A Culture of Individual Dignity

Whether the accusations of sexual harassment and racism levied against the World Economic Forum (WEF) are true or false, they teach some lessons. It is worth reading the investigation report of the Wall Street Journal (Shalini Ramachandran and Khadeeja Safdar, “Behind Davos, Claims of a Toxic Workplace,” WSJ, June 29, 2024) and its follow-up (“World Economic Forum Opens Board Probe of Workplace Culture,” July 19, 2024). To summarize the investigation report in the WSJ’s own terms:

Under Schwab’s decadeslong oversight, the Forum has allowed to fester an atmosphere hostile to women and Black people in its own workplace, according to internal complaints, email exchanges and interviews with dozens of current and former Forum employees and other people familiar with the Forum’s practices.

To the extent that the accusations are true, they will show how hypocritical men can violate the faddish DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) ideology they proclaim. To the extent that they are false, they will show how a groupist and victimization ideology can incite immoral or resentful employees to falsely accuse innocent individuals. One way or another, the WEF will have been hoisted by its own ideological petard.

The World Economic Forum of Davos fame is “economic” only in the sense of being a cartel of business leaders, rent seekers, and politicos who, to summarize roughly, want to use the coercive power of the state to swindle ordinary people. Its unifying idea seems to be that collective choices have absolute priority over individual choices and that its own shade of mushy statism is the one to be imposed. The organization jumps on any fad—one of them being DEI—that can contribute to increasing its standing and the power of its ideal rulers. Its founder and current chairman, Klaus Schwab, and a co-author wrote, among other clichés (Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset [Forum Publishing, 2020]):

In the post-pandemic world, questions of fairness will come to the fore, ranging from stagnating real incomes for a vast 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 equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature.

(To further illustrate their chameleonic mushiness, they even speak of “societal equality,” which feels  more scientific and serious than the standard “social equality,” apparently old-fashioned and perhaps too tainted by spontaneous-order connotations.)

The Wall Street Journal investigation observes that

The Forum has sometimes struggled to live up to ideals it preaches about promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

In 2020, for example, the WEF released Diversity, Equity and Inclusion 4.0: A Toolkit for Leaders to Accelerate Social Progress in the Future of Work. Its 2020-2021 annual report boasts about “embedding diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice,” boasting of its racial conscience:

Over the past year, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world, the Forum also set up the Partnering for Racial Justice in Business initiative. Nearly 60 companies joined the alliance and pledged to take immediate action on racial justice in their own organization and to work together to drive systems 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, flirting innuendos and tensions cannot be avoided. Harassment and bullying are another matter. Just as economics prevents one from neglecting individual choices, classical liberalism promotes a culture of individual respect and dignity. Its positive and normative theoretical background is based on individual consent. It is more unlikely for a culture of individual contempt to develop when the individual is conceived as freely choosing his acts of exchange and possessing a theoretical veto right over collective choices.

The same applies to racial matters. If we believe the WSJ’s examples, WEF management seems to have better reacted to vulgar racism in its work environment. The organization is still likely be sued or perhaps prosecuted for private discrimination, which is consistent with its preference for government solutions to all problems. It is not difficult to conceive how, in an ideological environment of power-broking and disregard for individuals, discrimination based on mere group membership, a sequel of tribalism, would be more rampant than under a culture of individual dignity.

Libertarianism and classical liberalism constitute the only political philosophy favorable to DEI in the sense of free Diversity, formal Equality, and Individualism, as opposed to forced and artificial diversity, arbitrary equalization, and authoritarian inclusion. The WEF stands on the latter side.