Whether the allegations of sexual harassment and racism against the World Economic Forum (WEF) are true or false, they teach some lessons. It is worth reading the research report of the Wall Street Journal (Shalini Ramachandran and Khadeeja Safdar, “Behind Davos are claims of a toxic workplace,” WJJune 29, 2024) and its sequel (“World Economic Forum opens investigation into workplace culture”, July 19, 2024). To summarize the research report in the WJown conditions:
Under Schwab’s decades-long watch, the Forum has allowed an atmosphere to develop in its own workplace that is hostile to women and black people, according to internal complaints, email exchanges and interviews with dozens of current and former Forum employees and others people familiar with the Forum’s practices.
To the extent that the allegations are true, they will show how hypocritical men can violate the fashionable DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusivity) ideology they proclaim. To the extent they are false, they will show how groupist and victimhood ideology can drive immoral or resentful employees to falsely accuse innocent individuals. Somehow the WEF will have been lifted by its own ideological petard.
The Davos World Economic Forum’s fame is only “economic” in the sense that it is a cartel of corporate executives, rent-seekers and politicians who, to put it bluntly, want to use the coercive power of the state to round up ordinary people lights. The unifying idea seems to be that collective choices take absolute priority over individual choices and that his own shade of mushy statism is the one that should be imposed. The organization jumps on every fad – one of which is DEI – that can help increase its position and the power of its ideal rulers. The founder and current chairman, Klaus Schwab, and a co-author wrote, among other things, clichés (Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: the great reset [Forum Publishing, 2020]):
In the post-pandemic world, questions of justice will come to the fore, ranging from stagnant real incomes for a large majority to the redefinition of our social contracts. …We are now at a crossroads. One path will take us to a better world: more inclusive, more just and with more respect for Mother Nature.
(To further illustrate their chameleon-like mushiness, they even speak of “social equality,” which feels more scientific and serious than the standard “social equality,” seemingly old-fashioned and perhaps too tainted with connotations of spontaneous order.)
The Wall Street Journal research shows this
The Forum has at times struggled to live up to the ideals it preaches about promoting diversity, equality and inclusivity.
For example, in 2020 the WEF was released Diversity, Equity and Inclusion 4.0: A Toolkit for Leaders to Accelerate Social Progress in the Future of Work. The 2020-2021 annual report boasts of “embedding diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice,” and boasts of its racial conscience:
This past year, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world, the Forum also launched the Partnering for Racial Justice in Business initiative. Nearly 60 companies joined the alliance, pledging to take immediate action on racial justice in their own organizations and work together to create systemic change.
Consider sexual harassment, which the zeitgeist of our time often confuses with non-vulgar and non-bullying compliments. As long as men and women work together, flirtatious innuendo and tension cannot be avoided. Harassment and bullying are another matter. Just as economics prevents individual choices from being neglected, classical liberalism promotes a culture of individual respect and dignity. Its positive and normative theoretical background is based on individual consent. A culture of individual contempt is less likely to develop when the individual is understood as freely choosing his acts of exchange and possessing a theoretical veto over collective choices.
The same goes for racial issues. If we believe that the WJAccording to WEF’s examples, WEF management appears to have responded better to vulgar racism in the work environment. The organization will likely still be sued or perhaps prosecuted for private discrimination, consistent with its preference for government solutions to all problems. It is not difficult to imagine how, in an ideological environment of abuse of power and contempt for individuals, discrimination based on mere group membership, a consequence of tribalism, would be more rampant than under a culture of individual dignity.
Libertarianism and classical liberalism constitute the only political philosophy that favors DEI in the sense of free diversity, formal equality, and individualism, as opposed to coerced and artificial diversity, arbitrary equality, and authoritarian inclusion. On the last side is the WEF.