Corporate spin will come to an end

The negative reaction of the public toward the Beijing Olympics may well represent the endgame when it comes to the ability of the ruling corporate elite to spin public opinion.

Some of the biggest brands in American corporate life, including Visa, Airbnb, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Intel, have spent company resources to associate themselves with a regime that has suffered a deservedly catastrophic loss of credibility with the public. Companies that don’t hesitate to castigate Americans for alleged human rights abuses such as voter ID and religious freedom laws are suddenly mute in the face of a regime that doesn’t have any voter ID laws because it doesn’t have any voters.

Coca-Cola helped lead a coalition that boycotted advertising on social media such as Facebook and Twitter because they were not sufficiently heavy-handed in banning “hate speech” and racism. White supremacy is certainly an evil thing, but why does Han supremacy get a free pass? Isn’t the subjugation of the ethnically distinct nation of Tibet systemic racism? Is it not social injustice?

It’s time to dig deeper into the problem than just complaining about “woke capitalism” and playing gotcha games with corporations about their double standards when it comes to political pronouncements. The deeper structural issue is the emergence of a managerial elite that practices amoral behavior, hides it behind selective moral preening, and thinks it can get away with it because ad dollars and corporate public relations tools can manipulate the public into accepting anything.

In order to get a look at the big picture, a good start is to begin with a figure like Edward Bernays, the father of “spin.” Bernays took the psychological insights of his uncle Sigmund Freud and weaponized them in order to manufacture public opinion. Not believing in providence, the atheist Bernays believed that great men (under his direction) must move in the hearts of the people and create public opinion themselves as the only way to avoid falling into the darkness of fascism. The corporate elite were morally obligated to save democracy from the American people, which Bernays believed he could manipulate at will.

But has that strategy reached its endgame? Do the American people believe what China says? Do they believe what large companies say when they claim to support diversity, equity, and inclusion at home but help fund an Olympic event ignoring China’s human rights abuses, implicitly acting as though China is just another nation rather than the world’s largest apartheid state and the worst abuser of human rights of all the great nations of the earth? It appears that a century of spin may be dying a natural death. Perhaps there is a limit to how far the people can be nudged away from truth via the power tools of public relations without revolting against it. Even if that limit has not been reached and spin has not completely failed in its power, it is undeniable that it has failed in its self-appointed role as the moral guardian against injustice. In many masked ways, and now nakedly, corporations are in bed with a regime that is morally repulsive.

The disastrous corporate investment in what many people are calling “the Genocide Olympics” should serve as a wake-up call. Any corporate executive who rubber-stamped Olympic sponsorship should be called to account. And, more importantly, Christians who own shares in these companies need to witness in favor of truth and against spin. Stock ownership is a position of authority. It allows voting on proxies and for (and against!) board members. It confers the right to speak at annual meetings. If an association with the mass-persecuting state of China is not enough of a trigger to get Christians into the business of being salt and light in the corporate boardrooms of the companies we own, then it’s hard to imagine what could be.