Vivek Ramaswamy - 12/15/23
Yeah, another thread about him. People keep asking who he is, what does he really stand for, yada yada. I just finished his book "Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam" published in August 2021, wherein he details exactly how wokeness is evil in a whole bunch of ways, how corporations have used it to further their own ends and gives some specific ways to combat it. Buried in the pages he explains implicitly and explicitly who he is and the things he holds to be important.
The last chapter is titled "Who Are We?", meaning who we are as Americans. Here is the slightly edited conclusion on pages 325-328, those parts I've skipped just make specific references to earlier chapters but don't change the thrust of his statements here:
"At our core, there are and always have been two distinctive ideals that define us as a nation. The first is the American Dream. The second is E Pluribus Unum -- the idea that from many, we Americans become one.
The American Dream is a dream of prosperity, freedom, and opportunity. It's the idea that no matter who your parents are, you can achieve your dreams through hard work, commitment and ingenuity...."
E Pluribus Unum is etched on every American coin, down to the penny. "From many, one." It's the idea that all of us as individuals, freely pursuing our own dreams, from a limitless variety of backgrounds, can unite into a single nation and pledge allegiance to the same flag and freely speak to one another even if they disagree about their politics.
Individualism and unity. Contradictory as these might seem they are each in America's heart. Most of us surely feel these two aspirations within ourselves. The desire for individual freedom and opportunity on the one hand and the desire to be part of something transcending ourselves on the other. America isn't just one of those things. It's both of them.
Our best shot at making the American Dream real is through capitalism. Our best shot at making E Pluribus Unum real is through democracy. That's why capitalism and democracy are the mother and father of America. The year 1776 wasn't just an accident. It was the year of the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. It was the year America was born.
...Our prosperity and individual freedom depend on the integrity of capitalism. Our unity and political freedoms depend on the integrity of democracy. With the birth of woke capitalism, we lose both and are left with neither. Wokeness turns E Pluribus Unum on its head -- "from many, one" to "from one, many". It perverts the American Dream into an American nightmare in which the characteristics you inherit at birth determine who you are and what you can achieve."...
In the end, America isn't a place at all. It's an idea. We call it the American Dream for a reason. It's not a destination that we reach; it's a vision we aspire to, one that we'll always fall short of but keep pursuing anyway. That's part of what it means to have a dream. But over the last decade, something very scary happened: we woke up. And once you wake up from a dream, you forget what it was all about. That's the real danger of wokeness.
We still have time to get this right. If the 2010s were about celebrating our diversity as individuals, then the 2020s should be about celebrating what we still share in common as people. They should be about reviving the ideals that bind us together as a nation. The American Dream. E Pluribus Unum. From many, one. We shouldn't let self-interested corporations and politicians exploit us with skin-deep identities and cheap social justice causes that they sell us to advance their own agendas. That's just their trick: divide and conquer America by making our shared ideals disappear. Our shared identity has disappeared right along with it.
...(talking about a magic trick from the beginning of the book) it's not enough to make something disappear. You have to bring it back. That's the defining challenge of our time, and it's the most important work we'll ever do as Americans."
It's a good summation of the book. He reminds me more and more of the children of immigrants from the 19th and early 20th centuries, full of idealism about America and what it should be. If you take it cynically then it sounds like a lot of the jingoism politicians use when they wrap themselves in the flag but the rest of the book logically leads up to this.
If you really want to know who the guy is you need to read his books. Or I guess you could just let me read them and report back here on what he says.
In the next couple of days I'm going to start reading "Nation of Victims - Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence".
Btw, the copyright notice in the front of Woke, Inc. says I'm not allowed to upload, publish etc. the material of the book except for review purposes so here's my book review: "It's a good book, I learned a lot from it and recommend it."
The last chapter is titled "Who Are We?", meaning who we are as Americans. Here is the slightly edited conclusion on pages 325-328, those parts I've skipped just make specific references to earlier chapters but don't change the thrust of his statements here:
"At our core, there are and always have been two distinctive ideals that define us as a nation. The first is the American Dream. The second is E Pluribus Unum -- the idea that from many, we Americans become one.
The American Dream is a dream of prosperity, freedom, and opportunity. It's the idea that no matter who your parents are, you can achieve your dreams through hard work, commitment and ingenuity...."
E Pluribus Unum is etched on every American coin, down to the penny. "From many, one." It's the idea that all of us as individuals, freely pursuing our own dreams, from a limitless variety of backgrounds, can unite into a single nation and pledge allegiance to the same flag and freely speak to one another even if they disagree about their politics.
Individualism and unity. Contradictory as these might seem they are each in America's heart. Most of us surely feel these two aspirations within ourselves. The desire for individual freedom and opportunity on the one hand and the desire to be part of something transcending ourselves on the other. America isn't just one of those things. It's both of them.
Our best shot at making the American Dream real is through capitalism. Our best shot at making E Pluribus Unum real is through democracy. That's why capitalism and democracy are the mother and father of America. The year 1776 wasn't just an accident. It was the year of the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. It was the year America was born.
...Our prosperity and individual freedom depend on the integrity of capitalism. Our unity and political freedoms depend on the integrity of democracy. With the birth of woke capitalism, we lose both and are left with neither. Wokeness turns E Pluribus Unum on its head -- "from many, one" to "from one, many". It perverts the American Dream into an American nightmare in which the characteristics you inherit at birth determine who you are and what you can achieve."...
In the end, America isn't a place at all. It's an idea. We call it the American Dream for a reason. It's not a destination that we reach; it's a vision we aspire to, one that we'll always fall short of but keep pursuing anyway. That's part of what it means to have a dream. But over the last decade, something very scary happened: we woke up. And once you wake up from a dream, you forget what it was all about. That's the real danger of wokeness.
We still have time to get this right. If the 2010s were about celebrating our diversity as individuals, then the 2020s should be about celebrating what we still share in common as people. They should be about reviving the ideals that bind us together as a nation. The American Dream. E Pluribus Unum. From many, one. We shouldn't let self-interested corporations and politicians exploit us with skin-deep identities and cheap social justice causes that they sell us to advance their own agendas. That's just their trick: divide and conquer America by making our shared ideals disappear. Our shared identity has disappeared right along with it.
...(talking about a magic trick from the beginning of the book) it's not enough to make something disappear. You have to bring it back. That's the defining challenge of our time, and it's the most important work we'll ever do as Americans."
It's a good summation of the book. He reminds me more and more of the children of immigrants from the 19th and early 20th centuries, full of idealism about America and what it should be. If you take it cynically then it sounds like a lot of the jingoism politicians use when they wrap themselves in the flag but the rest of the book logically leads up to this.
If you really want to know who the guy is you need to read his books. Or I guess you could just let me read them and report back here on what he says.
In the next couple of days I'm going to start reading "Nation of Victims - Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence".Btw, the copyright notice in the front of Woke, Inc. says I'm not allowed to upload, publish etc. the material of the book except for review purposes so here's my book review: "It's a good book, I learned a lot from it and recommend it."
Speaks in many tongues. Do I trust him? Nope.![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/hNCLIC3.png)
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/C9MJhxn.png)