Over the coming weeks I will be launching a new online research centre: the Centre for Civic Concord. I will provide updates on this as soon as the website goes live.

At one level, the idea is straightforward. The Centre will be devoted to studying one of the defining problems of our age: the growing metapolitical bipolarisation of Western societies and the apparent breakdown of trust between many elite institutions and the wider public. Its research programme will examine political polarisation, institutional culture, elite power, democratic legitimacy, social cohesion and practical institutional reform. It will also provide a home for a new online journal, Concordia Civica, bringing together scholars and independent thinkers interested in these questions. I hope a new book imprint, going by the same name, will be forthcoming some time soon after the journal starts to take off.

Yet as I found myself writing the Centre’s website text over recent weeks, something unexpected happened.

I began thinking less about institutions and more about human nature.

The more I tried to explain why contemporary societies appear so deeply divided, the more I found myself returning to an intriguing possibility: that one of the defining features of our age is a growing estrangement from the conservative dimensions of human nature.

This is not an argument against liberalism.

Nor is it an argument that conservatism should triumph over liberalism.

My own academic work has increasingly persuaded me that stable democratic societies require both liberal and conservative dispositions. They perform different functions. Liberal dispositions encourage experimentation, innovation, openness and adaptation. Conservative dispositions preserve continuity, identity, loyalty, restraint and the social inheritances upon which every civilisation depends. Healthy societies need both.

The problem arises when one begins to imagine that only one side of this relationship possesses moral legitimacy.

For several decades, most of our leading institutions have increasingly interpreted social and political questions through predominantly liberal assumptions. Universities, professional organisations, sections of the media, corporate institutions and many parts of government have gradually come to regard liberal values not simply as one legitimate outlook among others, but as the obvious moral framework through which society ought to be understood. In recent years this has escalated into a manichean hostility towards the fundamental intellectual and ethical premises of conservatism.

Whether one agrees with every aspect of that diagnosis is almost beside the point.

The more interesting question is what this institutional development does to our understanding of ourselves.

What happens if societies progressively lose contact with conservative instincts that have accompanied human communities throughout history? What happens if continuity, attachment, permanence, national loyalty, inherited tradition, ethno-cultural boundaries and social order increasingly come to be viewed not as legitimate human concerns but primarily as psychological deficiencies or moral failings?

Increasingly I find myself wondering whether our present political conflicts reflect precisely this kind of estrangement.

Not simply an estrangement between institutions and citizens.

Not simply an estrangement between elites and wider populations.

But an estrangement from important parts of our own psychological inheritance.

My own work on Vilfredo Pareto’s contribution to elite theory has long suggested that liberal and conservative dispositions are better understood as enduring features of human societies than as temporary ideological fashions. They represent different adaptive tendencies that repeatedly emerge throughout history. Every society requires movement and stability; innovation and continuity; openness and restraint. The challenge has never been to eliminate one tendency in favour of the other, but to sustain an intelligent balance between them. This is what Pareto’s soft advocacy of ‘open elites’ was all about.

Seen from this perspective, many contemporary political disputes begin to look rather different.

Questions surrounding immigration, national identity, institutional trust, democratic legitimacy, cultural change and elite power are no longer isolated controversies. They become interconnected expressions of a deeper imbalance within our institutional life. Equally, many of the emotional reactions that dominate contemporary politics begin to appear less mysterious. They may represent attempts - sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive - to recover forms of social equilibrium that have gradually been lost.

This way of thinking also suggests that one of the great neglected questions for contemporary scholarship is not simply how liberal democracies should function, but how liberal and conservative forms of human flourishing can once again coexist within the same institutions.

That is the question I hope the Centre for Civic Concord will explore.

Its starting point is deliberately unfashionable. It treats conservative-liberal pluralism not as an awkward political compromise but as one of the essential conditions of long-term civic peace. It asks how institutions might become more genuinely open to differing outlooks. It examines the relationship between elite formation, institutional culture and social cohesion. Above all, it seeks practical solutions rather than endless ideological victory.

The Centre will remain independent of political parties and lobbying organisations. It will publish long-form essays, research papers and eventually more lengthy scholarly contributions through Concordia Civica. Although much of its work will undoubtedly challenge prevailing assumptions within contemporary academia, its purpose is not to replace one orthodoxy with another. Rather, it is to encourage more serious inquiry into questions that have too often been neglected precisely because they have become politically uncomfortable.

I suspect that many readers of this Substack have sensed that something fundamental has shifted in our societies but have struggled to articulate exactly what it is.

Increasingly, I think I know how I would describe it.

We have become remarkably sophisticated in understanding liberation.

Perhaps we now need to become equally sophisticated in understanding contemporary estrangement - particularly our estrangement from those conservative dimensions of human nature upon which every enduring civilisation has, in one way or another, depended.

The Centre for Civic Concord will be my attempt to explore that possibility.

I hope you’ll join me as the project begins.

P.S. Notice the centre logo, which I adapted from the stylised face image created by Joost Schmidt, and which became well known when used to advertise the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition. I think the adaptation works extraordinarily hard to signify the new centre’s concerns. There’s layer upon layer of symbolism in there! But that’s a post for another day...

‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1568).

Purpose

This executive summary condenses the central arguments of the full technical guidance report into a concise risk management briefing. The report’s central proposal is that organisations should formally recognise ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ (GWGB) causal pathways as constituting a legitimate category of organisational risk.

The report argues that GWGB risk characteristically unfolds as a process of virtue-to-value collapse: initiatives and decisions are instigated by people who regard themselves as virtuous and well-meaning, yet who fail to anticipate the consequences of their actions. The general pattern identified is one in which liberal progressive ideology, culture, and values - which have been intensifying together within elite institutions for decades - are adopted within organisations where they produce initiatives and decisions that lead directly to tangible failure or loss.

Once politically coded, these problems become reputational. They then escalate along operational complications pathways, where operational and reputational problems intersect to produce cumulative impacts on organisational value. The report further argues that these dynamics persist because organisations follow prevailing ideas originating within elite institutions that are themselves incapable or unwilling to focus adequately on the risks arising from their wider societal stewardship. Organisations that expose themselves to GWGB risk are therefore akin to the blind led by the blind, echoing the metaphor depicted in the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The report argues that these escalating dynamics must be identified and interrupted at an early stage. Drawing on recent GWGB risk episodes in both the UK and USA, it proposes a six-subcategory breakdown of the risk, with each subcategory specifying a distinctive causal pathway of virtue-to-value collapse. The guidance further proposes illustrative precautionary and remedial controls applicable to each subcategory.

Finally, the report advocates the use of proactive early-warning analysis techniques to ensure that GWGB risk problems either never materialise or are addressed decisively before they escalate along operational complications pathways into broader organisational crises.

The guidance reflects the author’s academic background in both risk management and social theory dealing with elite-led social change. Hence it very uniquely merges:

• social theory,

• political sociology,

• organisational analysis,

• risk management methodology

• rhetorical framing (calculated to improve management outcomes)

into something that still reads coherently as a professional guidance document.

Legal Qualifier

The guide is an exploratory – and highly original - attempt to organise the topic into a systematic management framework; however, it does not claim to be comprehensive or definitive. The content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, financial, or professional advice. Organisations should exercise their own judgment and seek appropriate professional counsel when applying any of the concepts or examples described herein. The author accepts no liability for any actions taken or not taken based on the use of this material.

Corporate Readership

The strongest fit is probably:

• senior risk professionals,

• governance specialists,

• crisis management consultants,

• political risk analysts,

• corporate security professionals,

• strategic communications executives,

• and boards operating in politically exposed sectors.

The document is particularly suited to corporate environments already experiencing tension between:

• brand activism,

• stakeholder management,

• workforce ideology,

• and reputational volatility.

Social Theory Context

The report positions itself explicitly within traditions of critical social theory concerned with modernity, elite power, institutional change, and manufactured risk. It draws heavily on Anthony Giddens’ concept of the “juggernaut of modernity” and Ulrich Beck’s theory of “reflexive modernisation” to frame contemporary organisations as operating inside social systems that continuously generate unintended risks through their own processes of transformation. From this perspective, GWGB risk is not treated as a series of isolated corporate public-relations failures, but as an emergent property of wider elite-institutional trajectories of ideological, cultural, and value change. The report argues that organisations increasingly internalise EDI and ESG frameworks not simply as operational practices but as hegemonic normative systems shaping institutional legitimacy itself. In doing so, it presents wokeness as the leading edge and dangerous experimental boundary of broader liberal-progressive and post-national transformations unfolding across advanced societies.

The report further situates itself within classical and contemporary elite theory. Drawing on Pareto, Gramsci, Foucault, and wider traditions of historical-pessimist sociology, it argues that elite institutional systems tend toward cumulative forms of blindness generated by their own ideological and cultural assumptions. These assumptions, once deeply normalised, progressively weaken the capacity for self-correction and adversarial challenge. The argument is that organisations embedded within these elite-institutional environments inherit the same blind spots, producing what the report repeatedly characterises as “the blind led by the blind.” The concepts of hyperreality and hypernormalisation are also touched upon to explain how organisational actors may continue reproducing symbolic frameworks that many privately recognise as dysfunctional, while remaining unable or unwilling to challenge them openly due to professional, reputational, and political pressures.

A Six-Dimensional Solution

The report positions itself as an attempt to translate contemporary “culture war” dynamics into the technical language of organisational risk management. It argues that risk management, as a profession committed to forward-looking scepticism and candour, cannot exempt dominant ideological frameworks from critical scrutiny simply because they possess institutional legitimacy. It conceptualises GWGB risk as a subtype of both “internal risk” and “political polarisation risk,” thereby linking organisational governance failures to escalating conflict between elite institutional cultures and increasingly resistant non-elite publics. In this sense, the document attempts to bridge social theory and managerial practice by presenting ideological capture, symbolic moral signalling, and institutional risk blindness as concrete organisational risk mechanisms rather than merely political controversies.

Six Dimensions of GWGB Risk Exposure

➜ Consumer Demand Exposure → alienation of mainstream consumers

➜ Brand Positioning Exposure → abandonment by mainstream consumers

➜ Workforce Stability Exposure → workforce demoralisation

➜ Capital Access Exposure → higher costs of capital

➜ Regulation and Governance Exposure → compromised leadership

➜ Strategic Infrastructure and National Loyalty Exposure → compromised security

The report argues that risk arising within any one of these six exposure domains can escalate rapidly through social media amplification, generating reputational contagion across stakeholder groups and causing the risk to spread across multiple exposure domains simultaneously.

Risk Controls

The report’s proposals for matching the six GWGB risk categories to precautionary and remedial controls are grounded in conventional enterprise risk management logic. Each subcategory - consumer demand exposure, brand positioning exposure, workforce stability exposure, capital access exposure, regulation and governance exposure, and strategic infrastructure/national loyalty exposure - is paired with illustrative governance responses designed either to prevent escalation or to mitigate damage after incidents occur. Proposed controls include enhanced stakeholder analysis, adversarial review processes to challenge groupthink, structured governance oversight, escalation procedures for reputational crises, workforce sentiment monitoring, scenario planning, and more rigorous scrutiny of externally driven ideological commitments. The report emphasises that these controls are intended to integrate directly into existing risk management infrastructure rather than requiring wholly new systems, allowing organisations to scale their responses proportionately according to sector, exposure, and institutional culture.

Early Warning Analysis Proposals

The report also places significant emphasis on early warning analysis as a core requirement of effective GWGB risk management. It argues that GWGB risks are especially prone to rapid escalation through social media amplification and cross-stakeholder contagion, with organisations often becoming fully aware of emerging problems only after reputational damage has already accelerated beyond straightforward containment.

To address this vulnerability, the report proposes the use of continuous environmental scanning, social-media monitoring, sentiment analysis, structured “risk radar” systems, and threat-level indicators designed to detect emerging GWGB dynamics while they are still in formative stages. It further recommends that organisations maintain Sentinel Reports as living documents linked directly to threat-level indicators, with elevated threat levels triggering progressively more intensive scanning activity and Sentinel reporting requirements. To minimise political bias and improve analytical robustness, the report proposes that threat levels be determined by politically heterogeneous expert panels.

The overall rationale for this proactive vigilance framework is that organisations require anticipatory rather than purely reactive governance capabilities, since the reputational and operational effects of politicised controversies can intensify with extraordinary speed across customers, employees, investors, regulators, and wider public audiences simultaneously.

Key Quotational Summary

“Sometimes ‘woke’ makes money; sometimes it loses money. Before such outcomes become known, however, woke carries risk.”

“GWGB risk should be treated as a formal category of risk, signalling the possibility of organisational loss or failure in the same way as any other recognised organisational risk.”

“The more uncritically organisations internalise prevailing elite-institutional ideology, culture and values, the more they inadvertently expose themselves to GWGB risk.”

“All cultural and value systems can be understood as structuring not only perception but also systematic zones of risk blindness – in other words domains in which certain possible harms, trade-offs, losses or failures are cognitively discounted using a variety of psychological strategies of willed avoidance. When organisations operate under the guidance of institutions that inhabit the same cultural milieu, this blindness is not merely replicated but potentially compounded, as reinforcing norms reduce critical interrogation and amplify shared assumptions.”

“As a result, what might otherwise look like a loose set of cultural preferences comes to resemble a coherent, self-reinforcing and coercive system of elite institutional power, in which shared ideas help to justify and sustain organisational behaviours associable with wokeness. Because these norms are built into organisations, they are hard to challenge from within, yet they become most visible where they clash with more conservative and nationalist views.”

“This circumstance puts almost all large organisations in a perpetual state of at least very low-level ‘culture war’ with large swathes of the general populations of all advanced western societies. The implications for governance, leadership and management in organisations, and perhaps especially for organisational functions such as strategy, risk, marketing, human relations, and security, are potentially enormous.”

“We have now entered a very dangerous phase of fundamental conflict between elites and non-elites over ideology, culture and values. It makes little sense for risk professionals with any degree of professional acumen and integrity to sidestep either the meta risk issues, or the related organisational risk issues, which this conflict raises.”

“Risk management is depicted herein as an ethical vocation founded upon candour, making it duty-bound to translate all forward-looking contemplation of organisational failure or loss into the technical language of risk management - regardless of political-cultural obstacles to speaking out, and while guarding against socio-technical manipulation even under intense pressure to succumb.”

“Either risks exist along possible causal pathways to failure or loss for organisations, or they don’t. If they do, then provided their probability and impact dimensions accede the normal qualifying thresholds for risk management intervention, then they should automatically qualify for such intervention.”

“Where a risk category space exists, inhabited with such qualifying risks, and yet risk management side-steps around it, then that’s wilful risk blindness - and by extension risk negligence such as may conflict with basic management accountabilities in organisations.”

“Discounting risk signals solely because of perceived political bias of source creates blind spots in the risk environment - and in doing so, undermines effective risk management.”

“Processes such as mass immigration and rapid ethnic demographic change intensify political and cultural contestation, positioning organisational commitments to inclusion and anti-discrimination simultaneously as adaptive responses to increasingly plural societies and yet as focal points of resistance among groups who perceive these shifts as destabilising established ethnic, national, cultural, or civic identities.”

“To say that an organisation has gone ‘woke’ is to suggest that it has adopted a leading-edge positioning vis-à-vis the liberal, post-national elite-institutional assault on public sentiment anchored to conservatism and nationalism.”

“Elite power has always erred through arrogance, hubris, and suppression of dissent. Naturally, as a risk academic, my inclination is to cut into this problem by attuning quite specifically to risk posed by institutional elite power - or ‘meta risk’ as we can also call it - as it commits ever more aggressively to liberal and post-national ideology.”

“The guide urges risk managers to recognise that organisational implementations of dominant institutional cultures and values can and do sometimes result in organisational failure or loss, as is likely to be wholly ignored or at least significantly under-acknowledged, both within organisations and within the institutions they routinely turn to for guidance.”

“The key to managing GWGB risk is surely its risk category positioning. It makes no technical-professional sense whatsoever to force wholesale exclusion of certain risk categories or subcategories from risk management consideration, just because they fail to chime with political and cultural sensibilities that have grown prevalent across the institutions in recent years.”

“All power is inherently prone to error, not simply because it misjudges events, but because it becomes progressively entrapped within its own ideology, culture and values.”

“The consequence is a form of closure for the risk imagination.”

Summary of Core Analytical Position

The report situates GWGB risk within a broader framework of elite-institutional change, arguing that contemporary organisations increasingly operate inside highly polarised ideological and cultural environments shaped by EDI and ESG frameworks. It contends that many organisations have developed blind spots toward risks emerging from these commitments because prevailing institutional cultures discourage open challenge and reward symbolic moral signalling over instrumental rationality and measurable outcomes.

The author proposes that GWGB risk be positioned formally at the overlap between ‘internal risk’ and ‘political polarisation risk’ inside organisational risk matrices. Looking at it from that perspective, the report argues that the problem is not merely reputational backlash but a deeper tendency toward institutional risk blindness, groupthink, and failure of critical self-correction.

The report emphasises that organisations should not attempt to manage these issues through ad hoc public-relations responses alone. Instead, they should develop structured early warning systems, scenario analysis, stakeholder monitoring, and formal governance mechanisms capable of identifying escalating sociocultural risks before they become organisational crises.

Overall, the report presents GWGB risk as a modern organisational risk category emerging from the interaction between institutional ideology, political polarisation, reputational dynamics, and failures of organisational self-correction. Its principal recommendation is that organisations treat these dynamics not as purely political controversies, but as formal risk management problems requiring systematic governance attention.

Image: ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1568): a meditation on collective blindness, imitation and the catastrophic consequences of misguided leadership.

Length: 21,000 words. Fill the coffee machine. Bring snacks and lots of patience – and prepare for a blend of critical social theory and corporate guidance prose like no other under the sun. I will upload a separate executive summary for those who prefer short reads.

This was first intended as a 1500 word substack essay, but it soon mushroomed into a month-long writing project. There was just so much to say….

Introduction

This guide calls on organisations of all kinds to adopt a planned and systematic approach to the precautionary and remedial management of ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ (GWGB) risk. First, it theorises the problem - linking it to ongoing elite-institution-led societal change to explain why many feel uncomfortable talking about it. Then it develops its central proposition: that the GWGB risk category be formally integrated into risk matrices already used for general risk management. The approach taken is to conceptualise GWGB risk as occupying the area of overlap formed by the more established ‘internal risk’ and ‘political polarisation risk’ categories.

Technical risk management solutions are then proposed for consideration by risk leadership within organisations. The technical guidance is derived neither from scientific analysis nor by surveying professional judgment; rather, it reflects one individual’s exploration of the issues, working from combined academic specialisms in social theory and risk management while also drawing on recent high-profile examples in the UK and USA. It is therefore illustrative in character, reflecting a personal perspective of critical detachment from institutional environments that produce GWGB risk. While it does seem to offer a sensible way forward, both in its theorisation of the risk problem and in its technical solutions, it is far from perfect.

The guidance may require substantial further tailoring to fit unique organisational circumstances and needs. Organisations should be mindful that implementations could create tensions with pre-existing ideological, cultural, ethical, and brand positions – both those that have formal status and those that have evolved and can be hard to spot. Stripped down, minimal implementations may be appropriate for companies which have deliberately embedded political activism linked to ‘wokeness’ within their commercial identities and business models. That may entail using it only as a simple heuristic in the spirit of adversarial decision-making for groupthink mitigation. Lush and Ben & Jerry’s are well-known examples of companies that trade successfully due to such activist stances, though many others express similar political commitments in subtler ways. Such organisations should bear in mind the dilemma they face whereby although they may regard the guidance as culturally awkward or politically suspicious, they may also stand to benefit from it more than most - because they may have heightened risk blindness for woke-to-broke causal pathways.

The guide explores these politico-cultural obstacles to implementation, not only to raise awareness of them but also to develop suggestions for ensuring they are consistently given due regard in the technical management of GWGB risk. The fact of the matter is this: when people are deeply committed to woke, woke-to-broke dynamics can be very painful to accept. Yet such individuals must remain tethered to hard reality if they are to participate in the governance, leadership or management of organisations. Sometimes ‘woke’ makes money; sometimes it loses money. ‘Woke’ Hollywood illustrates both major successes and major failures quite spectacularly by box office metrics. Before such outcomes become known, however, woke carries risk. To deny the need for vigilance regarding possible downside risk is to think more from a political activist consciousness than from the perspective of competent and committed organisational stewardship.

The guide does not adjudicate the broader political, ethical, or cultural merits of liberal-progressive corporate positioning, nor does it assess the full spectrum of potential commercial outcomes associated with it. Rather, it is positioned neutrally in the sense that it recognises that under some market conditions, liberal-progressive aligned branding and signalling may generate significant commercial advantages, stakeholder support, or workforce cohesion – such that introducing high profile management of GWGB risk could conceivably undermine these advantages; likewise, it recognises that under other conditions, liberal-progressive branding and signalling may generate material enterprise risks. To be very clear, though, individual guidance documents can only achieve so much - and the present one is intentionally limited to the latter problem domain. Its purpose is therefore analogous to other specialised risk management frameworks which focus specifically upon downside exposures associable with particular risk categories, escalation dynamics, organisational vulnerability, and loss mitigation, rather than attempting to provide a symmetrical assessment of both risks and opportunities.

In the approach taken here, then, the best way to ensure effective stewardship of GWGB issues under often challenging politico-cultural circumstances within organisations is to address them through professional risk management practices and associated organisational infrastructure. In other words, GWGB risk should be treated as a formal category of risk, signalling the possibility of organisational loss or failure in the same way as any other recognised organisational risk. It does seem that all organisations are exposed to this risk to some degree, entailing that they all need to think seriously about extending their formal risk management to cover it.

The guidance may also require substantial amendment or refinement in organisations requiring intensive focus on specific woke-to-broke causal pathways. For example, firms operating within critical national infrastructure sectors, or carrying elevated exposure to economic espionage risk, may require more tailored guidance. Such guidance would need to focus on the ways in which wokeness - being global in outlook and, in some important respects to be discussed below, enthusiastically post-national in its ideological, cultural, and value-forming influences - can create organisation level vulnerabilities relevant to national security.

The organisations that perhaps stand to get the most value out of the guidance are those that have to some small degree gone ‘woke’, only to then discover amidst the changing political climate of the last few years that some back-pedalling may now be in their best interest. In other words, the guidance can be used for strategic steering in volatile political environments. In many cases, the best way forward may be partial, incremental implementation on an experimental basis, progressing gradually towards wide roll-out while monitoring for reputational effects.

A six sub-category solution is proposed to ensure reasonably comprehensive coverage of the GWGB risk category in its entirety. The solution is based on prominent GWGB risk episodes in the US and the UK over the last few years. For clarity, the six sub-categories and their main pathways to organisational harm are listed below:

1) Consumer Demand Exposure → alienation of mainstream consumers

2) Brand Positioning Exposure → abandonment of mainstream consumers

3) Workforce Stability Exposure → workforce demoralisation

4) Capital Access Exposure → higher costs of capital

5) Regulation and Governance Exposure → compromised leadership

6) Strategic Infrastructure and National Loyalty Exposure → compromised security

Illustrative precautionary and remedial controls are suggested for each sub-category. Organisations may of course wish to amend all these illustrative solutions, depending on their particular risk exposures and pre-existing risk management frameworks.

The guidance further highlights the inherent tendency of GWGB risk to escalate rapidly across potentially all these dimensions simultaneously, the central mechanism of concern being one where reputational damage transmits via social media wildfire across the full range of both internal and external stakeholder constituencies. Recognising the need to identify GWGB risk while it is still in-the-making, the guidance proposes implementations of early-warning analytical techniques designed to keep risk management processes vigilant for GWGB missteps which could quickly cause cumulative destruction of organisational value in this way.

Legal Qualifier

This is an exploratory – and highly original - attempt to organise the topic into a systematic management framework; however, it does not claim to be comprehensive or definitive. The content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, financial, or professional advice. Organisations should exercise their own judgment and seek appropriate professional counsel when applying any of the concepts or examples described herein. The author accepts no liability for any actions taken or not taken based on the use of this material.

Broad Social Context: ‘Wokeness’ and Elite-Institutional Change

I have worked as a risk academic within business schools for the last 25 years or so. My PhD background prior to that was in political and sociological elite theory - an area concerned with political and cultural conflict between elites and non-elites. Over time, I have cultivated both my risk management and elite theory specialisms, often combining them for research writing on a range of ‘business in society’ topics. I further link these two domains in the present guidance document by treating GWGB risk produced within organisations as arising with the general trajectory of elite-institution-led ideology, culture and values change over recent decades.

To be very clear, then, I do not view such risks as arising solely within specific organisations for reasons unique to those organisations. That would altogether neglect their systemic nature. Instead, I recognise the organisational instances of woke leading to broke that we hear about so often on social media as simply the most visible and striking manifestations of harm produced by a much greater and almost impossible-to-steer ‘juggernaut of modernity’ – to use Anthony Giddens’ (1990) evocative metaphor for how the forces of modernity play out in the world.

Giddens coined that term to depict modernity as a powerful runaway system of social change that humans created but cannot fully control. The idea aligns neatly with Ulrich Beck’s (1992) theory of ‘reflexive modernisation’, whereby that same system increasingly produces and must confront its own manufactured risks.

If we align this mainstream sociological view of modernity as inherently self-destabilising with historical pessimist strands within elite theory - which emphasise that elite attempts to steer social change can themselves intensify social disorder - GWGB risk can be understood as more than organisation-level dysfunction within elite-shaped institutional systems. It instead reflects the broader limits of elite institutional steering within modernity itself.

On this view, elite-institutional efforts to direct ideological, cultural, and moral change may generate unintended and increasingly unmanageable social transformations, producing growing dissent and recursive destabilisation across society. GWGB risk emerges where organisations occupy leading-edge positions within these steered transformations and therefore become disproportionately exposed to the resulting harm and dissent.

Accordingly, this guide conceptualises GWGB as a risk category produced through unevenly steered processes of reflexive modernisation, and as one that is currently grossly under-recognised not least because elite institutions are reluctant to acknowledge that these dynamics exceed their full understanding and control. This reluctance is reinforced by a prevailing liberal-progressive heuristic that implicitly assumes history to be “on the side” of liberal-progressive causes. I will depict the risk profession as having a duty of scepticism toward that heuristic and the belief it produces, as part of its broader obligation to challenge all false confident expectation regarding how the future might take shape.

Although processes of reflexive modernisation are themselves highly complex, well past the point of allowing us to predict outcomes, their ongoing transformative effects upon elite-institutional ideology, culture and values are themselves quite easy to grasp due to their tendency to configure towards simplification as they exert influence. Today these have crystallised as initialisms – EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) and ESG (environmental social and governance) - for easy passage into law, regulation, behavioural guidance for organisations, and propaganda for education systems. We need to understand these influences, I believe, if we are to develop a sufficiently causal view of GWGB risk as can enable organisations to deal with it effectively in their technical risk management.

More particularly, organisations need to think systemically about their relationships with elite institutions if they wish to get GWGB risk under control. The juggernaut of modernity is incredibly hard to steer, not just because it has a very powerful engine running at full acceleration, but because the elite institutions that steer it are heavily blinkered by their own ideology, culture and values. The problem this creates for organisations is that in turning to elite institutions for all kinds of behavioural guidance, they effectively become the blind led by the blind. The more uncritically they internalise prevailing elite-institutional ideology, culture and values, the more they inadvertently expose themselves to GWGB risk - because they become unwitting collaborators in its production.

What presently blinkers both elite institutional leadership and organisational followership to GWGB risk is this. Over the past several decades, under conditions of intense globalisation, a very particular elite institutional framework of ideology, culture, and values has achieved a form of normalised dominance across many domains of social life shaped by elite institutional power, even as contestation around it has grown. In other words, it has become a combative ‘hegemony’ in the classic Gramscian sense. Its central features are widely recognised. They simplify around an integrated equality–diversity–inclusivity (EDI) orientation that aspires to be societally transformative in ways that many want and that many more don’t want, and whose divisiveness in this respect has rendered it primary subject matter for ‘politics’ today.

EDI expands “equality” beyond the liberal idea of equal opportunity into a commitment to equalised outcomes, supported by formal protections and targeted measures for recognised social categories such as sex, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability. “Diversity” prioritises the visible representation of these groups across institutions - workplaces, universities, public bodies, etc. “Inclusion,” in turn, operates as a governing norm, concerned with promoting full participation and a recognised sense of belonging across these groups.

Taken together, then, EDI is more than a set of discrete aims; it constitutes an integrated framework of ideology, culture and values that reorients institutional priorities, standards of legitimacy, and behavioural expectations. Its ‘inclusivities’ directly challenge traditional forms of “exclusivity” - particularly those embedded in conceptions of nationhood, which have throughout history relied on bounded membership, shared ‘thick’ identity, and differentiated access to status, participation, benefits and entitlements.

EDI is closely aligned with transnational norms associable with the formation of transnational capitalist classes and global workforce flows, drawing authority from global rights frameworks, international organisations, and cross-border institutional standards. This places it in direct conflict with the historically rooted structures and prerogatives of nation-states, extending the locus of political and legal authority beyond the national level. Understood in this way, EDI is not just an ethical or managerial framework but part of a broader reconfiguration of power that is hollowing out both nation states and the sentiments of national belonging that bind them. Through it, authority, legitimacy, and obligation are all increasingly articulated together in transnational rather than strictly national terms.

EDI advances alongside ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), a framework developed in finance and corporate governance to assess how organisations manage environmental impact, social responsibilities, and internal oversight. Within this schema, EDI provides much of the substance of the “social” pillar, particularly around workforce composition, equity, and stakeholder inclusion. The two move in tandem because both convert normative commitments into measurable standards, reinforced through reporting requirements, regulatory frameworks, and investor expectations. As a result, they operate as mutually reinforcing mechanisms driving institutional change across corporate, public, and transnational domains – all in a general direction that both neo-liberals and left-liberals can just about agree to want, and yet which conservatives and nationalists increasingly abhor.

Taken together, then, these shifts have created the conditions in which “wokeness” now emerges within specific organisations as both a marker and a driver of disruptive societal change. This substantially politicised - or rather, meta-politicised - elite-institutional framework, having achieved staggering levels of hegemony in just a few short years, is now widely used to interpret social reality itself, often to the extent that thinking outside it becomes difficult. Hence many cannot bring themselves to extend values of tolerance to those who challenge it. That is why freedom of speech has become such an important topic today – now rendered controversial to an extent that previous generations could not possibly have imagined. Likewise, this is why wokeness can be extremely hard to challenge at organisational level, even when it obviously causes or threatens to cause harm.

When we consider this framework dynamically as a product of ongoing elite-institution-led societal change, furthermore, wokeness seems to make most sense as its leading edge – the frontier where it experiments by testing and pushing its boundaries, and where it therefore becomes most likely to produce harms that are hard to predict and perhaps sometimes even harder to acknowledge.

This elite-led institutional trajectory of ideological, cultural, and value change has, nonetheless, become deeply contested. On the one hand, it shapes the commonsense and habitual fabric of contemporary institutional and organisational life - what some sociologists describe as its doxic, taken-for-granted, experiential quality - often to the point where its profound conditioning, limiting, and tacit censoring effects go wholly unnoticed. On the other hand, a growing number of people feel that something has gone badly wrong within the elite institutional frameworks in which organisations now operate. They experience a sense of estrangement from these structures, which often appear arriviste and disconnected from older, more authoritative, and more folk-rooted expressions of ideology, culture, and value. The erosion of these traditions troubles them. Looking from that standpoint, the new framework can seem almost inversive of the principles that have guided Western civilisation until very recently.

Aggressive implementations of the framework may therefore cause serious workforce morale issues that are hard to spot, simply because opposition often dare not declare itself. Demoralisation may be most likely to express as ‘quiet quitting’ - i.e. less proactive and mindful organisational citizenship behaviour and more applications for early retirement.

Scope for vocal criticism seems quite strongly linked to political cycles. In the USA there has clearly been some backlash during the second Trump administration. This has involved executive and legislative efforts to defund or prohibit EDI offices and programmes in federal agencies and contractors, restrict workplace trainings framed around concepts like systemic racism or implicit bias, and reshape school and university curricula by limiting the teaching of ideas associated with critical race theory, gender identity, and structural inequality - though these moves are unevenly applied and are frequently contested in courts and by states.

In the United Kingdom, the picture remains more hybrid: governments have promoted free speech protections (notably in higher education regulation), while many public institutions – e.g. universities, parts of the civil service, and the NHS - have continued to expand EDI infrastructures, particularly under Labour Party government, resulting in a tense coexistence of anti-woke political rhetoric with ongoing institutional embedding of EDI practices rather than a straightforward rollback.

In France, resistance is framed through republican universalism and opposition to ‘Anglo-American identity politics,’. Meanwhile, countries like Hungary embed similar critiques within broader illiberal state projects that more directly reshape media, education, and civil society.

Yet in all these cases, political volatility is such that strong reversals of current trends are always just one national election away. Societies are no longer at ease with themselves in the sense that they always remain close to a dramatic pivot point on these precise issues.

The more general situation amidst all this volatility is that criticism of elite-led trajectories of societal change now occupy a central place in that part of contemporary (meta)political and cultural debate which is frequently described as the “culture war”. In this guidance document I explain that it is now timely for organisational risk managers, and the risk-focused professional associations that support them, to recognise that the contested societal dynamics that provide basic subject matter for the culture war now bear directly upon their domain.

Translating what are, in effect, political (that is, culture war–related) tensions into the language of organisational risk, and them addressing these through technical risk management approaches, is of course inherently challenging. Nevertheless, the task is now required of them. The reasons could hardly be clearer: ‘woke’ can sometimes lead to ‘broke’; given that risk management exists to professionalise the forward-looking management of anything that, if mismanaged, could produce organisational failure or loss, it would be grossly remiss to ignore woke-to-broke dynamics. One might also phrase this argument as follows: it makes absolutely no sense to sweep an entire broad category of reflexive modernisation risk under the carpet.

A growing number of critical observers - including many working within government and across a broad range of major public, corporate, academic, and cultural institutions – clearly do now sense that something has gone awry at the elite-institutional level. They nonetheless also appreciate that the organisational woke-to-broke dynamics which this can give rise to, can be extremely difficult to diagnose with precision without taking what could be perceived as a strong political position. What they need are not political but technocratic problem frames they can directly match to practical solutions. They need to be able to refer to causal mechanisms, including ‘soft’ – i.e. cultural and psychological ones if need be – that demonstrably give rise to problems at organisation level which any reasonable person would seek to avoid or mitigate.

What is required, in other words, is social theory that can help us unpack the – sometimes highly complex – causal mechanisms through which ‘woke’ can, within the prevailing elite institutional framework of ideology, culture, and values, lead to ‘broke’. Consider how the following social theory perspective can help sensitise us to woke-to-broke dynamics at both elite-institutional and organisational scale – giving us some reasonably firm ground to begin theorising on. Eminent culture war commentator Thomas Sowell saw these dynamics coming sooner than most commentators. As early as 1993 he stated: “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” Let that idea be our starting point.

Sowell’s observation resonates even more powerfully today. Its force lies in identifying a shift in the social role of ideology towards ever greater invasiveness and capture of pragmatic, outcome-oriented decision-making, the result of which has been the rise of normative frameworks that obsess over signalling goodness. The more substantive underlying argument is that over recent decades there has been a discernible move away from instrumental rationality - where policies and practices are evaluated primarily in terms of their measurable effectiveness - toward a more expressive or moralised rationality, in which legitimacy is conferred through alignment with prevailing ethical and symbolic frameworks. In this context, decisions made in all kinds of organisation are increasingly justified not by demonstrable outcomes but by their capacity to signal fairness, inclusion, or moral awareness. The result is not the disappearance of reason, but its reorientation: empirical performance becomes secondary to the communicability of moral intent.

This shift is reinforced by structural features of modern organisations within their broader institutional environments, particularly under conditions of large-scale social complexification. As organisations have become more interconnected, more publicly exposed, and more dependent on globally diffuse stakeholder approval, the conditions under which decisions are made have changed in profound ways. In such settings, feedback loops are often weak or delayed, making it difficult to rigorously evaluate the real-world effects of all sorts of organisational policies, decisions, initiatives, innovations and the like. At the same time, globally diffuse reputational ecosystems - now intensified by digital media and continuous scrutiny - have sharply increased the premium placed on visible moral conformity.

Under these circumstances, recourse to what is seen as the prevailing elite-institutional framework becomes a ‘safe’ simplifying heuristic for organisations negotiating complexity and change – further allowing the framework to tighten into a monoculture demanding compliance. The diffusions of responsibility that are characteristic of complex bureaucratic structures encourage risk-averse behaviours which can submit too easily to these compliance pressures. Aligning with approved moral language becomes a safer course than questioning it - even where it may be implicated in organisational harm. This brings patterned shifts in organisational reasoning: decisions are increasingly shaped by how they will be perceived, rather than how they will perform over time.

Hence what counts as ‘rational’ judgment is itself being reconfigured. It is increasingly filtered through prevailing ideological frameworks that define which risks matter and which forms of evidence carry weight. Evidence is valued when it supports dominant moral narratives, and reinterpreted or deprioritised when it does not. Rational justification is not abandoned; rather, it is progressively subordinated to the demands of symbolic legitimacy in an environment where legitimacy itself has become more volatile, more visible, and more valuable.

Over time, these dynamics contribute to what may be described as a drift toward institutional and organisational hyperreality, in which representations of virtue increasingly substitute for direct engagement with underlying reality. This entails organisational systems becoming more self-referential - optimising for compliance metrics, auditability, and reputational signalling rather than substantive outcomes. The appearance of overall moral coherence can then take precedence over empirical effectiveness, producing a condition in which organisations operate increasingly within frameworks of internally consistent symbolic validation, at the expense of externally grounded verification. The cumulative effect is that organisational ideology, culture and values do not simply distort reason from the outside but instead become embedded within the very criteria by which reason itself is defined and enacted.

Power, Truth and Risk

Over the past decade, I became increasingly concerned about organisations developing blind spots toward “woke-broke” dynamics under these conditions. Those concerns took shape at the intersection of my parallel interests in elite theory and organisational risk management. Bringing those two fields together led me to a broad insight regarding the relationship between power, truth, and risk, which is highly relevant for understanding these dynamics.

In 2025, I published a book with Routledge called “Re-reading Pareto on Elite Power and Societal Bipolarisation: a critical perspective on metapolitics and democracy”. This re-reads classical elite theory for contemporary application by depicting today’s ‘elites’ as highly heterogeneous, heavily globalised, and socially very widely distributed networks comprising all types of institution and large organisation. I argue that what allows us to bundle these together and call them distinctive ‘elites’ is that they coordinate via distinctive institutional fields comprising ideology, culture and values which all broadly align.

Classical elite theory depicts entire ‘elites’ as cycling through the wheel of fortune: they rise and consolidate, only to later decline and be replaced as their own internal assumptions harden and begin to undermine them. Applying this idea of ongoing elite rise and fall to contemporary elite sprawls across increasingly global societies, my book interprets this process as one where elites are both shaped and constrained by their shared institutional fields; in other words, these work well - until they don’t. The book discusses how people are becoming sensitive to problems with prevailing institutional fields and are starting to doubt and turn away from them - perhaps by quietly quitting from their roles or by suffering in an awkward silence for the sake of their careers. It uses the concept of hypernormalisation, originally developed to analyse late-stage soviet elites, to analyse the similarly fragile elite-institutional ideology, culture and value systems that similarly late-stage liberal elites are imposing today - despite widespread silent understandings that these often do not work well.

Thinking in parallel as a risk management academic, I have long discerned a similar pattern playing out at organisation level: leaderships repeatedly generate “internal risks” that are not recognised as such, and which often turn out to be their undoing. For me, the big-picture conclusion, no matter we have in mind entire globally sprawling elite networks or specific organisational leaderships, is best stated with a Foucauldian twist: “power regimes” cannot last when the “truth regimes” they rely on stop working for them. In other words, all power - whether exercised by entire elites or by organisational leaderships - is inherently prone to error, not simply because it misjudges events, but because it becomes progressively entrapped within its own ideology, culture and values. Typically, what initially enables coordination and authority gradually hardens into a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that weaken the capacity for self-correction - by which I mean the ability to take a critical, forward-looking view of where things are heading.

When we take this view of power, truth and risk and apply it to the problem of creeping ideological capture which Sowell alerts us to, we start to see a problem which few are prepared to confront. Across both political and organisational life, there is widespread acceptance of the need for professional challenge - for questioning decisions, models, and established practices. This implies some degree of adversarial thinking. Yet in practice, this commitment has a clear boundary. It rarely extends to elite-institutional fields and their many conditioning effects – including the risk blindness they may sometimes produce. For risk managers this is, in effect, the ‘internal risk’ that dare not be spoken of. It is often simply too powerful and too omnipresent to speak against in any way.

The reason for this limit is both structural and psychological. These institutional frameworks shape professional identity. They provide ontological security and a sense of belonging, and they also function as the standards against which competence and loyalty are judged within almost all large organisations. To challenge them is therefore to risk being very severely marginalised. As a result, individuals are placed in a constrained position: expected to think critically, but only within limits that leave foundational assumptions intact, with career advancement often depending on demonstrating formal alignment or implicit obeisance to those limits.

The consequence, across both elites and organisations, is a form of closure for the risk imagination. Critique persists, but it becomes selective - vigorous within accepted parameters, muted at the level where it may often generate its most penetrating risk insights. Under these conditions, the capacity for self-correction is not absent, but systematically weakened, allowing internally generated risks and errors to accumulate, often unnoticed, until they cause problems that can no longer be ignored.

The present guide invites organisational risk managers to reflect carefully on this point – and to consider that they can hardly be competent risk analysts if they are not prepared to think critically about the ideologies, cultures and values within which they and others around them are deeply immersed to the point where it may be hard to even notice them at all.

In my 2025 book on ‘Re-reading Pareto’, I draw on classical elite theory to argue that contemporary political and cultural conflict between elites and non-elites has, in many countries, intensified to the point where outbreaks of low-level civil strife now appear plausible. In this respect, some comparison may be warranted with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Years of Lead in Italy, or even the Latin American Dirty Wars of the last century. Anyone who is surprised by such a claim would be well advised to review the many 2025 YouTube discussions featuring Professor David Betz of King’s College London, who, drawing on his specialism in war studies, argues that Western societies increasingly exhibit structural conditions associated with civil conflict, including declining political legitimacy, elite fragmentation, and intensifying social polarisation.

The fact that we are on the verge of such conflict has further profound implications for limits on speaking out about prevailing elite-institutional truth regimes. In my book I explain that the tacit chill of censorship against speaking out within the institutions is compounded by the problem whereby elite-institutional power increasingly frames dissent as having a proto-terroristic character. For example, to speak out against prevailing liberal elite-institutional norms today is to increasingly risk being interrogated by police forces operating on either hate crime or terror prevention premises. In such cases the ‘punishment is often the process’, and the fear of that process is often an extremely powerful disincentive against saying anything that could be construed - even wholly unreasonably and hysterically - as criticism of woke liberal values. What’s more, such processes - for example where they entail being reported to the Prevent Counter-Terrorism service in the UK, may lead on to some element of psychiatric evaluation that is reminiscent of how the Soviet Union employed punitive psychiatry as a highly effective technique of state oppression.

Recognising that speaking out has become a gamble that can easily lead to devastating encounters with the law, nowadays, it is of course hardly surprising that dissent is typically heavily muted at organisational and institutional level. Those who dismiss these concerns as exaggerated should also consider that, as I mentioned earlier, many advanced societies now sit at highly volatile pivot points where we are always just one new government, and one new set of laws or policing priorities away, from radically transformed risk exposures for speaking out – perhaps for example involving more aggressive ‘two tier policing’ of dissenters for hate crime – or coordination of de-banking practices by financial institutions. To reiterate - these are debates one certainly does not wade into lightly today. What one says today creates small nuggets of gold for the offence archaeologists who will come along five or ten years from now, possibly in radically deteriorated political, legal and cultural environments where civil liberties are severely curtailed.

To return to the bigger picture, this is a whole-of-society conflict whose ideological dimensions hide in plain sight. We need general descriptors to render them visible, and yet these always look awkward when we try to simplify right down. We do however seem to get very close to the nub of the conflict when we link the words ‘liberal’ and ‘post-national’ to denote elite-side ideology, culture and values, and the words ‘conservative’ and ‘nationalist’ to denote conflicting non-elite positions.

We come closer still when we recognise that liberal post-national ideology is becoming ever more deeply embedded across the institutional fields that structure contemporary organisational life - with ‘wokeness’ now acting, in effect, as their spearhead. From a sociological perspective, long-run trajectories toward liberal individualism (or ‘individualisation’) and post-national orientations – to use concepts often associated with mainstream sociological theorists like Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck - tend to become institutionalised within organisational value systems, where commitments to diversity, inclusion, and global ethical responsibility are formalised as governance norms. What is often labelled “wokeness” can thus be understood not as an external ideological imposition but as the organisational expression of these broader structural shifts, reflecting how contemporary institutions translate abstract cultural change into administrative practice. Crucially, though, this institutionalisation unfolds within the wider field of culture war conflict. Processes such as mass immigration and rapid ethnic demographic change intensify political and cultural contestation, positioning organisational commitments to inclusion and anti-discrimination simultaneously as adaptive responses to increasingly plural societies and yet as focal points of resistance among groups who perceive these shifts as destabilising established ethnic, national, cultural, or civic identities.

Almost all large organisations now align to varying degrees with such ideology, enabling them to coordinate with one another, establish shared standards, and reinforce common assumptions about legitimacy and best practice. This alignment is further stabilised by the fact that lawmakers, regulators, and influential media actors largely operate within the same normative environment today. We should also perhaps consider the element of legal determinism at play one of the most important drivers and normalisers of change. For example, accuse a UK university of having gone ‘woke’ today and it may simply point to its obligations under both the 2010 Equality Act and the Public Sector Equality Duty that is set within the act to escalate proactive compliance.

As a result, what might otherwise look like a loose set of cultural preferences comes to resemble a coherent, self-reinforcing and coercive system of elite institutional power, in which shared ideas help to justify and sustain organisational behaviours associable with wokeness. Because these norms are built into organisations, they are hard to challenge from within, yet they become most visible where they clash with more conservative and nationalist views, especially around mass immigration and rapid demographic change. Looking from this non-elite rooted conservative and nationalist perspective, the promotion of ethnic diversity within organisations directly challenges older ideas of national cohesion, while the parallel emphasis on non-heteronormative identities and gender equality works in a more indirect but related way - reshaping social priorities and status, and, in the eyes of conservative and nationalist critics, placing less weight on continuity and tradition. It is at these points of tension and anxious grievance, rather than in abstract debate, that the conflict becomes most concrete. As the birthrates of indigenous European and diaspora-European populations continue to dip, and as rates of mass immigration into these societies continue to rise, conservative and nationalist concerns regarding how organisations are presently intervening in social life on interrelated matters of ethnicity, sexuality and gender can only intensify.

This circumstance puts almost all large organisations in a perpetual state of at least very low level ‘culture war’ with large swathes of the general populations of all advanced western societies. The implications for governance, leadership and management in organisations, and perhaps especially for organisational functions such as strategy, risk, marketing, human relations, and security, are potentially enormous – and this guide cannot possibly explore them from all pertinent organisational-functional perspectives. Instead I focus specifically on risk management challenges arising when organisations commit to, or are widely perceived as committing to, ideology, culture and value positions that are intensively and belligerently liberal and post-national in their ideological character – to a degree that makes them a target for conservative and nationalist anger along the lines sketched out above.

While the term ‘woke’ originated in African American Vernacular English as a call to remain alert to racial injustice during the Civil Rights Movement, in contemporary usage it more often refers to ‘progressive’ institutional and organisational commitments to social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet additional layers of meaning emerge when the term is understood as denoting, as explained above, a perceived excess of elite-driven liberal and post-national ideology, situated within the wider conflict over culture and values in contemporary society. ‘Woke’ has moved, in effect, from a defensive victimhood footing onto one of fast, deep attack.

In this more contextualised view, to say that an organisation has gone ‘woke’ is to suggest that it has adopted a leading-edge positioning vis-à-vis the liberal, post-national elite-institutional assault on public sentiment anchored to conservatism and nationalism. The term, in this sense, functions less as a precise description of policies or practices, and more as a signal of where an organisation is perceived to stand in relation to evolving elite institutional norms.

Used critically with these meanings placed to the fore, the term strongly connotes a sense of unease - at times rising to the level of civilizational dread - about the overall direction of travel for elite-institutional ideology, culture and values. More particularly, it expresses widespread public anxiety that established settlements between elite and non-elite ideologies, cultures and values, which have maintained adequate levels of social cohesion in previous decades, may now be breaking down - perhaps irrevocably.

While my book advocates for societies to become more at ease with themselves through what I term metapolitical pluralism as a basis for a renewed whole-of-society settlement over ideology culture and values, I recognise that such a commitment to balance and tolerance is not widely shared today. Many elite institutional and organisational actors engaged in this conflict appear to have developed a deep disregard for the possibility that their non-elite critics may hold valid concerns.

Such disregard is, as realism-based elite theory has warned down the decades, merely the historical norm. Elite power has always erred through arrogance, hubris, and suppression of dissent. Naturally, as a risk academic, my inclination is to cut into this problem by attuning quite specifically to risk posed by institutional elite power - or “meta risk” as we can also call it – as it commits ever more aggressively to liberal and post-national ideology. Obviously to speak of such meta risk at all today is hardly the best ticket to career success in institutions. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - or that simply ignoring it will make it go away.

Two Basic Axioms

In this guidance document, I explore what contemporary conflict between elites and non-elites over meta risks produced by elites means for the work of risk managers across organisations of all kinds. I do not ask them to self-reinvent as historical pessimist social theorists, deeply suspicious of elite competence and goodwill. I do however invite them to think from two simple axioms that bring them close to this position - and I explain that this is really a matter of professional necessity for them.

Risk managers in organisations already know these well. They integrate thoroughly within their workaday lives.

First – for every significantly scaled organisational behaviour or decision there is a corresponding risk space. Risk managers have a duty to promote proactive exploration of this risk space using dedicated processes and technologies - in effect, professionalising the organisation’s forward-looking view of things.

Second – organisational behaviours and decisions inhabit ideology, culture and value milieus which constrain exploration of these risk spaces; the more deeply immersed individuals are in these milieus, the greater the constraints are likely to be.

Looking from the purely technical risk management point of view, and working from these two axioms, the need to explore all possible woke-to-broke causal chains, mindful of the likelihood that many will be blinded to these causal chains by their ideology, culture and value positions, should be obvious. Risk management professional attitude should proclaim that no ideology-culture-and-values perspective deserves a free pass. ‘Woke’ behaviours and decisions, like all other organisational behaviours and decisions, create a risk space (Axiom 1); similarly, ‘woke’ positions, especially when passionately held, are likely to constrain exploration of this risk space (Axiom 2). To reiterate, that should be how things are. Risk professional associations should be giving guidance and support to their members, encouraging and empowering them to work rigorously from these axioms. And yet that is not how things are today.

We have now entered a very dangerous phase of fundamental conflict between elites and non-elites over ideology, culture and values. It makes little sense for risk professionals with any degree of professional acumen and integrity to sidestep either the meta risk issues, or the related organisational risk issues, which this conflict raises. Of course, by these ‘organisational risks’ I do not mean risks that are relatively safe to discuss and are manageable through, for example, political violence insurance. Rather, I refer to risks that arise from organisational ideologies, cultures and values that mirror, and sometimes exaggerate, broader elite institutional norms - norms that are now deeply contested, and which today go under the heading of ‘wokeness’ where the contestation grows salient. So, what are risk professionals to do? What can they do?

The Risk Problem – And What to Call It

As David Hume famously said, reason is the slave of the passions - a dynamic that, in contemporary organisational settings, may sometimes take the form of a practical enslavement of reasoning to passionately held political and social commitments. In this guide, such enslavement is treated as the underlying cause of GWGB risk. The approach taken is not to precisely identify or challenge ‘woke’ passions and the ‘woke’ values they associate to per se, but rather to examine their organisational effects when they override or distort the instrumental rationalities which organisations require to minimise failure or loss.

Corporate readers with responsibilities for risk management should find the guide both engaging and easy to apply. Most of its proposed technical procedures are self-explanatory and require little additional guidance. Jobbing risk managers will already be very familiar with their use for generic risk management. Yet the risks the guide addresses are among the most micropolitically sensitive ones which risk managers may face in their professional lives. Simply being able to address them at all is recognised by the guide as not just an initial hurdle, but the main one - after which the guide’s recommended technical risk management procedures for minimising organisational failure or loss become very straightforward.

Risk management is depicted herein as an ethical vocation founded upon candour, making it duty-bound to translate all forward-looking contemplation of organisational failure or loss into the technical language of risk management - regardless of political-cultural obstacles to speaking out, and while guarding against socio-technical manipulation even under intense pressure to succumb. Applying these vocation-defining principles to the management of GWGB risk will inevitably expose risk practitioners to serious career repercussions in some cases. To demand that technical honesty triumph over micropolitical evasion and dissimulation in organisations that stumble into GWGB risk problems is to set a very high ethical bar - one that dignifies the risk profession.

Readers interested in culture war politics - and in how organisations might responsibly navigate such terrain - will also find the remaining ‘technical’ discussions relevant. Just like organisational risk managers they will be keenly aware that speaking truth to institutional power often requires confronting the cultural and psychological biases that shape what institutions are able, or willing, to acknowledge as truth. They may be highly intrigued to consider how this pattern may play out through the management of GWGB risk in organisations, as may generate micropolitical resistance at the highest organisational levels.

To reiterate from earlier, we now live in societies marked by intense political and cultural polarisation, in which institutional claims to truth have grown increasingly fragile. In this environment, institutions can react more sharply to perceived challenges over basic values, sometimes in ways that feel disproportionate or unpredictable. We see this pattern frequently today. Expressions of opinion on fundamental political and social questions now regularly clash with what institutions deem acceptable, often exposing individuals who hold commonplace - or even majority - views to uncertain legal or career risks.

Millions of ordinary people who have learned to live with this condition have also been changed by it. They now place a high value on principles of speaking truth to institutional power - typically framed in terms of integrity, challenge, candour, and fearlessness - and they often incorporate these principles into their sense of identity and self-worth. How these same principles can and should fit within contemporary institutions that have to varying degrees gone ‘woke’, and which have also drifted into wilful blindness towards negative consequences arising, are questions that must surely fascinate everyone today – no matter whether their interest is professional, political or personal.

Naming an organisational risk category after the culture war expression “Get Woke, Go Broke” will strike some as eminently sensible, given its wide recognition and mnemonic clarity. If a risk is to be managed effectively across a large organisation, there is a strong case for using familiar language rather than introducing unnecessary abstraction. Others will view the term as inappropriate due to its partisan associations and derogatory tone. However, its rhetorical origins are distinct from the underlying risk mechanism, which remains real and observable regardless of terminology. The mechanism requires management; the label is secondary. The phrase is adopted here because its built-in provocation may improve thoughtful and careful attentiveness to the category in technical risk discussions.

Organisations should nevertheless reflect carefully on the trade-offs between alternative labels. Terms such as “Progressive Positioning Risk” or “Progressive Values Alignment Risk” may initially appear preferable where neutrality and balance are desired. However, “progressive” is itself a contested term, used approvingly in some contexts and critically in others. Where organisations adopt such language to signal alignment with their preferred culture and values, they should recognise that the underlying risk category will still require active and sometimes intensive management, regardless of terminology. As I mentioned earlier, organisations with strongly progressive values may often have by far the greatest need for such a category, since they are likely to be among the most exposed to the loss and failure dynamics it describes.

By contrast, “Sociocultural Positioning Risk” may appear to offer a more neutral framing, avoiding overt cultural signalling altogether. Some organisations may adopt a ‘Ming Vase’ approach to cultivating and maintaining institutional neutrality, perhaps because they feel they operate in a sociocultural tinderbox, in which case this term may seem by far the safest choice. Yet this apparent neutrality may be misleading. It frames the issue as a stable and controllable domain of strategic choice, and in doing so obscures the conditions under which the risk typically materialises. In practice, well-intentioned and carefully considered organisational decisions and initiatives - across marketing, policy, communications, or operational stance - may nonetheless result in unintended organisational failure or loss. These outcomes arise not from the absence of internal diligence, but from the inherent uncertainty and contestability of the internal environments in which organisations operate. Once such loss or failure has materialised, it is then subject to external interpretation, reframing, and amplification in ways that are often highly charged or politically contested. These external narratives can in turn feed back into the organisation, intensifying reputational damage, accelerating loss of stakeholder confidence, and compounding the original adverse outcomes. The language of “positioning” therefore risks concealing this full causal chain, presenting as controllable what is in practice an open-loop process of decision, unintended consequence, and external amplification.

The phrase “GWGB risk” is more explicit about this dynamic. In a sense it is more appropriately chaotic and disruptive. It better reflects the fact that organisational risk often originates in internal decision-making, proceeds through unintended organisational failure or loss, and only then becomes fully visible through external interpretation and amplification. While this insinuation of serious limitations to governance oversight might seem deliberately provocative, this may be precisely what makes the term useful in technical risk settings where attention might otherwise drift toward overly abstract or sanitised categories. In practice, organisations can easily underestimate the extent to which well-designed initiatives may still produce adverse internal outcomes, and how those outcomes may subsequently be reframed and magnified in external environments in ways that further intensify their impact. A degree of provocation in the terminology can therefore help ensure that this full chain - from decision to unintended consequence, to external interpretation, to compounded organisational effect - remains clearly visible in risk analysis and discussion.

“GWGB risk” also offers more particular advantage as a paradoxical provocation - a deliberately jarring label grounded in the premise that resistance to it may itself signal, or even reinforce, the cultural and value-based dynamics that give rise to the very risk it seeks to describe. That makes the term likely to unsettle all who use it, particularly in organisational settings that are both micropolitically and socio-culturally tense and ambiguous. Yet these unsettling effects can themselves be harnessed in risk management training sessions to prompt a particular mode of interpretation, in which trainees are taught to understand that any discomfort they experience when using the category label is by design, and that this is precisely what permits it to work harder than most other risk category labels do. The aim would be to train users to recognise that the label adequately names the risk while also very powerfully signifying the need for vigilance against value-driven discomfort that might lead either to its dismissal or underestimation, or conversely to its exaggeration or overestimation. The category label can thus delivers a sobering realist warning: everyone who enters discussions about this risk category stands at the boundary of culture war where highly intense political passions begin to impinge on technical organisational matters, and where successful management depends on sustained professional self-monitoring and the ability to treat the issues as technical risk-management challenges rather than as battles over ideology.

GWGB risk signals should be analytically separated from their sources. The tendency of partisan right-wing media to generate and over-amplify such signals should be borne in mind, based on reasonable concerns about credibility and reliability, while nonetheless recognising that they may still point to genuine underlying risks. Even where such signals largely constitute mis-, dis-, or malinformation, they may still generate or amplify perceptions of reputational harm capable of rapid escalation, which itself makes them worthy of some precautionary assessment.

Technical risk management relies on all such forms of information. It requires continuous operation of a risk radar, open to inputs from across the information spectrum, including from those that challenge prevailing assumptions for any reason. Discounting risk signals solely because of perceived political bias of source creates blind spots in the risk environment - and in doing so, undermines effective risk management.

Organisations of all kinds need to manage GWGB risk because decisions and initiatives that raise social, political, and cultural questions over their sociocultural positioning can directly affect revenue, reputation, employee morale, investor confidence, legal and regulatory standing, long-term brand equity, and also corporate/national security. In a highly polarised environment amplified by social media, stakeholders - including customers, staff, regulators, and partners – increasingly scrutinise corporate positions on issues ranging from diversity initiatives to environmental policy. When actions are perceived as performative, inconsistent with core values, or misaligned with the expectations of key audiences, backlash can lead to boycotts, loss of market share, talent attrition, and share price volatility. Conversely, a failure to act when stakeholders expect leadership can also damage trust.

Effective risk management therefore requires clear alignment between organisational purpose and public positioning, rigorous stakeholder analysis, scenario planning, transparent communication, and measurable outcomes. By capturing GWGB risk dynamics within a prominent risk category - rather than relegating their handling to low-level, ad hoc decisions about marketing, policies and operations - organisations can protect financial performance while maintaining credibility and resilience in a complex operating environment.

The Practical Risk Management Challenge

The remainder of the guide is now structured as follows. The next two sections will elaborate key working definitions. These are intended to establish the management of GWGB risk as technical risk management practice requiring careful ongoing vigilance for its own failure due to considerable likelihood of at least some socio-technical manipulation. The approach taken will be to offer a combination of mutually supportive external and internal definitions for the risk category.

The external definition section will situate GWGB risk within risk category context. While treating it as a subcategory of internal risk will highlight problems of organisational power and ideology that are structurally embedded within it, further considering it as a subcategory of political polarisation risk will qualify these problems as ones of elite-institutional power and ideology amidst escalating political and cultural bipolarisation between elite institutions and non-elites. Think of this as risk problem identification by triangulation. In supplying rich contextualisation in this way, the exercise is intended to help those managing the risk category better understand the cultural and value orientations that generate these risks, and how their close links to both organisational and elite-institutional power can inhibit critical discussion of their negative impacts within organisations.

The internal definition section will then define the ‘form’ of causal mechanism which the risk category refers to – and hence which all risks must exhibit if they are to quality for placement within the category. The culture and values orientations that are identified (albeit loosely) via the external definition process will constitute the requisite risk drivers. These will be theorised both as generating the risks and as valid risk objects for technical risk management attention as soon as they demonstrate the potential to steer organisational initiatives toward failure or loss, as per the internal definition.

The remainder of the guide then makes simple technical recommendations which can plug directly into existing organisational risk management frameworks, as involve widely standardised use of embedded risk registers and risk management processes. First, it subcategorises GWGB risks for alignment with appropriate controls. It proposes a six-subcategory structure based on high-profile cases in the United States and the United Kingdom, illustrating both precautionary and remedial controls for each subcategory. Then it recommends practical techniques for maintaining vigilance against GWGB missteps. Ongoing early warning analysis is proposed so that risk management can catch these risks when they are still in the making – ideally before their reputational impacts spill out across multiple stakeholder constituencies and impact dimensions. Aligning early warning analysis to use of threat-level indicator systems is also recommended so that applications of risk management resource can vary as necessary. As we will see, it is very much in the nature of these risks that they can escalate quickly to become risk management priorities – as indeed illustrates why the need for this guidance is so pressing. The risks are such that the risk management resource that gets applied to them must be scalable up and down rapidly, by order of magnitude rather than within narrow ranges, stretching to encompass crisis and business continuity management in severe cases.

External Definition (by risk category context)

One way to get to know the GWGB risk category is by external definition; more particularly, by its situatedness within an area of overlap formed of two already commonly used risk categories: internal risk and political polarisation risk. By approaching GWGB risk as a risk subcategory which comes into existence by filling this area of overlap, it becomes possible to understand both the risk and the challenges it poses in surprisingly rich contextual detail.

Situating the risk within this risk category context should be helpful for risk practitioners by establishing routine triggers for engaging with it via standard risk management processes. Such processes must work both through and between risk categories aiming for comprehensiveness. Positioning GWGB risk as a shared subcategory of internal risk and political polarisation risk entails that each time either of these larger categories comes up for management discussion, comprehensiveness demands that their shared subcategory be acknowledged as well.

Why Risk Matrix Positioning Matters

Before we look directly at these two parent categories, and at why it helps to understand GWGB risk as very much their child, possessing the DNA of both, a little more background on this view of routine risk management process may help. Organisations need to manage a wide range of risks. While many of these impact frequently and are easy to spot (and are often controlled via insurance purchase) many more are ambiguous and easy to overlook - entailing that to manage them they must first be theorised into existence as management objects by acts of risk imagination. That can create severe vulnerability to socio-technical manipulation by powerful voices within organisations.

Effective risk management in highly complex risk environments therefore requires careful design of risk matrices to ensure good coverage - taking account not only of the obvious risks, but also the less obvious ones, and, where there is willingness to do so, risks hiding in plain sight that many would prefer not to acknowledge or discuss at all. In practice this means designing risk category sets for structured coverage, pushing towards a forever elusive ideal of comprehensiveness. However, individual risks rarely conform to a single, neatly bounded category; rather, they emerge from complex, interconnected causal pathways that cut across category domains. Categorisation schemes should therefore be understood as pragmatic tools for organising attention and for inspiring risk imagination, and not as a definitive representation of causal reality. Effective risk management depends on recognising that many risks simultaneously inhabit multiple categories. Hence effective use of risk category sets demands that we look for risk not just within categories but in their areas of overlap as well. When a risk gets positioned within a clearly defined area of overlap it becomes harder to ignore.

Think of risk matrix design as a blend of creative judgement and evidence-based science. Tailoring risk matrices to reflect the unique features of an organisation’s risk environment must be balanced against pressures for industry-sector consistency, regulatory expectations, the constraints of risk control products and services offered by insurers, and a range of further considerations. Trade-offs must balance accurately reflecting the complexity of the risk environment with the practical management benefits of simplification. The test of a good risk matrix is always how much actionable risk it captures in the Goldilocks zone between too much and too little complexity reduction, a challenge that grows especially acute in relation to risks that were not obvious to begin with and/or whose discussion may make some people uncomfortable. Pressures towards matrix simplification may render such risks particularly susceptible to dismissal.

Organisational risk is managed through a combination of ongoing matrix redesign and implementation via risk registers and standard risk assessment processes. Through these central components of risk management infrastructure, what gets included in the matrix is, in a very real and practical sense, what ends up getting managed. Through these practical implementations risk matrices can provide foundational management structure and discipline - not only for shaping how the organisation identifies risk, but for allocating resources and defining accountabilities in line with overall management priorities as well. Hence when we conceive of risk matrices as serving to establish and point the organisation’s risk radar, directing attention to specific areas, we need to think of how these practicalities all align. Ultimately, risk radars guide resources, influence people and processes towards certain environmental scanning activities, and they shape individual management incentives and perceptions for participating in these activities too. The result should ideally be a coordinated and systematic approach to managing risk that maps to and moves with the risk environment.

Bearing all this in mind, risk matrices (i.e. structured risk category sets) clearly matter enormously – and the key to managing GWGB risk is surely its risk category positioning. It makes no technical-professional sense whatsoever to force wholesale exclusion of certain risk categories or subcategories from risk management consideration, just because they fail to chime with political and cultural sensibilities that have grown prevalent across the institutions in recent years. Either risks exist along possible causal pathways to failure or loss for organisations, or they don’t. If they do, then provided their probability and impact dimensions accede the normal qualifying thresholds for risk management intervention, then they should automatically qualify for such intervention.

Where a risk category space exists, inhabited with such qualifying risks, and yet risk management side-steps around it, then that’s wilful risk blindness - and by extension risk negligence such as may conflict with basic management accountabilities in organisations – including fiduciary ones at the very highest levels.

Effective management of GWGB risk therefore depends upon having a powerful and widely understood rationale for positioning it prominently at a defined location within the risk matrix to ensure such failure does not materialise. With that in mind let us now turn back to the question of how GWGB risk can be defined ‘externally’ (i.e. risk matrix-wise) as a shared subcategory of both internal risk and political polarisation risk.

‘GWGB Risk’ as ‘Internal Risk’

First let’s look at the very broad internal risk category and at the management challenges it poses. Organisational risk management is sometimes understood as a dual-facing practice that must address sources of uncertainty both internal and external to the organisation if it is to be logically complete in its coverage of the risk environment. Nonetheless it must also remain mindful that complex ongoing reflexivity may causally bind these two risk domains to one another. External risks - such as market volatility, regulatory change, and geopolitical disruption - are typically more visible and are therefore more readily incorporated into formal risk matrices. By contrast, internal risks emerge from within the organisation’s own structures, cultures, and decision-making processes, making them inherently more difficult to identify and control. This difficulty arises in large part because internal risks are often generated and sustained by organisational power: hierarchical authority, incentive systems, and dominant managerial narratives can obscure emerging threats, discourage challenge, and normalise unsafe practices. As a result, internal risk frequently evades standardised management techniques and instead demands more reflexive forms of governance, including critical oversight, transparency, and an openness to dissent.

The need to tackle internal risk is explicitly recognised in the 2002 UK risk management process guidance produced jointly by the risk professional associations ALARM, IRM, and AIRMIC, which stipulates that risk must be managed within both the internal and external ‘context’ of the organisation. Empirical support for the centrality of internal risk is powerfully reinforced by the Roads to Ruin report, published in 2011 by AIRMIC in collaboration with Cass Business School (later renamed Bayes Business School). The report demonstrates through analysis of major corporate failures that internal factors - particularly weaknesses in governance, leadership, and organisational culture - are the predominant drivers of corporate crisis. It highlights how “board risk blindness,” deficient communication, and misaligned incentives systematically undermine organisational resilience, often with catastrophic consequences. Taken together, professional guidance and empirical evidence converge on the conclusion that effective risk management depends upon recognising the primacy of internally generated risks, even where external shocks appear to trigger organisational loss or failure. Self-evidently, GWGB risk fits neatly within this internal risk category space.

‘GWGB Risk’ arising via ‘Political Polarisation’

Next let us explore problems of internal risk for organisations that arise specifically with political polarisation. We can use this area of risk category overlap, to reiterate, to provide a practical working ‘external’ definition for the GWGB risk subcategory. Theorising this category overlap entails setting GWGB risk within the context of organisational power and ideology on the one hand, and within broader context of political and cultural conflict between elite institutions and non-elites on the other hand - in effect linking organisational risk to what is sometimes called the ‘meta risk’ that becomes visible within political and cultural disputes over elite stewardship of societal change on the grand scale.

This section will explain why organisational risk managers need to contemplate both meta risk at the societal level, and risk as they are more familiar with it at the organisational level, if they are to fully appreciate GWGB risk as ‘internal’ risk arising via growing political polarisation across society. There will be considerable nuance to the argument. The key point it will ask them to reflect on - one most have probably not considered before, and which may seem wholly alien to and beyond the scope of their organisational roles - is that all such ‘political polarisation’ risk is simultaneously ‘internal’ to organisations, where it can be called GWGB risk, and yet it is simultaneously ‘internal’ to the elite-institutional culture and values milieus within which organisations operate, and which have grown increasingly problematic as frameworks for organisations to operate within due to growing contestation of their legitimacy across society as a whole.

One might describe ‘internal’ risk of this nature as doubly challenging to engage with at the organisational level. It requires risk managers - at least for critical-analytical purposes - to step somewhat out into the cold, and to be seen to do so, detaching not only from organisational culture and values milieus but also from the broader institutional frameworks into which many have spent their entire lives being socialised. This is, plainly, a very demanding expectation. Most risk professionals recognise that their role entails a degree of adversarial challenge to internally generated risk arising from organisational power; however, extending this test of their character to encompass some critical scrutiny of broader elite institutional powers may well appear both unwise and unnecessary - whether in terms of career considerations or from a strictly technical risk management perspective.

Nevertheless, this guide urges them to think otherwise. Internal risk always was and probably always will be the most awkward challenge they face. Yet face it they must - no matter whether the risk problems it brings emanate from within the power hierarchies of specific organisations, or from the ideological hegemonies of elite-institutional networks which sprawl across entire societies, and which are vastly more powerful and influential to the point where many cannot even conceive of challenging them. This may entail partially reversing a lifetime of having internalised hegemonic culture and value orientations well past the point where critical scrutiny can still feel appropriate. Organisational risk managers are simply not used to thinking this way about ‘internal risk’ – but that position cannot reasonably be maintained in severely polarising societies.

I am not arguing here that risk managers must ‘take the red pill’, as it were, by pivoting against prevailing elite institutional culture and values from some alternative perspective. I have already explained that this guide does not ask risk managers to challenge any culture and value position per se. Instead, the main thrust of the argument is that they do however need to appreciate, as a matter of basic professional integrity, that where organisations espouse culture and values that are also prominent within broader elite institutional culture and value milieus, then those circumstances do seem to point towards the likelihood of at least some cumulative risk blindness. At that point the phenomenon clearly enters their professional domain. What they need to grasp, in other words, is that organisational implementations of said cultures and values can and do sometimes result in organisational failure or loss, as is likely to be wholly ignored or at least significantly under-acknowledged, both within organisations and within the institutions they routinely turn to for guidance on their cultures and values - and likewise for guidance on what risks they should manage.

This point about elite-institutional-leader-to-organisational-follower cumulative risk blindness seems to provide the theoretical crux for understanding and managing GWGB risk insofar as it becomes visible within the area of overlap formed of internal risk and political polarisation risk – which is why I choose to front this guide with the famous 1568 painting of ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It shows a line of blind men, each led by the one before him, stumbling ‘progressively’ (pun intended) into a ditch - one already fallen, others following in sequence, their shared impairment rendering each dependent on the flawed guidance of the last. That is precisely the dynamic I have in mind here. While this may render the guide controversial for some, it is nonetheless a nettle which must be grasped if technical risk management is to guard effectively against overwhelming cumulative sociocultural manipulation towards risk blindness.

With that idea we really get to the heart of the problem. All cultural and value systems can be understood as structuring not only perception but also systematic zones of risk blindness – in other words domains in which certain possible harms, trade-offs, losses or failures are cognitively discounted using a variety of psychological strategies of willed avoidance. When organisations operate under the guidance of institutions that inhabit the same cultural milieu, this blindness is not merely replicated but potentially compounded, as reinforcing norms reduce critical interrogation and amplify shared assumptions. Over time, such alignment may produce cumulative epistemic narrowing, where dissenting signals are filtered out across multiple layers of authority. Extending this logic, one might also theorise a “bullwhip” effect along the institution-to-organisation guidance chain, whereby small initial blind spots become progressively magnified downstream, particularly under conditions of asymmetrical trust in which followers defer to leaders’ judgments. In such contexts, naive or uncritical trust can intensify the attenuation of risk perception, resulting in increasingly severe distortions between actual and perceived vulnerabilities. The problem for risk managers and their professional associations then, is that their outlooks will tend to be shaped by their separate role-positions within these institution-to-organisation guidance chains – whether they like it or not.

This leader–follower influence chain has itself become a source of growing public anxiety. In today’s highly polarised, low-trust societies, political anxiety increasingly centres on the perception that organisations may be contributing - even incrementally - to systemic meta risks affecting society as a whole. Such anxieties can be rapidly activated by media coverage, directing waves of hostility towards organisations perceived to embody or amplify those risks. While originating in internally generated organisational vulnerabilities, GWGB risk becomes significantly more damaging when those vulnerabilities intersect with wider public narratives and anxieties of this kind. A central difficulty, therefore, is that individuals attempting to address such risks from within an organisation may themselves be perceived as aligning with broader anti-elite or populist currents hostile to behaviours associated with established institutions.

Just as there is a leading edge of culture and values change in the elite institutions that call themselves ‘progressive’, such leading edges can manifest likewise within organisations. That is fundamentally when GWGB risks materialise. When such ‘progress’ happens rapidly, both institutionally and organisationally, in societies that are transforming rapidly under the weight of modernity, it is inevitable that debate over associable societal and organisational harms will be politically very highly charged. Yet it remains the duty of organisational risk managers to attend to possible organisational harms regardless of all cumulative (i.e. institutional and organisational) cultural pressures to turn away in conditioned risk blindness.

Such organisational risk exposure can occur even when the internal risk is politically motivated and considered acceptable within the organisation’s risk appetite, because public perception may still judge it harmful in its contribution to meta risk. It can also occur when the internal risk is entirely unwitting, arising from a lack of acumen for reading culture-war passions and sensitivities. The remainder of this discussion of political polarisation risk will now explain that the risk and insurance profession’s attention to the political polarisation risk category seems to sidestep around these extremely important issues. Opening a new risk subcategory called GWGB risk within the area of overlap between internal risk and political polarisation risk seems to offer the solution – one that cautions organisations to be very careful about how their behaviours are perceived as playing to culture war sensibilities.

Today, the insurance industry helps firms manage political polarisation primarily through increasingly comprehensive political risk insurance (PRI) products and advisory services that combine financial protection with strategic insight. Insurers such as AIG and brokers like Marsh and Gallagher offer coverage against losses arising from government actions, political violence, regulatory shifts, or contract disruption, while also providing data, scenario analysis, and crisis consulting to help firms anticipate geopolitical instability and maintain investment confidence. As polarisation intensifies globally, these products are being used more widely - not just in emerging markets but across advanced economies.

Yet this support is more effective at mitigating external risks than internal ones. Insurance is well suited to quantifiable, exogenous shocks - such as expropriation, civil unrest, or sudden regulatory change - because these can be transferred or indemnified financially. By contrast, internal risks linked to polarisation - such as workforce division, reputational conflict, or stakeholder activism - are harder to insure and instead require organisational, cultural, or governance responses. While insurers increasingly provide advisory services that touch on these issues, their core contribution remains that of a financial backstop against external shocks rather than a solution to internal corporate tensions – including those that can arise via GWGB missteps.

Consistent with this turn toward political risk product development in the insurance industry, recent annual editions of the Global Risks Report published by the World Economic Forum have consistently identified political or societal polarisation as a major global risk. This reflects growing ideological fragmentation, declining institutional trust, and widening perceptions of social and economic inequality across many societies. The reports emphasise that polarisation functions not merely as a discrete political phenomenon but as a systemic risk amplifier: interacting with misinformation, political instability, governance breakdown, and social unrest, while also complicating coordinated responses to economic, environmental, and technological challenges. In response, the global risk management community - including international organisations, governments, and large corporations - has increasingly sought to address polarisation through enhanced risk intelligence, stakeholder governance mechanisms, digital information governance, and multi-stakeholder collaboration aimed at strengthening institutional resilience and restoring public trust.

Despite such growing recognition of political polarisation risk, and the proliferation of governance initiatives designed to address it, no widely accepted framework has however emerged for managing political polarisation risks that are internally generated within organisations. This is particularly evident in relation to internally generated risks linked to internal culture and values, which can readily qualify as political polarisation where they are widely deemed political in character, and where they may therefore elicit highly politicised responses from across internal and external stakeholder constituencies. While political polarisation is increasingly treated as a systemic concern within global risk discourse, then, appropriate guidance for self-inflicted organisational exposure has not been forthcoming. This has simply not achieved due recognition as a standardised or codified domain of risk governance at all.

The reason for this omission hides in plain sight: supranational bodies such as the World Economic Forum - along with professional risk associations and the global insurance industry - are structurally constrained in their ability to provide guidance on risks for organisations that emerge with the ideology, culture and values perspectives they themselves promote, and within which they are fully immersed. This is best understood not as a matter of bias in a narrow sense, but rather as a far greater problem of endogenous selectivity: meta risks that originate from real world implementations of dominant elite institutional ideology, culture and value amount to a systemic meta risk problem that is unlikely to be fully recognised, articulated, or prioritised – and so its translation into organisation level risk exposures becomes unlikely as well.

This limitation becomes clearer when considering the dual role played by organisations such as the World Economic Forum. As both risk-mapping bodies and normative policy advocates, they advance frameworks - such as stakeholder capitalism, ESG and EDI integration, and globally coordinated governance - that embed substantive assumptions about risk. These frameworks inevitably highlight risks that can be addressed through greater alignment with their prescriptions, while suppressing consideration of those that may arise from them. The result is a structural asymmetry in risk perception: risk mitigation pathways for their desired social goals are emphasised, whereas the possibility of risk generation through the same pathways and goals remains comparatively underexplored.

By promoting convergence in governance norms and organisational values across national jurisdictions, such frameworks can easily contribute to increasingly correlated exposure profiles among organisations. Convergence of ideology, culture and values, arising from such globally high-profile advocacy and co-ordination work, can be expected to generate deep collective blind spots - areas of risk that organisations discount precisely because they are widely discounted. Hence organisations that choose to unwittingly align themselves with what they perceive to be the dominant institutional direction of travel in cultural and normative terms, as signalled by entities like the WEF, may in so doing increase both their exposure to unforeseen organisation level failure and loss, and at the same time their exposure to politicised backlash from disgruntled non-elite groups. Under these circumstances of WEF orchestrated convergence, then, GWGB risk may become much more likely to emerge at individual organisation level as a manifestation of that wider problem of cumulative risk blindness mentioned earlier. The resulting risk blindness might even be theorised as compounding so widely on both elite-institutional and organisational levels – and, indeed, at global scale - as to create a groupthink problem of such magnitude as to make challenge from within the institutions unthinkable.

In summary, then, organisations that rely on risk frameworks shaped by elite institutional perspectives inherit not only their analytical strengths but also their systematic risk blind spots. The under-recognition of certain categories of meta risk at the elite-institutional level can translate directly into organisation-level risk vulnerabilities, greatly limiting the effectiveness of such frameworks as comprehensive tools for risk management. Expecting supranational institutions such as the World Economic Forum to diagnose both meta risks and organisational risks arising from the value systems they themselves promote is perhaps analogous to asking a mirror to reveal what lies behind it. Or at the very least, they cannot be expected to undertake focused and rigorous work to highlight the limits, distortions, or risks that are embedded within their own operating assumptions. This is not primarily a question of bad faith. Intellectual arrogance my play only a very marginal role. Rather, it simply reflects the fact that institutions are less well equipped to recognise and evaluate risks that originate within their own assumptions and normative commitments - particularly when a major part of their role is to propagate these so that they provide co-ordinating institutional fields for governments, regulators, large organisations, and many other significantly scaled entities of all kinds around the world. This problem doubtless applies to some degree to all institutional entities that try to offer thought leadership of any kind. It creates a structural paradox for all institutional guidance on risk, and with that a need for critical interrogation of all such guidance which actively attunes to the possible risk blind spots of the guidance issuer. Perhaps all institutional guidance on political risk, and especially on political polarisation risk, should only be taken seriously when its mettle has been thoroughly tested by commentators who are willing and able to think outside of prevailing elite-institutional norms.

These various matters of ‘ideology, culture and value’ do of course require some further specification if we are to get to know GWGB risk both as organisational risk and as meta risk. General cultural descriptors for capturing differences between global institutional entities like the WEF, and groundswells of dissent and grievance, are rarely clear and uncontested. We can however cross-reference between multiple conceptual overlays to get close to the nub of what is at issue. Over the last several years, a wide variety of simplifying binaries have been proposed – often within politics and social theory literatures dealing with recent populist waves - which attempt to capture growing differences between what are sometimes called ‘non-elite’ and ‘elite-institutional’ ideology, culture and value perspectives. Those concepts help to position the conflict for us within social structure – but that leaves us still requiring to know the identities of the collective protagonists, as well as their general outlooks. Binaries seeking to describe the protagonists who increasingly stand opposed to one another include ‘the people versus the institutions’, ‘mob versus blob’ and somewheres versus anywheres’. Their differing ideological outlooks, all of which carry strong culture and values connotations, are often framed in terms ‘conservatism versus liberalism’, ‘tribalism/localism versus globalism’, ‘nationalism versus post-nationalism’ and also ‘particularism versus universalism’.

When taken together, these binaries provide broad coverage of the most dangerous and volatile political and cultural faultline today, as is now commonly implicated in bringing society to the brink of fundamental social conflict, potentially even low-level civil war. Some readers of this guide may be aware of Professor David Betz’ arguments, which began circulating widely on social media in early 2025, claiming that many countries such as the UK, USA, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands are presently teetering on the brink of civil war. Betz argues that this is due to the extreme nature of factional polarisation between elites and masses, which only seems to be getting worse – and which he regards today’s elite institutions as having grown ‘spectacularly tone deaf’ towards. Given this backdrop of severe polarisation and possibly impending fundamental social conflict, it seems inconceivable that risk professionals should neglect the associated organisational risk management issues. They really do need to ask themselves whether they might form part of this groupthink problem of spectacular tone deafness across the institutions.

Defined externally by risk category context, then, GWGB risk can be understood as comprising risk problems generated within organisations which begin with expressions of culture and values aligned with the elite side of these various binaries, and which are then amplified into reputational problems by provoking adverse reactions from those aligned with the non-elite side. It seems more helpful to interpret GWGB risk in terms of these binaries than to limit attention to the word ‘woke’ itself, for to take the broader view is to gain a keener awareness of how the risks constitute organisational snapshots of greater meta risk problems bound up with very severe and growing social instability.

Thankfully, working systematically towards technical risk management solutions can be far more straightforward than this section’s various discussions might suggest. The next section offers an internal definition of GWGB risk, providing the practical framework required to identify and manage these risks. It will allow them to be approached with a causal mindset which is ultimately concerned whether they can be causally implicated in organisational failure or loss. Looking from this perspective, a lay understanding of political polarisation may well suffice for working out the expressive culture war politics at play. Combinations of sound judgment and metricisation effort, applied together to map out causal pathways to organisational failure or loss, are what should really count.

Internal Definition (by causal mechanism)

Now let us to turn attention to how the GWGB risk category can also be defined internally; that is to say, by causal mechanism. A term with good mnemonic power seems appropriate here. Let us therefore assert that GWGB risk always refers to causal mechanisms of ‘virtue-to-value collapse’ within organisations whose ideologies, cultures and values have shifted toward the liberal-left in recent years, broadly in line with wider elite-institutional trends. The risk emerges when influential actors - inspired and emboldened by these liberal-left culture and values shifts - pursue initiatives they regard as socially virtuous, only to encounter unforeseen problems which produce failure or loss for organisations.

Such initiatives can be theorised as generating cumulative failure and loss along two analytically distinct yet typically interacting pathways:

Main Trigger Pathways form through activation of a psychological mechanism whose core meaning is widely understood from popular culture-war use of the term ‘trigger’. These pathways open when individuals react negatively to what they perceive as egregious left-liberal cultural expression within organisations. When such reactions occur at scale, affecting many and to extents that can be hard to anticipate, this can soon generate complex adverse outcomes for the organisations concerned. While not strictly necessary for virtue-to-value collapse to happen, these psychological mechanisms are likely to play a central role in practice. Being highly visible in public-facing GWGB dynamics they must therefore form a key part of any evidence-based analysis.

To understand Main Trigger Pathways, we need to look at how hostile perception forms at significant social scale. Organisations are seen - accurately or otherwise - to have adopted left-liberal culture war positions, signalling partisan alignment either overtly or through more subtle cues. Because culture war issues are widely recognisable and inherently polarising, even minimal or ambiguous signals can activate entrenched interpretive frames. To reiterate, we live in factionally bipolarising societies, where individuals now very routinely apply rigid friend–enemy codings to evaluate social phenomena, and where perceptual volatility around such issues is correspondingly high.

Within this broad social context of seemingly ever-worsening hair-trigger sensitivity, the psychological trigger mechanisms that steer public sentiment may operate as the decisive causal bridge between organisational action and adverse outcomes. Two psychological dynamics seem especially important. First, identity threat detection: individuals are highly attuned to signals that appear to affirm or undermine the values and identities with which they are affiliated, and even weak cues can be experienced as challenges requiring response. Second, partisan sorting: once an issue is perceived as culture war coded, people rapidly classify actors, institutions, and behaviours into aligned or opposed camps, simplifying complex realities into binary moral evaluations. On the grand scalem, this produces the factional bipolarisations between elites and non-elites we see today. Once ‘triggered’ into existence via these powerful psychological dynamics to become important social forces, grievance-based perceptions of organisations as enemy culture war belligerents can quickly propagate through social networks, producing reputational conflict, internal and/or external stakeholder polarisation, consumer backlash, or indeed any combination thereof. Once these social forces are released, it is impossible to put them ‘back in the bottle’ as it were, and their effects may be profound.

Operational Pathways form where left-liberal initiatives within organisations lead more directly to failures or losses. Obvious examples are when organisations make poor trade-offs between hiring for diversity and for talent – or when they become wilfully blind to national loyalty problems that compromise security. Such Operational Pathways can produce virtue-to-value collapse, even in the absence Main Trigger Pathways. Over time, though, both will often merge and flow together along Operational Complications Pathways, as initial failures or losses propagate into broader organisational difficulties amidst altered, and often more hostile, perceptions of the organisation.

When Operational Pathways form, what generally happens is that unanticipated complications arise under the radar, leading to technical failures, inefficiencies, or other forms of loss. These failures can arise in virtually any domain of organisational activity and need not be politically salient at the outset. However, psychological trigger mechanisms will tend to re-enter the causal chain at a later stage: once failures become visible, they are retrospectively politicised and drawn into culture war narratives. What began as a technical or managerial issue is then reframed through culture war friend-enemy scanning processes.

A further layer of complexity arises through reflexivity. As organisations respond to criticism, those responses themselves become new inputs for perception, interpretation, and triggering. In highly networked and reactive information environments, this can intensify feedback loops, amplifying controversy and sustaining social media firestorms. Along these often highly complex cumulative loss pathways, the defining dynamic is escalation. Triggering issues are amplified through political contestation, allowing localised problems to expand beyond their point of origin and assume broader organisational significance. Crucially, these effects converge on organisational value. Early impacts - on brand perception, internal cohesion, quality, safety, security, decision-making, stakeholder trust, etc - may at first appear discrete, intangible, or insufficiently material when taken in isolation. Yet when considered collectively, more scope may emerge for judging the issues as severe and warranting strong intervention. Organisational value may therefore serve as the key integrating concept, enabling dispersed effects to be understood in the round and with levels of materiality that resist their dismissal.

The overall pattern, as defines the GWGB risk category, is thus one of cumulative virtue-to-value collapse: a domino effect in which pressures across multiple organisational dimensions reinforce one another. What begins as a contained issue can propagate into a broader erosion of organisational capacity, performance, and resilience, particularly as internal interdependencies transmit disruptions across functions and domains. Because these effects cut across areas that are typically measured and managed separately, no single metric or function can fully capture their impact.

A holistic perspective based on organisational value is therefore required. This requires cross-cutting risk approaches dedicated to tracing how underlying dynamics may interact and accumulate, ideally before their cascades through the functions produce significant loss of organisational value. Only via combinations of retrospective and forward-looking analysis of these interactions - and their convergence on organisational value - can the full spectrum of consequences, both measurable and systemic, be properly understood and addressed.

The are now four remaining sections within this guidance. The first three contain tentative proposals for tackling GWGB risk via technical risk management in organisations. The first of these sections proposes a six-subcategory solution for GWGB risk, based on six causal pathways of virtue-to-value collapse. The following section then proposes illustrative precautionary and remedial sets of controls for each of the six risk pathways. The last of the three technical sections then illustrates how a holistic management overview of the problem may be achieved via early warning analysis that is sensitive to operational complications problems where the risks escalate along multiple pathways. The general conclusion then reverts to theory, showing how GWGB meta risk translates directly into manageable risk for organisations. The purpose of this brief exercise is to offer some final thoughts on how to detect GWGB risk while it is still incubating within organisations – and on what can make it extremely difficult to spot.

GWGB Risk Sub-Categories

The table below sets out my six proposed sub-categories. For each it asserts: (i) an exposure, (ii) a causal pathway to organisational failure or loss which qualifies the risk for technical risk management attention (and which maps to commonplace critical concerns about ‘woke’ organisations), and (iii) prominent US and UK examples from recent years. Some discussion of each sub-category then follows. For each sub-category, discussion of one US example and one UK example provides some further illustration. These illustrations are intentionally very brief. They call attention to episodes in the histories of organisations which are by their nature highly controversial and where claims about events and their impacts are widely contested. The intention is not to give a definitive verdict on these matters, but rather to call the reader’s attention to particular domains of GWGB risk to clarify that they are real and that they warrant being taken very seriously within technical risk management.

1. Consumer Demand Exposure

Consumer demand exposure arises when a company’s politically or culturally charged marketing decisions provoke a backlash among consumers that directly affects purchasing behaviour. Retail sales in consumer markets respond quickly to shifts in sentiment, making this one of the most immediate and measurable GWGB risk exposures. Controversies that polarise public opinion can trigger boycotts, social-media campaigns, and rapid shifts in purchasing patterns. Even short-term demand shocks can significantly disrupt market share, inventory management, and distributor relationships, particularly for brands with long-standing dominance in highly competitive sectors.

United States Example - Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney Campaign (2023)

In April 2023, Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a promotional campaign celebrating her “365 Days of Girlhood.” The partnership quickly became the focus of intense media commentary and online discussion. Conservative commentators and social-media users called for boycotts of Bud Light.

Retail-tracking data indicated Bud Light sales declined by 20–25% year-on-year in the weeks following the campaign. By mid-2023, Bud Light lost its long-standing position as the best-selling beer in the U.S., overtaken by Modelo Especial. Parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev experienced a temporary market capitalisation reduction of approximately $15–20 billion. The episode demonstrates how a high-profile marketing decision can trigger measurable demand shocks across multiple channels.

United Kingdom Example - Greggs Pride Campaign Controversies (2019–2023)

Between 2019 and 2023, Greggs periodically launched Pride-themed products and LGBT-related marketing campaigns, including limited-edition items and partnerships linked to Pride events. Some campaigns attracted criticism from conservative commentators and online activists, who accused the company of using political or identity-based messaging in place of neutral consumer branding.

The backlash was concentrated mainly on social media and boycott campaigns, where critics encouraged customers to avoid Greggs stores or switch to competitors. Although the company did not report a major long-term decline in revenues, the controversy created short-term reputational volatility and exposed the brand to consumer polarisation - a growing commercial risk for mass-market retailers operating across politically diverse customer bases.

The commercial issue was less about immediate financial damage and more about demand sensitivity. Consumer-facing businesses rely heavily on broad brand appeal and repeat purchasing behaviour, and politically charged marketing can increase the risk that parts of the customer base disengage from the brand. Even limited reductions in footfall, customer loyalty, or social sentiment can affect sales momentum, particularly in highly competitive, low-margin retail sectors such as food-to-go. The Greggs case therefore illustrates how values-based corporate messaging can create measurable consumer-demand risk when customers perceive a company as taking sides in contested cultural or political debates.

2. Brand Positioning Exposure

Brand positioning exposure occurs when corporate messaging or political engagement reshapes how consumers interpret a brand’s identity or purpose. Companies traditionally rely on broad cultural appeal; when they appear to adopt partisan positions, segments of their audience may perceive the brand as aligned with a particular ideology. Such exposure can alter customer loyalty, provoke political scrutiny, or attract activist attention.

Unlike short-term revenue shocks, these effects often unfold more gradually, as consumers reassess their emotional or cultural connection to the brand. Highly symbolic or lifestyle-oriented brands are especially sensitive to this form of risk.

United States Example - The Walt Disney Company and the Parental Rights in Education Act Dispute (2022–2024)

In March 2022, The Walt Disney Company publicly criticised Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, after internal employee pressure contributed to the company taking a public position. In response, Florida lawmakers moved to restructure the Reedy Creek Improvement District, raising uncertainty over Disney’s long-standing self-governing arrangements in its Orlando operations. While the dispute created regulatory and political uncertainty, the main issue arising for Disney was that its brand became more explicitly associated with a contested political issue. For a mass-market entertainment company that depends on broad family appeal, this increased the risk of customer polarisation and weaker brand neutrality.

During 2022, Disney’s share price fell sharply alongside broader market pressures, while the company also faced consumer criticism and boycott calls from some groups. The episode highlighted how shifts in brand perception toward a more politicised position can increase volatility in demand expectations and investor sentiment, particularly for companies reliant on cross-demographic consumer trust.

United Kingdom Example - National Trust Historical Interpretation Debate (2020–2023)

Starting in 2020, the National Trust published research connecting historic properties to Britain’s imperial and slave-trade history. The organisation also expanded diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at heritage sites.

These changes triggered sustained political controversy and media attention through 2021–2023. Critics accused the Trust of politicising national heritage, while supporters defended the scholarly basis of the research. Membership disputes and parliamentary scrutiny highlighted how ideological positioning can create long-term brand exposure risks in cultural heritage institutions perceived as distancing themselves from cultural heritage, and from the demographic groups that are most likely to venerate it.

3. Workforce Stability Exposure

Workforce stability exposure arises when ideological or political conflicts within an organisation disrupt employee cohesion, morale, or leadership authority. Political and social issues that polarise employees can provoke activism, resignations, internal disputes, and operational disruption. ‘Quiet quitting’ in all its forms can then escalate – which by its nature can be hard to spot, especially when still in its early stages. Companies reliant on specialised staff or knowledge-intensive operations are particularly vulnerable.

These exposures sometimes arise when management encourages or restricts political expression in ways that conflict with employee expectations, potentially triggering sudden workforce departures or long-term morale issues.

United States Example - Basecamp Internal Activism Crisis (2021)

In April 2021, Basecamp implemented a policy banning political discussions on internal communication channels. This decision followed months of debate regarding social justice issues among staff.

Within weeks, roughly one-third of employees accepted voluntary buyouts and left, including several senior developers and designers. The departures disrupted operations and necessitated rapid recruitment and restructuring, illustrating the operational risks of internal ideological disputes.

United Kingdom Example - BBC Cultural and Diversity Debates (2020–2023)

From 2020 to 2023, the BBC expanded diversity and inclusion initiatives across management and editorial structures. Public and internal debates about editorial balance and organisational culture periodically became visible in media reporting.

The result was a prolonged period of reputational scrutiny, internal friction, and staff dissatisfaction, illustrating how the incorporation of highly contested ideological issues into governance and organisational culture can generate instability within large institutions, particularly where employees perceive tensions between institutional values, professional identity, and freedom of expression.

4. Capital Access Exposure

Capital access exposure arises when a company’s political or ideological positioning influences investors, shareholders, or institutional funders. In highly politicised contexts, firms may face divestment, withdrawal of capital, or redirected investment flows if stakeholders perceive that political signalling is prioritised over commercial performance.

Such exposure demonstrates how politically charged corporate behaviour can translate into tangible financial consequences, even when the company remains fundamentally profitable.

United States Example - BlackRock ESG Investment Backlash (2022–2024)

Starting in 2022, BlackRock faced growing political backlash from several U.S. state governments over its support for ESG investing and climate-related stewardship policies. Republican-led states, including Texas and Florida, argued that BlackRock was using its market influence to advance political objectives - particularly on climate change - at the expense of maximising investment returns for pension beneficiaries

The criticism translated into concrete financial action. Texas placed BlackRock on a list of financial firms accused of boycotting fossil fuel companies under state anti-ESG legislation, while Florida announced the withdrawal of roughly $2 billion in state-managed assets from BlackRock mandates. Other states and public pension systems also reviewed or reduced relationships with ESG-associated managers.

The main financial issue arising for BlackRock was pressure on assets under management, fee income, and client growth. Asset managers depend heavily on retaining large institutional mandates, and politically controversial stewardship positions increase the risk that public-sector investors may reallocate funds to competitors perceived as more politically neutral.

United Kingdom Example - Legal & General Investment Management ESG Investment Criticism (2021–2023)

From 2021–2023, Legal & General Investment Management expanded its climate and ESG policies by putting greater pressure on companies to adopt net-zero plans and improve environmental reporting. This included voting against company directors and removing some companies from investment portfolios if they failed to meet climate expectations. The strategy attracted criticism from politicians, industry groups, and some investors who argued that Legal & General was moving beyond its core responsibility of maximising financial returns. Opponents claimed the firm was allowing political and social objectives to influence investment decisions, particularly through restrictions on exposure to traditional energy and industrial sectors.

The commercial risk was not that ESG policies directly caused a funding crisis, but that they created reputational and client-retention problems. As anti-ESG sentiment grew, especially in parts of the US market, large asset managers associated with activist ESG strategies faced increased political scrutiny and the risk of client withdrawals. For Legal & General, this contributed to broader pressure on assets under management, profitability, and investor confidence. The case therefore illustrates how strongly politicised corporate activism can create financial and capital-market risks for investment firms when clients or investors believe ideological positioning is taking precedence over commercial performance.

5. Corporate Reputation & Governance Exposure

Corporate reputation and governance exposure arises when politically sensitive actions undermine both public trust and internal workforce trust in leadership or institutional credibility. Media coverage, political scrutiny, and regulatory attention can amplify reputational effects, often resulting in executive resignations, internal investigations, or structural reforms.

The key risk is perceived mismanagement of politically sensitive issues, which may damage credibility even when the underlying action is commercially neutral.

Legal risks may also be positioned under this category heading. Although neither of the two GWGB illustrations provided below deal with situations where organisations overstep the boundaries of law and civil liberty through their woke initiatives or assumptions, Daniel J. ShenSmith’s BlackBeltBarrister YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/@BlackBeltBarrister - is well worth visiting for regular UK examples of this.

US Example – The Boeing Culture and Safety Controversy (2019-2025)

In aerospace manufacturing, the cultivation of trust in the manufacturer’s commitment to safety matters enormously. Between 2019 and 2025, Boeing faced growing criticism over internal culture and management practices following the 737 MAX passenger aircraft crisis and later manufacturing failures. Critics argued that the company had moved away from its traditional engineering-led culture toward a more managerial and compliance-focused approach, with increasing emphasis on DEI initiatives, corporate messaging, HR structures, and production targets. Some commentators claimed that Boeing’s leadership had become overly focused on image management and internal culture programmes at the expense of engineering discipline, technical excellence, and safety oversight.

The controversy was linked to reports of low workforce morale, weakened trust between management and technical staff, and employee reluctance to raise safety concerns. Investigations and whistleblower testimony described a culture in which some engineers and inspectors felt disengaged or ignored, contributing to concerns about quality control and operational safety. Critics increasingly cited Boeing as a case in which perceived ideological and managerial drift - including an expanded focus on DEI and corporate social priorities - was seen as contributing to weakened institutional cohesion, operational reliability, and organisational performance.

United Kingdom Example — NatWest Group / Coutts Debanking Controversy (2023)

In July 2023, the leader of the Reform Party Nigel Farage disclosed that his accounts at Coutts had been closed. Internal documents suggested reputational concerns were partly tied to his political views. The controversy escalated into a major governance and reputational crisis, culminating in CEO Alison Rose resigning. Share price volatility and regulatory scrutiny highlighted the consequences of politically sensitive decisions for corporate governance.

Of all the examples given in this document, this is perhaps the most worrying and the most future facing, as it points toward what may become ever more common corporate practice in future years. As left-liberal governments continue to lose social trust and vote share amidst growing populist surges, the risk is that they will resort to ever more draconian legal frameworks of opinion suppression which operate by denying the basic digital needs of conservative and nationalist dissidents. The Farage debanking episode illustrates something truly chilling: corporate appetite for taking this path, despite the political views in question being passionately held by many millions of people.

6. Strategic Infrastructure and National Loyalty Exposure

Strategic infrastructure and national loyalty exposure arises especially when multinational corporations in sensitive sectors underestimate national-security obligations or the importance of employee loyalty to host-country interests. Companies that emphasise global integration, ideological openness, or diversity may inadvertently create vulnerabilities in technology, supply chains, or data governance.

Critics argue that such exposures occur in sectors where access to sensitive technologies or critical infrastructure intersects with national-security priorities. These risks may trigger regulatory investigations, legislative action, or diplomatic pressure when corporations are perceived as insufficiently attentive to national loyalty considerations.

United States Example - Twitter (Pre-Musk) Security Controversy (c. 2018–2022)

During the late pre-Musk period, Twitter faced repeated criticism that its internal culture and governance structures had created significant operational and security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that a highly politicised internal environment - characterised by activist employee culture, contentious moderation debates, and ideological factionalism - weakened managerial discipline and institutional cohesion. Concerns intensified after several high-profile incidents, including the 2020 account-hacking breach affecting major political and corporate figures, allegations from former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko regarding weak internal controls, and accusations that excessive internal access privileges created insider-risk vulnerabilities.

The controversy mattered because Twitter’s credibility depended heavily on trust, platform integrity, and secure information governance. The security disputes damaged confidence among regulators, advertisers, and political stakeholders, while also exposing the company to legal scrutiny and reputational harm. Critics increasingly portrayed Twitter as an example of a major technology platform whose internal ideological conflicts and governance instability had undermined operational resilience and weakened institutional trust in the company’s ability to manage sensitive digital infrastructure responsibly.

United Kingdom Example – UK University ties with China (2010s-onward)

Over roughly the last decade, UK universities have significantly expanded research partnerships and recruitment pipelines with China, particularly in STEM fields such as AI, aerospace engineering, advanced materials, and quantum technologies. These links were often driven by financial incentives (notably high-fee Chinese postgraduate enrolments) and a longstanding academic culture of open collaboration. However, security concerns began to intensify as it became clearer that some collaborative research sat in dual use domains where civilian applications overlap with military capability. By the early 2020s, government and intelligence briefings increasingly warned that universities had underestimated the ease with which open research environments - shared labs, co-authorship, visiting scholars, and IP transfer through partnerships - could enable both economic espionage and access to strategically sensitive knowledge.

From around 2020 to 2024, scrutiny sharpened further, with parliamentary committees, media investigations, and security agencies highlighting cases where UK institutions had partnerships involving Chinese universities or institutes linked to defence-adjacent ecosystems. MI5 and other bodies repeatedly emphasised that academic exchange could be exploited for technology transfer, particularly in fields relevant to defence, cyber capability, and advanced computing. By the mid-2020s, the policy debate had shifted toward whether UK universities had systematically underestimated the risks of dependency on Chinese student income and collaborative research funding, leading to inconsistent implementation of research security measures such as export controls awareness, vetting of collaborators, and protection of sensitive datasets. The broad timeline thus reflects a gradual transition of attitudes towards heightened security awareness, which may have happened far sooner had universities not been steeped in post-national ideology, culture and values.

Risk Controls

Now here are illustrative risk controls that can be applied for each of the six causal pathways. Preventative controls are planned in advance for implementation before the risk happens. Responsive controls are planned in advance for implementation after the risk happens. This is technical risk management at its simplest, when viewed as a forward planning activity. Wrapping identified risks in planned control actions, both preventative and responsive, is commonly referred to as the ‘bow tie method’.

1. Consumer Demand Exposure

Ex-Ante (Preventive)

• Political Sensitivity Screening: Pre-launch review of marketing campaigns and partnerships to identify content that could trigger politically or culturally motivated consumer backlash. Involves cross-functional teams evaluating imagery, slogans, and influencer collaborations for potential reputational impact.

• Consumer Sentiment Testing: Early-stage testing with focus groups or online panels representing different demographic and ideological segments to gauge potential reactions to campaigns and adjust messaging accordingly.

Ex-Post (Responsive)

• Brand Repositioning Measures: Adjusting advertising or messaging after backlash to refocus on core product attributes, heritage, or quality, helping redirect consumer attention away from political debate.

• Channel Support Programs: Temporary measures such as promotional discounts, inventory support, or marketing subsidies to stabilise distribution partners and retailers affected by sudden declines in demand.

2. Brand Positioning Exposure

Ex-Ante (Preventive)

• Corporate Neutrality Guidelines: Internal policies specifying which political or social issues the company can engage with publicly, limiting messaging to operationally relevant topics to protect brand neutrality.

• Stakeholder Impact Analysis: Structured assessment of how different groups (consumers, regulators, investors, advocacy organisations) may respond to proposed corporate statements or campaigns.

Ex-Post (Responsive)

• Brand Narrative Rebalancing: Adjusting public communications to emphasise mission, neutrality, innovation, non-discriminatory customer service, and community engagement rather than polarising ideological positions.

• Stakeholder Engagement: Consultation and dialogue with external stakeholders representing diverse viewpoints to mitigate reputational harm and rebuild trust.

3. Workforce Stability Exposure

Ex-Ante (Preventive)

• Workplace Expression Policies: Clear rules for internal political and social discussions, balancing freedom of expression with professional decorum to prevent internal conflicts from escalating.

• Culture Mediation Channels: Established mechanisms for early resolution of ideological or cultural disputes, including confidential reporting channels or facilitated dialogue sessions.

Ex-Post (Responsive)

• Retention Initiatives: Targeted measures such as retention bonuses, accelerated recruitment, or temporary team restructuring to stabilise operations after workforce disruptions.

• Leadership Reset Actions: Cultural reset programs, management restructuring, or transparent communication initiatives to rebuild employee confidence and operational cohesion.

4. Capital Access Exposure

Ex-Ante (Preventive)

• Investment Strategy Transparency: Clearly communicate ESG or socially oriented investment policies to investors and regulators to reduce misinterpretation or political backlash.

• Investor Stakeholder Mapping: Proactively identify investors and public capital providers sensitive to political messaging and align engagement strategies accordingly.

Ex-Post (Responsive)

• Investor Reassurance Briefings: Conduct structured communications to clarify corporate strategy, mitigate investor concerns, and restore confidence after political or ideological controversies.

• Capital Source Diversification: Reduce exposure to capital withdrawal by broadening the investor base and accessing alternative funding sources.

5. Corporate Reputation & Governance Exposure

Ex-Ante (Preventive)

• Governance Risk Reviews: Regular assessments of leadership decisions and organisational practices for potential political or cultural vulnerabilities, aiming to prevent reputational crises.

• Crisis Communication Plans: Pre-established protocols and templates for responding to politically sensitive controversies to ensure coordinated, timely, and consistent messaging.

Ex-Post (Responsive)

• Independent Investigations: Deploy third-party reviews of allegations or internal disputes to demonstrate accountability and restore stakeholder confidence.

• Leadership Accountability: Transparent corrective actions, including management changes or formal public statements, to reaffirm governance integrity after a reputational crisis.

6. Strategic Infrastructure & National Loyalty Exposure

Ex-Ante (Preventive)

• Security Compliance Frameworks: Implementation of internal policies, vetting procedures, and operational safeguards to ensure employees and contractors in sensitive roles comply with national security requirements.

• Sensitive Role Vetting: Background checks, nationality and national loyalty considerations, and operational restrictions for roles involving strategic infrastructure, sensitive technology, or national-security-relevant data.

Ex-Post (Responsive)

• Incident Containment Protocols: Rapid response measures to limit exposure after breaches, including operational lockdowns, data segregation, and controlled communication. Intensive liaison with Government Security and Police Services.

• Structural Governance Reforms: Reorganisation of corporate structures, data access rules, or operational processes to restore alignment with national security expectations after an incident.

Early Warning Analysis

While GWGB risks may initially manifest within in a single domain, experience seems to show that the consequences rarely remain isolated. Operational complications pathways will tend to involve co-escalation of reputational problems across both internal and external stakeholder constituencies, alongside growing potential for failure and loss across a mounting number of areas of operation.

Given this interconnectedness, effective risk management cannot be limited to a single sub- category of GWGB risk. Corporations need holistic frameworks that integrate comprehensive sets of both ex-ante preventive measures and ex-post responsive measures, to pre-empt, contain and remediate incidents. Only by considering all six exposure categories in the round can organisations anticipate potential spillover effects and design a coherent approach that mitigates both direct losses and indirect systemic impacts.

This can be achieved by routinising early warning analysis, and more particularly by maintaining Sentinel Reports as living documents. Sentinel reports can be connected to threat-level warning systems that are operated by expert judgment panels, so that the seriousness of the situation automatically controls how detailed the reports are and how often they are produced. When the threat level is low, reports are generated less often and focus on general background monitoring and normal activity. As the threat level increases, the system begins producing reports more frequently, includes more detailed analysis, and combines information from more sources to spot the risks earlier. At the highest threat levels, sentinel reports may be updated almost in real time, helping decision-makers respond quickly to fast-changing or emerging dangers.

Here are some suggestions for structuring these reports.

Clarification of Purpose

The Sentinel Report serves as a continuously updated tool to monitor, evaluate, and communicate the potential for GWGB risk to emerge across all six exposure categories. It integrates intelligence from internal operations, market signals, social sentiment, regulatory developments, and geopolitical factors to support proactive decision-making.

Ownership and Accountability

The Sentinel Report is issued as a governed analytical product which scans both the internal and external context of the organisation for GWGB threat, and which therefore requires carefully planned and co-ordinated scanning activity to ensure thoroughness. It requires clear assignment of ownership and accountability within the organisation, both for those who contribute to and maintain the report, and for governance oversight. An appropriate expert panel should be designated to maintain and review the associated threat level warning system, ensuring consistent standards for assessment and escalation. The positions of both the report itself and the associated expert panel within the organisation’s committee and decision-making structure should be formally defined, with committee terms of reference and role descriptions amended as necessary.

Heterodox political representation leading to respectful challenge should be encouraged, both among those who contribute to and maintain the report and among those who sit on the expert panel - to better ensure the risks are addressed with due seriousness.

Report Structure

1. Executive Summary:

   • Concise snapshot of the current overall risk level.

   • Key incidents, trends, or emerging controversies that could trigger multi-category spillovers.

2. Exposure Category Updates:

   • Consumer Demand Exposure: Monitor sales trends, social-media sentiment, and boycott activity.

   • Brand Positioning Exposure: Track public statements, advertising campaigns, and stakeholder perception.

   • Workforce Stability Exposure: Record internal disputes, resignations, walkouts, and morale indicators.

   • Capital Access Exposure: Track investor communications, divestments, pension fund actions, and market commentary.

   • Corporate Reputation & Governance Exposure: Note regulatory scrutiny, media coverage, leadership challenges, and public credibility.

   • Strategic Infrastructure & National Loyalty Exposure: Monitor data security incidents, workforce vetting issues, and technology/IP vulnerabilities.

3. Emerging Risk Indicators:

   • Identify early signs of escalation (e.g., viral social media backlash, employee petitions, activist investor pressure, government inquiries).

4. Recommended Actions / Resource Allocation:

   • Suggest proportionate ex-ante and ex-post interventions depending on the risk level.

5. Risk Escalation History:

   • Maintain a record of past alerts, interventions, and outcomes for trend analysis and institutional memory.

Resource Intensity and Warning Levels

A tiered warning system allows the organisation to scale monitoring, analysis, and response effort according to the perceived severity of risk. Here’s a proposed four-level indicator system:

1. Green – Low Risk

   • Minor social or political signals detected; no significant impact yet.

   • Sentinel Activity: Monthly report update, light monitoring of media, social sentiment, and internal metrics.

2. Yellow – Moderate Risk

   • Early signs of consumer or stakeholder concern; isolated incidents reported.

   • Sentinel Activity: Bi-weekly monitoring, targeted internal intelligence gathering, preliminary engagement with key stakeholders.

3. Orange – Elevated Risk

   • Clear signals of potential multi-category impact; negative trends observable in at least one category.

   • Sentinel Activity: Weekly report updates, cross-functional review meetings, initial mitigation measures implemented, investor or regulator briefings as required.

4. Red - High Risk / Crisis Level

   • Active backlash or incident affecting multiple exposure categories; high likelihood of financial or reputational loss.

   • Sentinel Activity: Daily monitoring, executive-level briefings, full mobilisation of crisis management resources, rapid ex-post interventions, and stakeholder communications.

Optional: A five-level system could insert a ‘Light Yellow - Early Signal’ between Green and Yellow to capture very preliminary indicators without over-committing resources.

Maintenance Approach

The Sentinel Report should be a living document:

• Entries are updated automatically where possible (e.g., social sentiment dashboards, sales monitoring, media clipping feeds).

• Risk analysts provide contextual interpretation and escalation recommendations.

Resource intensity should be directly proportional to the warning level, ensuring efficient allocation of monitoring and response capacity. Historical data and trend analysis should be retained to refine predictive indicators over time.

Conclusion

It seems fitting that this guidance should now end on a realist note, with final comments on how GWGB risk exposes some of the most difficult and painful issues which contemporary society must now confront. The purpose of this brief exercise is twofold. First, I offer a novel, structured view of how GWGB meta risk translates directly into risk exposures for organisations, so that those involved in its management may have a more thematically focused understanding of what it fundamentally is and what causes it. Second, I augment my earlier arguments about why many would prefer to ignore the problem altogether, to further emphasise that addressing it successfully within organisational risk management may often prove extremely challenging. I do so by elaborating my more thematically focused view to explain why many are likely to possess deep psychological dispositions for denying the existence of GWGB risk in organisations.

On the first of these two points, I would suggest that it is useful to understand GWGB risk on both meta and organisational levels as Tower of Babel risk. In other words, it is risk that emanates from combined real-world forces of globalisation and ideologies of globalism which break down national barriers and, in so doing, produce a hubristic denial of human nature’s deep attachment to tribal principles.

Further essential context we should perhaps bear in mind at all times is how society is transforming today under the weight of these influences – and in particular how relentless mass immigration is producing rapid ethnic-demographic transformation across European and European Diaspora Societies.

Robert Putnam’s now classic (2007) paper E Pluribus Unum can be read as an evidence-based, thematically focused discussion of the meta level GWGB risk which these changes have unleashed. It directly examines how increased ethnic diversity - particularly in the short to medium term - affects social cohesion. His core empirical claims are often summarised around declines in trust and civic engagement, alongside a “hunkering down” effect which he brings into his arguments to try to represent these changes as transitional and temporary - and which aligns to the value orientation expressed by his paper’s title (‘E Pluribus Unum’ means ‘Out of the Many, One’) .

Core impacts of rapid ethnic diversification identified by Putnam are:

1. Decline in generalised trust
   People in more diverse communities tend to trust others less - both those from other groups and their own group.

2. Reduced social capital / civic engagement
   Lower participation in community activities, volunteering, and collective efforts.

3. “Hunkering down” effect
   Individuals withdraw socially - less interaction overall, not just across groups.

4. Weaker sense of shared identity
   A reduced feeling of “we-ness” or common purpose.

5. Short-term vs long-term distinction
   Putnam explicitly argued these are short-term effects, and that over the long run, societies can and do build new, more inclusive identities.

One we appreciate that this list can be read as a five-point view of meta level GWGB risk, utilising it as a set of five insights for achieving a focused understanding GWGB risk pathways within organisations becomes quite straightforward. These insights might be summarised as follows:

1. Reduced interpersonal trust → Internal suspicion
   Employees may become more cautious in communication, worrying about saying the wrong thing or being judged through an ideological lens.
   → Result: less open dialogue, more guarded interactions.

2. Lower informal collaboration → Decline in discretionary effort
   When people feel tension around norms or language, they may disengage from optional collaboration (mentoring, brainstorming, social initiatives).
   → Result: weaker informal networks that often drive innovation.

3. “Hunkering down” → Professional withdrawal
   Staff may stick strictly to their roles, quietly quitting from broader participation in company culture or discussion.
   → Result: reduced team cohesion, fewer spontaneous contributions.

4. Fragmented identity → Loss of shared mission clarity
   If corporate identity becomes tied to contested values rather than widely shared goals, employees may feel less unified.
   → Result: weaker alignment around purpose and priorities.

5. Short-term disruption vs long-term adaptation
   Just as Putnam emphasised, these effects are not necessarily permanent. Organisations can develop clearer, inclusive norms, build shared language and goals and integrate differing perspectives into a stable culture.
   → Result: potential for a stronger, more adaptive corporate identity over time.

The fifth insight requires especially careful critical reflection to appreciate its full relevance and the value it offers. Putnam’s argument that societies eventually adapt and rebuild solidarity was comparatively under-evidenced within E Pluribus Unum itself and arguably has the character of a conciliatory normative or political addendum rather than a central demonstrated finding. Putnam is well known to have delayed publication of the study for several years out of concern that its findings might be politically weaponised by ethnic nationalists. Hence many readers regard the research as far more concerned with the short to medium term impacts identified in points one to four above. While it would be unfair to dismiss Putnam’s long-run integration thesis as dishonest or merely cosmetic, it nevertheless introduces a contestable normative element that should be treated cautiously.

The principal insight we may therefore derive from Putnam’s fifth point is that while long term adaptation is far from guaranteed, many actors within organisations will tend to interpret emerging cohesion risks as transitional and self-correcting. Putnam himself, despite being a highly experienced social scientist attentive to the distinction between descriptive and normative claims, appears to have struggled with this tension. It is therefore unsurprising that many within liberal-progressive organisational cultures may likewise prove inclined to discount GWGB-related risks as temporary bumps in the road. A related consideration is that while liberal-progressive frameworks often operate on long-term aspirational assumptions, many organisations operate on the time horizon of next month’s earnings forecasts. They cannot assume problems are going to disappear – and they certainly cannot afford to make utopian assumptions.

Yet there may also be deeper reasons why such risks are frequently underestimated. It seems that Putnam may have significantly underestimated one of the most important impacts of diversity upon communities: white flight. His analysis largely framed diversity’s effects as a generalised ‘hunkering down’ decline in trust across all ethnic-demographic groups, thereby placing less emphasis on the specific tendency of many white populations to exit changing neighbourhoods, schools, and institutions through relocation, selective participation, or indeed institutional withdrawal. Critics have argued that such ethnic-demographic sorting can profoundly intensify segregation, weaken shared institutions, and amplify all the problems Putnam described.

A white-flight-adjusted understanding of GWGB meta risk suggests that white flight patterns historically observed at the community level may also emerge within organisations. Just as white flight describes the tendency of many white or middle-class residents to withdraw from changing neighbourhoods, schools, and civic institutions through relocation or selective disengagement, similar dynamics may emerge within organisations as employees quietly disengage, reduce organisational citizenship behaviour, self-segregate socially, or ultimately exit organisations they perceive as culturally or ideologically misaligned with their personal concerns about rapid social change. At broad institutional level this phenomenon has been very widely examined under headings including institutional flight, elite exit, dissident exit, cultural withdrawal, organisational disengagement, political sorting, parallel institutions, middle-class flight, reduced organisational citizenship behaviour, and quiet quitting. These concepts can all largely be understood as variations of Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) conceptual framework of choosing “exit” over “voice,” whereby individuals increasingly withdraw from institutions rather than attempt to reform them from within. They also align neatly with David Betz’ thesis that contemporary liberal elite versus conservative non-elite factional polarisation may deteriorate into civil war for reasons that have substantively to do with the status-related phenomenon of ‘ethnic downgrading’ – that being a widely recognised precursor to civil war within the civil war literature. It seems extremely unwise to neglect these dynamics when attuning to GWGB risk dynamics within organisations.

And yet, viewed in this light, white flight may be especially difficult to recognise within organisations that grow diverse and insist upon diversity as a main pillar of organisational ethics. There is evidence that politically liberal whites can engage in forms of residential and institutional sorting that are similar to those historically associated with white flight, despite expressing more pro-diversity attitudes in principle. Research in urban sociology, school choice, and political geography has repeatedly found that many affluent liberal whites prefer diversity in the abstract while nevertheless selecting neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, and social environments that preserve high levels of cultural comfort, social trust, educational advantage, and ethnic homogeneity. In practice, this can generate patterns of exit, avoidance, and self-segregation resembling classical white flight, albeit articulated through different moral or ideological vocabularies. And there we have the root of the problem: white-flight-related disengagement within organisations may be systematically underestimated precisely because many of the actors most rhetorically committed to diversity may themselves participate, often tacitly and selectively, in patterns of quiet organisational exit - the true causes of which may be too painful for them to confront.

I offer that concluding point not as political invective against liberal progressives, but to underscore - in the prophetic spirit of Jules Verne or Jonathan Swift, who were both deeply attuned to frailties and contradictions of human nature - that modernity is reawakening primal psychological forces that liberal society neither understands nor controls. Humility before that reality is a prerequisite to seeing GWGB risks with eyes wide open.

References

Association of Insurance and Risk Managers (AIRMIC), Institute of Risk Management (IRM) and ALARM (2002) A risk management standard. London: AIRMIC, IRM and ALARM.

AIRMIC (2011) Roads to ruin: a study of major risk events – their origins, impact and implications. London: AIRMIC.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.

Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hirschman, A.O. (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marshall, A.J. (2025) Re-Reading Pareto on Elite Power and Societal Bipolarisation: A Critical Perspective on Metapolitics and Democracy. Abingdon: Routledge.

Putnam, R.D. (2007) ‘E pluribus unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30(2), pp. 137–174.

Sowell, T. (1993) Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

This oil‑on‑canvas painting by Italian Baroque artist Annibale Carracci is from around 1596. It depicts Hercules at a crossroads, flanked by two women representing moral choice. Pegasus in the top left corner symbolises divine reward for choosing well.

Introduction

This essay identifies what I describe as a form of mass political psychopathology - one that I regard as by far the most consequential wildcard in contemporary political and cultural life. In my 2025 book, Re-reading Pareto on Elite Power: a critical perspective on metapolitics and democracy, I conceptualised civic nationalism as a political manifestation of cognitive dissonance. Here I extend that argument by introducing the term ‘the Great Discomfort’ as a more precise and analytically useful term for the condition in question.

The phenomenon itself is widely sensed. We see it all the time in the ideological hesitations, rhetorical overcompensations, and political paralyses of civic nationalist politicians, journalists and other commentators who toe that ideological line, yet it remains greatly under-theorised. My aim in what follows is to clarify its underlying psychological structure and far-reaching political implications.

The arguments advanced here are explicitly theoretical. They construct a set of plausible dynamics - particularly forms of cognitive dissonance and linked ego defence strategies – that seem to very often accompany civic nationalist ideological positioning. The intention is not to psychologise political actors and their ideas reductively, but rather to clarify psychological motives and processes that often operate prominently within complex and context-specific political conduct.

The fundamental nature and historic role of civic nationalism are now widely contested like never before. Some argue that today’s rapidly ascendant party-political expressions of civic nationalism are nationalist in name only. They argue that civic nationalism really boils down to civic statism, and for the liberal state specifically; that is to say, they maintain that civic nationalism for the most part seeks to relocate collective loyalty from the nation as a pre-political community to the liberal state considered as a juridical, administrative and moral order. On this view, civic nationalists can only provide containment for rising nationalist passions. And yet many others, citing electoral legitimacy, organisational capacity, and pragmatic ability to translate popular sentiment into concrete legislation, regard civic nationalist parties as opening the only viable institutional channels through which nationalist passions can effect political change in nationalist directions today. Either way, civic nationalism is poised to play a decisive political role in the coming years, one that will fundamentally shape the future.

The modern idea of civic nationalism originates in part from Ernest Renan’s (1882) voluntarist account of the nation as a ‘daily plebiscite’. By that he meant that nationhood arises through continual reaffirmation of shared political will, aligned to shared selective memory (and forgetting), and not through common ethnicity or even language. Hans Kohn (1944) systematised the civic–ethnic nationalist distinction, contrasting Western, individual-rights-based nationalisms with Eastern, cultural forms rooted in folkish and religious collectivisms. This formalised the conceptual divide between civic and ethnic nationalisms along liberal individualist versus conservative collectivist lines, affirming nationalism as something which can lodge anywhere across the liberal-conservative spectrum. Later, Jürgen Habermas (e.g. 1992) reformulated civic nationalism as ‘constitutional patriotism’ which redirects national attachment toward democratic procedures and universalisable norms in pluralist societies. Contemporary theorists such as Yael Tamir (e.g. 1993) have further sought to reconcile national belonging with liberal individual rights and related public culture, thereby consolidating civic nationalism as a normative attempt to align collective identity with liberal constitutional and political (as well as more broadly cultural) order.

These and many similar theories of civic nationalism all detach national belonging from shared ancestry, grounding it instead in voluntary political commitment, equal citizenship, and adherence to common democratic institutions and the rule of law. This de-ethnicising ‘civic turn’ in nationalism has provided the ideological glue of post-war Western nation-states, establishing constitutional frameworks through which increasingly diverse populations could be integrated into shared political communities without assimilation to singular ethnocultural identities. Major political parties across the left–right spectrum have relied on it similarly, both when in government and in opposition, to express their organic commitments to national political life. Civic nationalism has also provided avowedly ‘nationalist’ political parties with ideological centres of gravity that allow them to reconcile nationalist elements in their support bases and programmatic ambitions with pragmatic cooperation with liberal elite institutions - as political parties generally require for growth.

The civic turn has however drawn severe criticism in recent years. Much of the debate has been pushed towards public prominence not by academics but rather by influential online political and cultural commentators, as well as by dissident or borderline-dissident nationalist groups. Their central charge has been that civic nationalism now appears as a normative project that redirects affective energies historically mobilised by ethnic nationalism - rooted significantly, though not exclusively, in ethnic homophily - toward sustaining an increasingly post-national liberal order that erodes the very demographic and cultural conditions from which those nationalist energies once derived political force. In persistently stultifying its own capacity to resist various liberal policies and laws associable with rapid mass immigration especially, they argue, contemporary civic nationalism tends toward a structurally self-undermining, even metaphorically self-lobotomising dynamic.

This critical insight might be further extended as follows: having renounced the strongest of the animating passions that once underwrote national attachment, civic nationalism now seems to be settling into an almost catatonic condition – not so much one that increasingly converts to liberal ideology as one that politically self-immobilises, acquiescing by weakening reflex to increasingly dominant post-nationalist and globalist liberal elite power. Critics from-the-right typically contend that civic nationalism is no longer sufficient to counterbalance these now-dominant trends – as have been steadily weakening the nation state’s ideological foundations for decades now. Stronger foundations are required, they warn, if governments and state institutions are to be redirected by popular will to finally tackle relentless mass immigration and more generally restore viable working settlements within political systems between countervailing conservative and liberal principles – so that society can once more enjoy being at some limited ease with itself as it was decades ago, prior to contemporary political and cultural polarisation.

I believe these criticisms from outside the highly vocal yet fragile constitutional, legal and political civic nationalist commonsense of our age hit the mark powerfully. That is why I decided to write this piece setting civic nationalism’s ongoing self-consumption within a cognitive dissonance frame to examine it more closely as surely one of the most important political-psychological phenomena warranting serious academic study today.

My theory depicting civic nationalism as the Great Discomfort of our age assembles over a theoretical scaffold with three interlocking beams: (i) classic cognitive dissonance theory, (ii) Vilfredo Pareto’s (e.g. 1916/1935) sociological conflict theory of liberal elites versus conservative non-elites, and (iii) David Riesman’s (1950) ‘Lonely Crowd’ analysis of socio-cultural maladaptation of conservatives to liberal societies.

I will now elaborate these foundations in the following section. They situate my claims within reputable academic literatures, lending them more clarity and analytical weight. My choice of Pareto and Reisman may at first glance seem unusual; however, as the next section will show, their theories provide distinctive lenses through which to understand the contemporary civic nationalist mindset and the pressures that shape the political role it plays today.

Theoretical Framework

Cognitive dissonance theory, first formulated by Leon Festinger (1957), describes the psychological tension that arises when individuals hold inconsistent beliefs, attitudes, or behaviours. These aversive states – often characterised as psychological ‘discomfort’ – motivate efforts to restore coherence, typically through rationalisation or selective reinterpretation rather than wholesale revision. Importantly, though, dissonance is not merely a structural inconsistency between cognitions but an affectively charged experience: the intensity of discomfort is amplified when beliefs are passionately held, morally laden, or central to one’s identity. Subsequent refinements to cognitive dissonance theory, particularly Elliot Aronson’s (1969) self-consistency theory, argue that dissonance is especially acute when perceived inconsistencies arise between central aspects of the self-concept. Similarly, Claude Steele’s (1988) self-affirmation theory conceptualises dissonance as threat to self-integrity, especially where perceived moral adequacy or personal competence is at stake – these being self-reflective concerns that typically arise with powerful emotions attached.

In cognitive dissonance theories, as distinct from theories of emotional repression, identity-related beliefs, passions and emotions of various kinds are managed not by excluding them but instead by mobilising them; that is, they energise the interpretive work of the mind to find ways to reconcile them to fixed realities of how people have chosen to live their lives. By contrast, theories of repression, drawing on psychoanalytic traditions associated with Sigmund Freud (e.g. Freud, 1915), construe conflict as resolved through the exclusion of intolerable affect from conscious awareness. Reaction formation goes further, positing not merely concealment but the inversion of impulse, such that prohibited desire reappears in exaggerated or moralised opposition. Dissonance reduction, however, does not depend upon any such burial or reversal of passion. Rather, it typically presupposes its continued accessibility, harnessing it to build and defend coherence. The key contrast between dissonance theory and emotional repression theory is therefore between different regulatory logics: one reorganises belief to preserve coherence (and, in later formulations, the self), while the other defends the self by disavowing or transforming whatever affect threatens it.

Nonetheless, we cannot draw rigid boundaries between these logics. When passions and accompanying beliefs generate discomfort, they may be channelled into intellectual work involving creative rationalisation; yet they may also be repressed, inverted, projected, or displaced to varying degrees as well. There are no limits to our ingenuity for mixing these and other ‘ego defence strategies’, as psychoanalysis calls them, when dissonance threatens identity. Cognitive dissonance theory remains applicable even when the affective stimulus that drives dissonance reduction effort is attenuated - or even intensified - through repression, whether occurring alongside, as part of, or due to, such effort. As will become clear at the end of this section, my profiling of how the civic nationalist mind processes powerful nationalist emotions via dissonance-reduction does also draw, to some extent, on theories of emotional repression. I do so mindful of the rule of thumb which says that the more powerful the dissonance-inducing emotion, the less capable dissonance work alone is of bearing the strain – and let’s face it, political life is filled with strong emotions linked to political identity.

Classic examples of what dissonance reduction work can look like are surprisingly simple. Smokers who know the health risks may downplay the statistical dangers. Consumers who regret an expensive purchase may justify it as ‘worth it’ (a form of post-decision dissonance). Students who cheat may tell themselves the test was unfair. A landmark study by Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith (1959) demonstrated that participants who were paid only $1 to lie about a boring task subsequently convinced themselves it was enjoyable, whereas those paid $20 felt sufficiently justified and did not alter their attitudes. This finding illustrates how belief change can reduce cognitive dissonance when external justification is weak. The general pattern, then, is that perceived inconsistency among one’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions threatens self-consistency/integrity and produces psychological discomfort, motivating efforts to restore coherence - sometimes through creative reinterpretation, and at times in ways that diverge from objective reality. Interestingly, most individuals seem adept at identifying cognitive dissonance in others; however, as research on ‘bias blind spots’ commonly reveals, they often struggle to recognise or resolve it in themselves.

The same dynamics appear in political life across the liberal-conservative ideological spectrum – where they tend to pertain to passionate beliefs aligned to political identities that come under pressure, leading to some creative ideological reconfiguration. Supporters of George W. Bush rationalised the absence of weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq War as immaterial in the decision to go to war, given the presence of other strategic goals. Backers of Ronald Reagan reconciled rising deficits with small-government ideals. Citizens under Benito Mussolini justified curtailed freedoms as necessary for national strength. On the left, repressions in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin were similarly defended as protecting the revolution. Today many leftist environmentalists advocate for carbon reduction, sustainability, and limits to consumption. Nonetheless they may justify continued high-carbon personal lifestyles, or support policies such as large-scale migration into high-consumption economies, or advocate for academic business models that rely on long haul air travel by many thousands of international students. In such cases, tension between environmental principles and other moral commitments (e.g. humanitarian universalism, economic growth, or personal convenience) can prompt rationalisations, reframing strategies, or selective emphases that preserve self-conception as ecologically responsible without requiring fundamental revision of either identity or behaviour.

Across all these political contexts, cognitive dissonance theory illuminates how individuals preserve a coherent and morally defensible self-concept - often deeply entwined with partisan loyalties and political passions - by reinterpreting, justifying, or selectively reframing evidence that would otherwise expose inconsistencies between their values and their commitments. Rather than abandoning cherished beliefs or affiliations, individuals typically adjust their understanding of events, motives, or outcomes so that their political identities remain intact and internally consistent. Their animating political passions may continue to flow with considerable freedom, and they may wallow in them and harness them to shape and regulate their political identities, but to do so they must sometimes adjust their thinking in ways that may smack of inauthenticity and create severe vulnerabilities to external criticism.

In the contemporary era of identity politics, political passions increasingly gravitate toward opposing extremes, as factional bipolarisation along the liberal–conservative divide becomes a dominant feature of public life. While some might say this view simplifies a complex political landscape, it nonetheless provides a useful shorthand for describing its prevailing structure. Within this polarising environment, a distinctive form of psychic strain seems to afflict politically engaged individuals who occupy civic nationalist positions - including prominent political leaders and media commentators. Such actors often find themselves suspended between poles, unable fully to identify with either the liberal or the conservative camp, even as all around them are nailing their colours boldly to one of these two masts. I argue that what civic nationalists are experiencing today is sustained dissonance generated by the tension between their animating nationalist attachments and the constrained ideological vocabulary permitted by the liberal power regime they have opted to ascend within, the liberal truth regime they have opted to think within, and the liberal moral logic they have opted to moralise within.

Rather than decisively resolving these tensions, civic nationalism may often operate as a mechanism for containing and regulating nationalist passions. In translating deeper nationalist impulses into liberal-democratic idioms, dissonance resolutions may afford these passions some partial articulation while withholding full acknowledgement of their affective intensity, or of their true nature and origins. This may lead to greatly restricted appreciation of nationalist passions as latent social forces which can be harnessed to mobilise the masses and divert political change along genuinely nationalist pathways. Hence we may witness lots of flag-waving, lots of symbolically intense ‘bulldog patriotism’ from English civic nationalists and of ‘shortbread tin patriotism’ from Scottish civic nationalists, for example, all of which can be very successfully mobilised for electoral success in some limited respects, yet all producing little-to-no genuine nationalist opposition to the growing post-national excesses of the liberal social order.

The result of this self-atony, then, is likely to be less the full reconciliation of nationalist passion with liberal belief and more a managed strain which the civic nationalist mind prefers not to acknowledge at all, and indeed which it lacks will to address – leading to public postures characterised by hesitation, overcorrection, and subdued frustration as can sometimes become painfully obvious to others. Viewed in this light, civic nationalism appears not merely as an ideology but as a structured psychological strategy reconciled to enduring a condition of ‘Great Discomfort’ in the face of persistent and unresolved political contradiction.

Now let’s focus more on the ontological basics of precisely what clashes with precisely what to create the Great Discomfort. Vilfredo Pareto’s sociological framework for understanding liberal–conservative conflict provides an essential support beam for my theoretical scaffold by offering rich insight into these ontological basics along simultaneously sociological, cultural and psychological lines. In other words, it can give us the big picture we need on the Great Discomfort. Through it we can form a view of the civic nationalist mind as ‘trapped’ not just at the margins of liberal elite institutional power, but more specifically between nationalist passions that press up through social structure from below and enormous socialisation pressure and careerist temptation to ideologise and moralise in conformity with liberal elite power institutional itself it as continually presses its will downwards through social structure from above.

I explored Pareto’s sociological liberal-conservative conflict theory in depth in my recent book (Marshall, 2025) that looked at why his sociology remains a vital framework for understanding political and cultural bipolarisation. I found it wasn’t an easy theory to summarise for many different reasons. Likewise, secondary commentators have typically struggled to present his key ideas in a digestible form. In the summary that now follows I therefore take some creative licence, selectively simplifying and rearticulating the framework Pareto spent decades refining, to focus only on highly relevant points as best I can. When reading this, consider that while we should be careful not to confuse theory with real life, some theories can pique and direct our sociological imaginations to get us much closer to the truth of things – particularly when we maintain some critical distance and don’t get too carried away by them.

My reading of Pareto is that he viewed elites as always tending more towards liberal individualism, while non-elites are characteristically more conservative from one era to the next. Even when elites become conservative, they still tend to be led by liberals at the top, who may be masters in passing themselves off as conservatives. That grand scale view of things obviously qualifies Pareto’s work as liberal versus conservative sociological conflict theory well suited to contemporary analysis of culture war and populist surges. It sets us thinking of societies as continually requiring tension management so that neither liberalism-at-the-top nor conservatism-at-the-bottom grows too powerful in the zero-sum power game that continually plays out between these two great social formations. Notice how this theory places an implicit normative value on political pluralism. Societies can remain relatively at ease with themselves, Pareto believed, when elites are ‘open’ in the sense that they permit countervailing elite-liberal and non-elite-conservative psychological and cultural principles to mix in the lower and middle echelons of elite institutions of all kinds. The potential for fundamental social conflict increases with degrees of elite ‘closure’ – such as my book argues we are witnessing today in the aggressive cancellation and marginalisation of conservatives from elite institutional life.

The theory offers sufficient ontological clarity on enduring differences between conservative and liberal minds and cultures as to render it highly distinctive, provocative, and indeed plausible. Although academic social scientists typically resist what they see as excessive binarisation in theoretical representations of grand-scale social phenomena, the beauty of Pareto’s theory is that it seems to succeed in capturing the stark realities of factionally bipolarised societies in terms of fundamentally opposed principles of elite liberalism and non-elite conservatism, which may plausibly stem from timeless and universal human nature - although Pareto himself would not admit their grounding in human nature because he considered himself a purely empirical social scientist.

Pareto labelled these countervailing principles, somewhat awkwardly, as class one and class two ‘residues’, which he considered the most important active elements within the social system. Put simply, the liberal class one residues tend to push down through social structure, while the conservative class two residues push upward. The ‘liberal’ class one residues that predominate in the higher echelons of elites, he believed, also intensify more widely across general populations with growing levels of societal complexity and prosperity.

Pareto called the class one residues the ‘instincts of combination’ to capture what he understood as a form of strategic and manipulative creativity (the Italian combinazione connotes cunning or artful contrivance). These residues permit adaptation to complex social conditions through a Machiavellian flexibility: a capacity for saying what must be said and doing what must be done to make one’s way in life as an individual. They reveal themselves in a fluidity of social relations, marked by loosened attachments to people, places, and even ideas. In Pareto’s liberal elites, then, we might expect to find what David Goodhart (2017) termed ‘anywheres’, as he distinguished from ‘somewheres’ whose political energies are more often animated by affectively thick national attachments.

This manipulative or combinatory creativity maps closely onto what, in psychological terms, we would recognise as dissonance reduction work. Because cognitive dissonance frequently requires the reinterpretation or reframing of uncomfortable beliefs and passions, a culture steeped in the ‘instincts of combination’ would be especially well equipped to perform such reinterpretations. Working from Pareto’s theory, a liberal elite culture may therefore be one in which the creative neutralisation and redirection of politically inconvenient passions -particularly those implying sacrificial collective obligation - becomes routine rather than exceptional.

What the Paretian idea of elites strong in ‘class one residues’ puts on the table for us, then, is a view of liberal elite politics as defined by a psycho-cultural orientation whose hallmark individualism prizes advancement and therefore celebrates flexibility in ideas and alliances. Political passions are not necessarily extinguished, but they are handled instrumentally. Pareto described the manipulative harnessing of political passion as ‘demagoguery’ when practised by governments, seeing it as central to how consent is achieved in mass democracies. In such political cultures, ideas that ‘work’ may come to be favoured over ideas held to be intrinsically ‘true’. Where class one residues dominate, this orientation may become so normalised that its ethical implications cease to be widely questioned.

Pareto’s class one residues thus describe a psycho-cultural disposition likely to concentrate in elite institutions, where intellectual labour devoted to resolving ideological strain is routine. Should conservative-nationalist passions intrude upon the ambitions of politicians, journalists, or commentators seeking advancement within a liberal elite order, the tools for managing the resulting tension are already culturally available. In this way, the class one residues provide a framework for understanding the dissonance work characteristic of the upwardly mobile civic nationalist mind and, by extension, the ascendant civic nationalist political party.

Pareto’s theory is especially useful here because it offers a plausible account of how ideological strains connected to powerful nationalist passions may be absorbed and reinterpreted within liberal frameworks of meaning. Examples of this re-interpretive process are not hard to find. In the UK, civic nationalists typically express fierce opposition to Channel crossings by illegal migrants. The passions are nationalist; the justifications, however, are almost always liberal. They centre on rule-of-law concerns - the need to ‘smash the gangs’, reduce sex crime, prevent the importation of drugs and terrorism - as well as on public cost arguments regarding hotel accommodation and social welfare. These justificatory patterns arguably reveal civic nationalist cognitive dissonance in particularly visible form. Pareto’s theory of the class one residues helps us make sense of this phenomenon in a subtle way: it suggests that such liberal framing of nationalist passion is not merely clever and well-chosen strategic rhetoric, but a patterned mode of rationalisation, which is itself normalised within elite culture, and through which nationalist sentiments are routinely translated into conceptually acceptable and institutionally legible arguments.

In this way, when conservative-nationalist passions threaten to unsettle the liberal elite order, the upwardly mobile civic nationalist politician - situated between nationalist affect and the intellectual commitments of liberalism - becomes uniquely exposed to ideological tension. Yet this exposure is not simply a matter of occupying an intermediary position; it also reflects immersion in an elite culture that renders liberal forms of dissonance reduction both normatively and professionally necessary. The resulting civic nationalist political career, as defined by cognitive dissonance and its attendant discomforts, is therefore perhaps often structured not only by the tension itself, but by a near-witless acquiescence to the institutional norm requiring that such tension be resolved in culturally sanctioned, liberal directions.

Consider also that civic nationalism is frequently described as propositional nationalism, meaning that it depends upon adherence to abstract ideas rather than inherited ties or affectively thick bonds. More specifically, it expresses national allegiance through explicit affirmation of propositions concerning citizenship, rights, and political values. Viewed through a Paretian lens, this propositional structure sits comfortably with an instrumental and critically distanced mode of ideological engagement, in which political ideas are approached with an eye to their strategic utility. Civic nationalists may retain some attraction to affect-laden forms of national commitment. Yet their allegiance to propositional nationalism will tend to redirect political energy onto an intellectual and discursive plane shaped by liberal elite norms. Passion is not eliminated, but thinned and reformulated - channelled into proceduralism, rhetorical manoeuvre, and performative affirmations of civic commitment. In this sense, civic nationalism can come to resemble a rhetorical game requiring considerable verbal dexterity to keep ideological posture aligned simultaneously with career incentives and liberal institutional expectations.

Pareto’s theory also holds implications for how we might further theorise such dissonance reduction as often occurring in conjunction with ego defence work. Let’s remember that the theory regards the class one residues as tending to intensify in the higher elite echelons. That being so, we might expect upwardly mobile civic nationalist politicians to displace or project some of their more highly charged nationalist sentiments onto supporters located lower in the social structure, where, as Pareto’s theory reminds us, these sentiments are likely to concentrate more. Condemnations of ‘ethnonationalism’ by civic nationalists are very common – and they are often very heated too. It seems reasonable to suspect that such condemnations might function not only as moral boundary drawing but also as a mechanism for distancing oneself from one’s own more visceral attachments. Such projections may inadvertently generate serious tensions between civic nationalist parties and segments of their support bases whose national commitments are thicker and less easily intellectualised away along liberal lines. Where this occurs, civic nationalist parties may become vulnerable to challengers from the political right offering affectively thicker and more authentic forms of nationalism. Political developments in the UK in early 2026, particularly the challenge posed by Restore Britain to the Reform Party for the loyalty of its grassroots activists and voters, seem to illustrate this pattern especially well. Furthermore, this can be viewed as a pressure upon party-political expressions of civic nationalism that keeps them locked into their states of cognitive dissonance at particular ‘levels’ of partial dissonance reduction. Knowing that full dissonance reduction along liberal ideological lines will tend to self-harm by alienating grassroots activists and voters, their strategic political ambitions to maintain appropriate balance will tend to ensure their ongoing discomfort.

Next let’s examine how Pareto would have us view these thicker forms of nationalism. Pareto’s class two residues, which he regarded as persistently stronger in non-elites, can be interpreted as powerfully signifying conservative-nationalist - and indeed populist - passions in the modern world, which press up through the social structure and strengthen through grievance at what those who possess them perceive as liberal elite excess. They can be expected to react especially strongly against what they perceive as unmandated liberal stewardship of rapid societal change toward liberal individualist futures in which liberal-individualist cultures, values, and laws prevail, and where general populations become ethnically unrecognisable over short time frames. Pareto labelled these the class two ‘persistence of aggregates’ residues - a term that denotes, above all else, a conservative passion for permanence and continuity, and indeed for ontological security and associated uncertainty reduction. While not directly equating to narrower and more exclusively nationalist psychological phenomena such as ethnic homophily - which may, in some contexts, become associated with xenophobic attitudes - Pareto’s theory of the class two residues would nevertheless lead us to expect these phenomena to combine, to varying degrees, within a broader conservative-nationalistic sentimental orientation that provides strong affective glue for folkish bonds, while at the same time ensuring vigilance for external threat. Its main social function, as Pareto seemed to perceive it, is to sustain group cohesion amidst crisis and austerity – with the latter point especially explaining why Pareto perceived it as forming its deepest reservoirs of sentiment among non-elites.

These class two ‘persistence of aggregates’ residues offer the ‘Great Discomfort’ theory a powerful part-sociological part-psychological conceptual simplification that deserves to be taken very seriously: the idea of a singular political passion that continually presses upward through the social structure, and which aligns closely with decades of psychological and social-attitudinal research attesting to the historically stable pattern whereby non-elites do tend, on average, to hold the most socially conservative views. While this political passion itself seems to know no boundaries between civic and ethnic forms of nationalism, clearly it can find its fullest expression - and at the same time its greatest social exclusion - in ethnic nationalism. As soon as it seeks release via civic nationalism, however, it paradoxically begins to get smothered by dissonance work while at the same time achieving its greatest voice and influence - because it now becomes tolerable to liberal elite social order. The result: most people only get to know modern political expressions of conservative-nationalist passion via dissonance work that is far more concerned with demonstrating the passion’s very limited consistencies with liberal elite power and ideology than with mounting any significant external challenge.

In conclusion, then, Pareto’s theory allows us to view the civic nationalist mind - presently ascendant, yet still mostly situated at the margins of elite institutional power - as buffeted by powerful dissonance pressures arising from the class one residues pressing down from above within the social structure and the class two residues pressing up from below. Notice the neatness of this simplification – which explains why I chose Pareto for my framework. The class one residues pressing down from above promote dissonance work that promises the civic nationalist mind success and influence if it agrees to be absorbed by the proposition-focused liberal order that sits above it. The class two residues pressing up from below stand for a powerful, holistic conservative-nationalist passion, rooted not only in ontological security and uncertainty aversion but equally in a strong impulse toward social cohesion - an affective commitment to the maintenance of binding, solidaristic ties. This singular passion can be theorised as powerfully animating the civic nationalist mind and ultimately driving its Great Discomfort as it languishes at the margins of the liberal elite institutions.

The classic (1950) ‘Lonely Crowd’ thesis by David Riesman also warrants a place in my scaffold for theorising the Great Discomfort. It allows us to more thoroughly map the dissonance that afflicts contemporary civic nationalists to their awkward partial exclusions from the elite institutions they seek ascendancy within. In many contemporary Western societies, elite institutions have moved sharply toward forms of liberalism that present themselves as inclusive yet often display marked hostility toward conservatives. The pressing question, then, is not merely whether conservatives can flourish in such environments, but whether they can even sustain basic working psychological equilibrium within institutions that appear increasingly to exclude or stigmatise them.

I began reflecting on this problem in the 1990s when I first encountered Riesman’s work. At the time, I did not anticipate the extent to which liberal institutions would harden into what might be described as aggressively illiberal postures toward conservative-nationalist passion. Riesman’s central claim was that affluent mid-twentieth-century societies were undergoing a profound psycho-cultural transformation in character structure. The ‘inner-directed’ type - guided by deeply internalised values instilled during early socialisation - was gradually being supplanted by the ‘other-directed’ type, whose orientation derived less from conscience than from attunement to peer approval, status signals, and shifting social norms. For Riesman, this was not simply a moral judgement but a structural diagnosis of rapidly advancing consumer societies, in which rising mobility disrupted fixed community norms, mass media began amplifying and revising shared cultural reference points, and corporate bureaucracies began emphasising teamwork and reputational management, thereby inducing individuals to monitor and adjust themselves more in response to frequently updating social cues.

Riesman’s metaphor of the inner-directed individual’s ‘inner gyroscope’ - a stabilising moral instrument set early in life and relatively resistant to later environmental change - readily translates into the view of conservatism as a strong superego orientation, forged through stable and secure socialisation and capable of maintaining coherence amid rapid cultural flux. Other directedness, by contrast, is characterised by adaptive calibration to prevailing opinion via what Riesman called the ‘inner radar’. The individual scans the social horizon for cues, adjusting presentation and conviction to maintain inclusion and avoid exclusion. In contemporary terms, this can resemble a performative responsiveness to institutional norms. This view of other-directedness immediately struck me as perfect for framing contemporary liberal-individualism as a manipulative dark triad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy) phenomenon, co-ascendent with the dark triad within the modern world, and very much antipodal to the strong superego conservative.

Working from this distinction, Riesman asks a profound question about compatibility: how can an inner-directed person function within an increasingly other-directed social order? His answer suggests that such individuals may retain moral confidence and perceived internal coherence, yet experience social isolation, marginalisation, and subtle pressures toward self-censorship. They may preserve much of their perceived self-integrity, but often at the cost of loneliness and being perceived as rigid in cultures that prize adaptability and continual transformation. The result may be a form of deep psychic discomfort - a persistent tension that demands ongoing, though rarely fully complete, efforts at dissonance reduction.

This dynamic reflects the difference between inner gyroscopes and inner radars. Inner gyroscopes can generate dissonance by holding steady against prevailing currents, whereas radars continually orient toward signals that facilitate social adjustment. Because they rely on inner gyroscopes, inner-directed individuals may maintain greater critical distance from their social world, and in contexts where dominant norms diverge from their convictions this can generate sustained strain. Dissonance reduction may remain partial or feel inauthentic. By contrast, those operating more through inner radar mechanisms may achieve smoother social integration - though potentially at the cost of diminished internal autonomy.

This dynamic seems to feed very neatly, then, into my theory of the Great Discomfort by clarifying the unenvious predicament of conservative, inner-directed actors who incline affectively towards nationalism within liberal, other-directed institutions and yet must continually struggle to justify doing so – even to themselves. It reveals their situation as allowing for political lives of precarious edgework and nothing more. Morally anchored yet socially constrained, they confront enormous cultural pressure to mute dissent and perform consensus. Some integrity may be retained, but often at the cost of marginalisation and reputational suspicion. The Great Discomfort may be further theorised along these lines, then, as both a psychological condition and as a sociopolitical stabilising mechanism: it structures civic nationalism as a managed interface between elite liberal norms and popular solidaristic impulses, sustaining a system in which contradictions are contained, displaced, or ritualised rather than decisively resolved. In this way, civic nationalism can be regarded as keeping those of conservative-nationalist orientation who see ascendency within liberal institutions ‘on the plantation’ - as contemporary ethnonationalist critics of civic nationalism often rather cruelly and yet very incisively put it.

The Nationalism Spectrum

Next, we frame the Great Discomfort in terms of how civic nationalism occupies a precarious position both at the thin edge of, and in external opposition to, the broader nationalism spectrum. The civic nationalist’s relationship to the nationalism spectrum is theorised here as resembling, in certain respects, the psychological predicament of an eBay buyer hovering over the purchase button as an auction counts down through its final hours. The desire to buy is intense, yet the decision to commit remains suspended. In this analogy, the ticking timer - continually heightening the buyer’s frustration and unease – of course symbolises the limited time that European nationalists perceive as remaining for action to preserve European and European diaspora nations in ethnic-demographic forms recognisable to them.

Civic, cultural, and ethnic variants of nationalism are commonly understood as ideal types that blend into one another by degrees. The ‘thinness-thickness’ metaphor traditionally captures how these ideal types vary by degree rather than in kind – together forming an internally complex part-psychological, part-ideological ‘nationalism spectrum’. A big mistake commonly made, I believe, is to lazily categorise civic nationalism as simply being on this spectrum when in fact its orientation towards it is one of psychologically complex and often indecisive partial commitment, as is likely to create substantial dissonance in the minds of most and possibly all civic nationalists to some degree.

This distinction between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ forms of nationalism originates in the political sociology and political theory literatures on national identity. ‘Thick’ nationalism typically refers to attachments that are affectively dense - experienced as a compelling pull or resonance in social life, even before being consciously named. It simultaneously refers to attachments that are emotionally intense - expressed in consciously recognised and articulated feelings such as pride, loyalty, or anger, often tied to shared cultural markers like language, religion, and history. By contrast, ‘thin’ nationalism is more abstract, propositional, and instrumental, often expressed through adherence to civic principles, political rights, or legal membership rather than inherited ties. Ethnic nationalisms are typically considered the thickest, as they rely on deeply rooted, affect-laden bonds and shared ancestry that are less easily reformulated or translated into liberal institutional frameworks. Civic nationalisms, in contrast, exemplify by far the thinnest forms, relying on voluntary commitments to political ideas and norms rather than on visceral attachments or inherited identity.

The thickness–thinness spectrum thus provides a useful lens for analysing the relative emotional intensity, social embeddedness, and malleability of different nationalist movements. Notice how it also aligns neatly with Pareto’s notion of a singular conservative-nationalist passion - conceptualised as the persistence of aggregate residues - which he theorised as being more thickly distributed in non-elite than in elite social milieus, and as continually pushing up through social structure with critical vigilance towards wayward elites. In what we might call the Pareto-adjusted nationalism spectrum, then, this passion always concentrates most ‘thickly’ at the lower levels of social structure, diminishing steadily toward the top and perhaps even disappearing entirely in the highest elite echelons.

Civic, cultural, and ethnic ideal types necessarily overlap – with fuzzy boundaries as some might put it - along the nationalism spectrum. Thicker nationalisms tend, in certain respects, to subsume thinner ones. Ethnic nationalists, for example, would generally accept civic criteria such as passports as important markers of national belonging – although obviously many might qualify this in various ways, for example by advocating for the rights of diasporas to return to their homelands. At the same time, thinner forms are often interpreted - sometimes plausibly - as ‘dog-whistling’ toward or ‘gatekeeping’ for their thicker counterparts. On this basis, they are frequently conflated and dismissed under the umbrella category of the ‘far right’ by post-nationalist critics seeking to delegitimise nationalism as such. Nominally civic nationalist political actors themselves are often among the most eager participants in this conflation, some of whom can only in the most attenuated senses be located on the nationalism spectrum at all (e.g. certain politicians and activists in the Scottish National Party, Sinn Féin, and Plaid Cymru). This phenomenon is arguably quite strikingly exemplified by Nicola Sturgeon, who as First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party reflected on her party’s name at the 2017 Edinburgh International Book Festival: “The word [nationalism] is difficult. If I could turn the clock back … to the establishment of my party … I wouldn’t choose the name it’s got just now”.

Returning to Pareto’s conception of class two residues pressing upward through the social structure until they encounter liberal glass ceilings, we can see that a singular, often latent, and highly potent passion for permanence and continuity - arguably rooted in enduring features of human psychology and encompassing, while not directly equating to, ethnic homophily – may indeed underlie all forms of nationalism. This underlying impulse could generate both the more visible, thinner forms of borderline-elite civic nationalism we see in many senior politicians and broadcasters on the right of the political spectrum, and the thicker, more affectively intense nationalisms found below, whose discursive existence depends upon commentators willing to operate in constant fear of censorship, harassment, penalisation, and stigmatisation. Interpreting this singular passion as a political expression of human nature necessarily implies that denying nationalism its legitimacy is tantamount to waging war against human nature itself – as is consistent with the learning-from-history metanarrative which says that today’s liberal elites, just like the mid-20th-century communist elites of the USSR and Eastern Europe before them, committed an error profoundly disequilibrating to society in arrogantly believing they could eradicate it.

Perhaps the most common critical view of civic nationalism is that it rests upon a legal minimalism which equates national belonging to little or nothing more than passport ownership. Civic nationalists tend to respond that is a misreading: a passport signifies entry into a shared political community grounded in rights, duties, and democratic values. Far from being merely formal, citizenship provides a neutral and inclusive foundation for affectively thick national identity, allowing diverse populations to participate fully in public life. In this sense, legal status is viewed as the starting point for belonging itself, which is deepened through civic engagement and adherence to common institutions, rather than preexisting cultural or ancestral ties. Hence a tension at the heart of civic nationalism is that while it clearly plays a liberal-progressive political role as a social lubricant for ethnic-demographic change, it simultaneously plays a more reactionary and indeed realist political role, perceiving itself as the only expression of nationalism that can be viable in the modern world – offering at least some resistance and counter-balance to rapid ethnic-demographic transformation.

Appealing to mainstream sensibilities in a modernising world allowed civic nationalism to predominate across the Postwar West. It remains the dominant official or legitimating ideology of most contemporary states and mainstream parties across the left–right spectrum, even where their rhetoric and practices diverge from it. To maintain this role, civic nationalism has been significantly ‘thinned,’ negotiating a tense and increasingly unstable accommodation with post-nationalist ideas that have gained cultural hegemony in many elite institutions over recent decades - so much so that the boundary between the two is now highly blurred. While civic nationalists often emphasise national sovereignty - whether in response to perceived erosion by supra-national bodies or in pursuit of national liberation from oppressive state arrangements or alien cultures they perceive to be implicated in the darker side of nationalism - they continue to anchor national life in shared liberal commitments to individual rights, pluralism, and diversity. In this sense, civic nationalism frequently overlaps with the very liberal post-nationalism it ostensibly resists, offering a minimalist conception of political community defined primarily by legal status and institutional membership.

Cultural nationalism predates civic nationalism by a long margin. Early forms of cultural nationalism are classically embodied in the work of thinkers such as Herder and Fichte and in the broader currents of romantic nationalism, which rejected abstract universalism in favour of historically rooted peoples bound by language, tradition, and shared cultural expression. For Herder (e.g. in his classic 1784-1891 text), the nation was a living cultural organism, shaped by vernacular language and folk tradition rather than by the state, while Fichte’s (1808) Addresses to the German Nation framed national renewal in terms of cultural education and moral formation. Romantic nationalism more broadly elevated history, myth, and sentiment as sources of political legitimacy, prefiguring later cultural nationalisms that seek to ground political solidarity in shared ways of life rather than purely civic principles.

Today, though, cultural nationalism configures in response to the now painfully exposed limits of civic nationalism, insofar as it seeks to supply the affective depth, shared meaning, and sense of belonging which more minimalist procedural theories of citizenship often struggle to generate. Where civic identity is experienced as insufficiently cohesive or emotionally resonant, cultural nationalism reasserts the importance of shared history, language, traditions, and collective memory as foundations of political solidarity. This reassertion need not reject civic principles outright. Instead, it steps in where their limits become visible, offering thickened versions of national identity capable of sustaining loyalty and social cohesion under conditions of diversity and social fragmentation. In this respect, cultural nationalism often reflects the realist intuition captured by Angela Merkel’s October 2010 Potsdam speech that “Multiculturalism has failed utterly. We tried it, and it failed”. In summary, then, it maintains a difficult balancing act where dissonance can thrive - demanding degrees of cultural commonality which are by their nature exclusive while continuing to affirm liberal rules of the game and the inclusive values which go with that.

In contemporary Western politics, the distinction between civic and cultural nationalism has become increasingly blurred. The rise of counter-jihadist sentiment - focusing on perceived threat of political Islam - has prompted many civic nationalist movements to adopt rhetoric and policies that resemble culturally grounded nationalism, emphasising the defence of national traditions, social norms, and cultural cohesion. While these movements continue to frame their claims in terms of rights, citizenship, and liberal principles, their heightened concern with mass immigration (especially from the Muslim world), religious symbols, and the preservation of a ‘national way of life’ clearly reflects an alignment with affectively thicker, culturally oriented forms of nationalism. This dynamic is further complicated by the pro-Zionist funding of many nationalist political and media entities, which has prompted criticisms that these cannot be fully nationalist because their national loyalties are compromised. Consequently, contemporary counter-jihadist civic and cultural nationalisms operate in a space shaped both by fear of political Islam and by external pressures that limit the expression of fully autonomous nationalist agendas.

Pro-Zionism, whether explicit or implicit, embraced or denied, thus constitutes a significant side concern within contemporary nationalist movements, presenting distinctive dissonance challenges for both civic and cultural nationalists. While their primary dissonance challenge remains that of reconciling nationalist passion with liberal elite institutional norms, as much of this essay has explained, pro-Zionism introduces additional tensions that may require specific strategies of dissonance resolution. Critics frequently contend that, due to varying degrees of alignment with blended economic, geo-strategic, and religious-eschatological versions of the Greater Israel Project, nationalist actors may appear to possess divided loyalties. Some even suggest a double standard, in which European nationalism must remain ‘thin’ while Jewish and Israeli nationalisms are permitted to be ‘thick’. Confronted with these pressures, nationalists themselves may experience a sense of internal tension, which can generate creative forms of dissonance work aimed at reconciling or justifying multiple commitments. In some instances, this may involve vicariously enacting thick nationalist passion through Zionist political actors, allowing it to be expressed externally and safely. Drawing on the Kleinian concept of projective identification, it becomes arguable that nationalists might sometimes also project the discomfort that arises with their own nationalist passions onto Zionist political actors, thereby externalising the emotional burden while maintaining affective engagement. In this way, ‘thin’ nationalist actors who support ‘thick’ pro-Zionist positions can simultaneously acknowledge the real challenges posed by such alignments while also sustaining forms of cautious yet broadly affirmative engagement which permit them to remain ‘on message’ - thereby keeping the funding flowing at institutional level and their careers intact at individual level.

Finally, let us examine more closely how ethnic nationalism forms the thickest end of the nationalism spectrum. Here, ethnos functions as the primary social cement. Common genetic ancestry takes precedence over liberal principles, shared history, or civic tradition as the foundation of national unity. Even so, the boundaries are rarely absolute. Ethnic nationalisms frequently borrow from civic, institutional, and cultural narratives to legitimise themselves, just as civic and cultural nationalisms often tap the ethnos they claim to transcend. Yet these ideological borrowings often remain rooted in ethnos. Culture may be interpreted as having bio-spiritedness at its core. The liberal values prized by civic nationalists, in particular, are often interpreted through the lens of the tradition of English liberty - viewing this as expressing a distinctive ethnos (originally English, now broadly Anglospheric) which preserves culture within a sweet spot balancing social cohesion with individual creativity and productivity.

Such arguments have proliferated online in recent years – and of course they are typically shunned by the academic social sciences. The reasons for this are quite easy to grasp. Postwar Western scholarship on nationalism was disproportionately shaped by diasporic, minority, and liberal intellectual traditions, many of whose leading figures were Jewish and who, shaped by historical experiences of persecution, maintained a marked aversion to white ethnic nationalism. Collectively, this produced a normative hostility toward ethnic majoritarianism and an under-theorisation of ethnic homophily as a stabilising social force capable of providing meaning and well-being - particularly among indigenous white European and European diaspora majorities subjected to rapidly escalating mass immigration. The result has been decades of aggressive promotion of post-nationalist culture and value preferences by academics to the vulnerable and impressionable minds of social science students. This brings us to the present: ethnic nationalism - the form of nationalism that still typically dare not speak its name in most elite institutional milieus - nonetheless appears to remain the main engine room for nationalist passion. One cannot meaningfully discuss a thin-thick nationalism spectrum without seriously engaging with the view that nationalism derives most of its power from this source.

In sum, then, civic nationalism must simultaneously appear neutral and inclusive while managing latent anxieties about demographic and cultural change. Understanding civic nationalism as an ongoing negotiation between legal abstraction and emotional depth reveals it not as a straightforward ideology but as an ongoing, psychologically mediated balancing act - a manifestation of collective cognitive dissonance that allows modern societies to maintain precisely that semblance of unity that is being torn apart by political polarisation and rapid ethnic-demographic change. It is regularly mocked for being too ‘thin’ by contemporary ethnic nationalists, who have found a highly effective technique for forcing it to reveal its both its Great Discomfort and that inauthentic opposition to ethnic nationalism from which its discomfort arises. That technique is very simple: ask the civic nationalist, “When your ethnicity diminishes to a minority within your own country, will it still be your country?” Common responses such as “Yes, of course” (spoken with withering disengagement), “Oh, I’ll be long gone before that happens,” or “Let’s just wait and see” arguably expose civic nationalist dissonance in its most unguarded and revealing forms.

Conclusion

To recapitulate, contemporary civic nationalism seems to be defined by a form of cognitive dissonance which I term the Great Discomfort. This arises when individuals hold deep conservative attachments - ethnic, cultural, historical, moral, and civilisational - while simultaneously part-internalising liberal normative frameworks that delegitimise these very attachments and which, furthermore, are deeply implicated as ideologies of liberal elite social power in the rapid transformation of society in ways conservatives revile. The result is not mere ideological tension but anxious inhibition: civic nationalists find themselves unable to affirm the conservative values they cherish even as they witness the societal erosion that comes with the social marginalisation and stigmatisation of these values.

What qualifies this Great Discomfort as surely the most consequential historical wildcard of our time is its rendering of contemporary conflict between liberal and conservative social formations structurally volatile and radically unpredictable by range of possible outcomes. The civic nationalist disposition, which at present contains and moderates its conservative impulses, may at any time in the very near future encounter political leadership capable of activating and mobilising these same impulses. If conservative-nationalist consciousness does one day soon escape the aforementioned ‘civic nationalist plantation’, then we could start to see seismic political and cultural shifts.

Across much of the institutional landscape, top-down elite culture and values exert sustained pressure on civic nationalism to adopt a more consistently liberal posture. Expressions of conservative-nationalist sentiment - particularly those that attribute positive social value to the preservation of ethnos as a foundation of national life - are frequently subjected to strong moral censure, social sanction and legal proscription. As I note in my 2025 book applying Pareto to contemporary political polarisation, these liberal influences together reveal a highly effective mobilisation of the disgust instinct – presided over not only by political elites, but also by coordinating legal, corporate, media, and educational actors. Impacts upon personality are brutal and far-reaching, easily capable of driving millions of ordinary people into deep states of cognitive dissonance.

Deliberate state level suppression operates alongside these pressures. Three interlocking mechanisms seem to sustain liberal elite predominance within contemporary democracies by suppressing all political expressions of ethnonationalism. Let’s call these the three Cs of Containment, Counter Insurgency and Cordon Sanitaire. These three Cs form three lines of defence against the rebuilding of polities sufficiently in touch with their conservative-nationalist sides as to achieve authentic maturity via authentic political pluralism. First, there exists a pattern of limited tolerance toward civic nationalist parties and ideologically aligned media institutions, which are often permitted to operate insofar as they perform a Containment function vis-à-vis the conservative-nationalist passions. Second, where such containment appears to fail, leading the conservative-nationalist passions to seek expression elsewhere, state institutions may deploy regulatory, legal, or security frameworks informed by Counter Insurgency doctrine to prevent the consolidation of broader support for uncontained conservative-nationalist movements. Third, when that second line of defence fails, established liberal parliamentary parties can still implement Cordon sanitaire strategies which exclude conservative-nationalist parties from coalition-building and government formation - even when they surge towards strong electoral representation and overtake all other parties in the polls.

Despite these demobilising and demoralising pressures, a profound choice increasingly confronts the civic nationalist moral imagination. At least to some degree, it has begun to perceive itself as facing a classic ‘Thucydides Trap’ problem of escalating urgency to act brought on by diminishing capacity to act. Within the United Kingdom, this Thucydides trap problem is sometimes articulated through the metaphor of an approaching ‘2066’ moment - a symbolic reference to a projected future point at which the historic ethnos of the indigenous white British populations, long regarded by conservatives as the cultural substrate of national life, is expected to diminish through demographic change to a level at which it can no longer exert decisive formative influence. The Thucydides Trap metaphor thus encapsulates not an inevitable conflict, but a perceived inflection point when the balance of political and cultural power is expected to shift irreversibly. Discussions within conservative-nationalist circles usually situate this inflexion point within the present decade – and for good reason given the rapidity of ethnic-demographic change.

The central question arising then, concerns the stability of civic nationalist equilibrium in its present liberal state – as the trap slowly closes. Can the internal dissonance between liberal commitments and conservative attachments be sustained? Or will affective conservative-nationalist energies intensify and seek political expression through charismatic leadership capable of mobilising them? I think it’s reasonable to conclude that these possibilities constitute by far the most consequential political uncertainties of the present age.

To illuminate the moral weight of the choice confronting civic nationalists, consider Annibale Carracci’s 1596 painting Hercules at the Crossroads – as shown above this essay. The image depicts Hercules poised between two paths: one led by Vice, offering pleasure and ease; the other by Virtue, demanding struggle but promising lasting honour and glory. The painting captures a moment of deliberation, not paralysis. Hercules embodies the strength required to confront competing normative demands and commit to a difficult but meaningful path.

Today, the West faces an analogous choice. Civic nationalists, situated at the intersection of liberal post-nationalism and conservative nationalism, bear the weight of having to make this choice most of all. They confront diverging futures: one of moral acquiescence and cultural passivity, the other of resolve to preserve historically rooted values and collective identity. Unlike Hercules, though, many remain psychologically constrained, caught in the Great Discomfort, unsure how to navigate these paths.

Civic nationalists urgently need a brutally honest, metacognitive reassessment of their predicament. The Great Discomfort seems to grip the minds of even their most capable electoral strategists with astonishing force - and yet the blindingly obvious negative consequences at election time may well be what finally compels re-evaluation. Voting at elections is increasingly happening along ethnic-sectarian lines. The February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in the UK offers a stark illustration, where the Green Party mobilised the Muslim vote to defeat the Civic Nationalist Reform Party, which had run on an inclusive, multi-ethnic platform in line with civic nationalist ideals. Reform seem to have lost because they committed the most basic schoolboy error which all competent campaign strategists understand: they seemingly failed to focus on their core constituency, instead favouring high visibility in opposition areas. Only cognitive dissonance can account for this. Ethnic nationalists have been ridiculing civic nationalists online for years, exposing a fundamental truth: when teams of individualists compete against teams of collectivists, the latter almost always win. If civic nationalists continue to blow only faint dog whistles to their core ethnic constituencies while their opponents mobilise theirs with ruthless efficiency, civic nationalism will steadily erode as ethnic voting patterns continue to intensify. Perhaps the hunger to do whatever it takes to succeed in elections will, over the next few years, prove the only force strong enough to finally push civic nationalist parties toward conservative nationalism and away from their abusive relationships with liberal post-nationalism.

References

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A reinterpretation of Titian’s (1550-65) Allegory of Prudence painting, blended with a translation of the statue of the Goddess Prudentia (St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City) into painted form.

Introduction

Some ideas are just too important to be parked pending academic publication – which often doesn’t present the best route to impact anyway, and which can sometimes feel like a final burial and laying to rest for new thinking which has been years in the making. This Substack essay is a hastily written and still unreferenced draft academic working paper which I hope will get noticed. I have tried my best to fill it with new ideas you won’t find anywhere else. Extending lines of argument already developed in my first Substack essay (posted on 24/12/25 and entitled ‘Promethean Dualism’), I will herein continue to address our biggest political and cultural problem: factional bipolarisation between relatively liberal elites and relatively conservative non-elites.

Recognising that both culture-warring social blocs now want incompatible things and are teetering on the brink of far more aggressive forms of conflict with each other, I would suggest that this is the kind of theoretical inventiveness we need most of all today. Social science and management academics have grown so egregiously partisan in their support for the liberal elite side of this conflict that they do not even think to consider publicly reasonable, compromise-based solutions.

I consider their failure to study liberal elite institutional power with due critical mind a research opportunity. If others won’t grasp all the low hanging fruit, I will. It’s their loss – and in some respects it’s their collective reputational suicide too, for through their manichean support for the liberal progressive ascendency across the institutions they make themselves irrelevant in the real world they rarely venture into. Their deepening liberal bias can only continue to divide and alienate growing numbers of students, their families, tax payers, politicians and local communities. And it all boils down to their refusal to accept the simple truth that researching and teaching the complex social world and people therein requires conservative-liberal metapolitical pluralism – as should be enshrined within their foundational professional knowledge and ethics.

Contrary to fatalistic views of still deepening societal bipolarisation, I will outline simple commonsense measures which all sorts of organisation can implement, to simultaneously improve their governance and management and help turn the metapolitical tide to rebuild societies more at ease with themselves. The crux of my argument will be that organisational ethics codes as they exist today across the corporate world provide a solid basis for promoting more prudent governance and management. Let me say up front that prudence resists simple definitions. In academic writing it is sometimes better to ‘get the ontology straightened out’ at the start by providing precise definitions of things. On other occasions the whole point is to take a deep breath and dive into all the possible meanings. The latter applies here, and so I would advise creating a mental filing cabinet, labelling it ‘prudence’, and then using both this present essay and other sources to fill the cabinet with content by slowly forming your own personal view of what it is and why it matters to you. Relax and try to enjoy its polymorphism and productive ambiguity. These qualities add considerably to its value and potential for mass appeal. Sometimes it’s not what you know that matters most – rather it’s how you structure your understanding of what you know.

I will approach prudence as a term of intellectually and ethically energised risk imagination and resolve to act in a forward-looking manner, which has been richly endowed with accumulated meaning in the western canon - especially by ancient Greeks and medieval Christians. It bears a particular wisdom which should lead us to value conservative-liberal character diversity for facilitating governance and management in temporal depth. As per the three faces of prudence concept which I will discuss first, governance and management in temporal depth entails harnessing perspectives that are past-facing, present-facing and future-facing, drawing them all together for constructive adversarial scrutiny of one another so that better collective judgments can be made.

Today a left-liberal metapolitical hegemony holds sway across almost all our elite institutions. Its authority to hire, fire, and cancel is barely a few years old, yet it carries itself with an extraordinary epistemic arrogance, convinced that it is immeasurably cleverer than and morally superior to all who dissent by sinking roots into ancestral ethnos. It regards its narrow intellectual and ethical commonsense as infinitely portable between all times and places – and it shapes its ideology accordingly by promoting timelessly applicable universal descriptive and moral categories while demoting and sometimes demonising folk wisdom derived from particular historical experience. Imagine the absurdity of a society whose elites refuse to value the past for its critical insight into the present. Oh, wait, you don’t need to imagine. We’re living in one.

Let me add something else in this highly critical vein which some might consider inaccurate or poorly judged - and notice that its critical depiction of today’s liberal elites only becomes defensible when aligned to the standpoint of historical consciousness. This essay regards historical consciousness as key to fostering more metapolitical pluralism in elite institutions, as indeed ultimately explains its concern with building governance and management in temporal depth and its related promotion of prudence within organisational culture. So, let’s briefly consider how this standpoint can alter how we see the world. To cut to the chase, the critical observation I have in mind can be summarised as relating to elite capture via law in the following terms. Our liberal elites today seek justification in unpopular, socially divisive laws, recently rushed into being by fragile and deeply unpopular political regimes in the final moments of their legitimacy – and it insists we regard those laws as morally unassailable, as though seared and engraved into stone by lightning. Obviously, a liberal ideologue and careerist wilfully bound to the present historical moment will be shocked by this statement. They will probably respond defensively by emphasising that laws are there for a reason and that lawbreakers must be punished with the full force of the law in extreme cases where they violate contemporary social values – effectively adopting what previous generations would have recognised straight away as a distinctively right-wing authoritarian orientation towards law. However, these defenders of the present regime will often care little about such historical associations because they are not of the present moment where all that matters is to assert power using all available means.

On the other hand, many people old enough to remember institutional commonsense in decades prior to the 2010s with some fondness will regard my statement as basically true. They may sometimes set the phenomenon it highlights in a historical frame of reference, possibly by quoting Tacitus or any number of other philosophers and cultural commentators who have famously theorised law as something unpopular regimes increasingly rely on amidst civic decay. In their efforts to explain how this fragile legal hegemony came about they may also start talking about ‘boiling frogs’ and ‘long marches through the institutions’. Notice that these are terms of historical consciousness. One of the key concerns of this essay then, is to promote such consciousness by finding practical ways to encourage elite institutions to see more of social reality by broadening the temporal framing mix within discourse and by cultivating muscularity for flexible temporal framing within governance and management practice.

Enhancing governance and management with recourse to the wisdom offered by the three faces of prudence concept offers us at least a partial remedy to problems of arrogant and fragile elite institutional power. Wisdom arising from this may be characterised as historical consciousness, as is most likely to flourish within organisations where governance and management achieve temporal depth and refuse to be bound by cult-like delusions of an eternal present where the combined truth regime and legal regime of the day is always right. The relationship between historical consciousness on the one hand, and governance and management in temporal depth on the other, is complex. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is to regard historical consciousness as a vital philosophical, psychological and cultural corollary of organisational practices which engage with social reality on the grand scale. Historical consciousness is not merely decorative within that context. It offers greater awareness of path dependence (how past judgments shape and constrain the present), critical sensitivity to organisational remembering and forgetting, moral and social forecasting imagination for long term outcomes, and vigilance for organisational myopia. Furthermore, to once more return to matters of law, it offers acute critical awareness of how legitimacies of all kinds are historically produced and often do not and cannot endure. We can then better appreciate governance and management in temporal depth in terms of its being fundamentally concerned with bringing in more people who can be expected to let more of that light in.

As we will see, one of the most important learning points arising with the three faces of prudence concept is that whereas individuals will often tend to be stuck in disproportionately past-facing, present-facing or future-facing perspectives, if you fill a governance body or management team with more conservative-liberal diversity then these limitations may start to give way to more historical consciousness aligned to governance and management in temporal depth at team level. While this might help bring much-needed external challenge to bear upon rigid left-liberal monocultures, it can also be more comprehensively valued for co-fostering epistemic humility, looser and more flexible temporal framing for all sorts of governance and management challenges, greater metapolitical awareness and tolerance, and by extension what I think we can also very reasonably call true democratic consciousness.

Widening the theoretical groove cut by my previous Substack essay entitled ‘Promethean Dualism’, this article continues to explore pathways for corporations to rebalance conservative and liberal representation on governance bodies and in management teams - in ways that favour shareholder value by sharpening adversarial scrutiny within all sorts of decision-making contexts. In my earlier essay on Promethean Dualism, the central argument was that because conservatives tend to orient to risky innovation with negative affect, while liberals tend to do so with positive affect, conservative-liberal balance on governance bodies and in management teams favours 360° adversarial scrutiny of risky innovation. Here, however, the rationale for re-balancing towards greater conservative-liberal diversity will centre instead upon the idea that governance and management in temporal depth via conservative-liberal re-balancing can deliver more prudent governance and management. Combining the two lines of argument for more conservative-liberal diversity, we can begin to conceive of Promethean Dualism and Prudence as co-enhancements to collective governance and management which are likely to synergise by permitting matters of risky innovation to be scrutinised in more temporal depth. That may sound like a bit of a brain twister – but think about high stakes management of risky innovation at scale amidst radical uncertainty and the corresponding need to do absolutely everything possible to optimise adversarial scrutiny by drawing on as many pertinent human judgment perspectives as possible. Obviously, that warrants promoting mixed and flexible temporal framings of issues, as might be powerfully advantaged by conservative-liberal diversity of character, viewpoint, values, emotional orientation, and the like.

We can then theorise further benefits arising with conservative-liberal diversity more straightforwardly in terms of soft metapolitical checks and balances within organisations. The cult at the centre of left-liberal corporate monoculture is often one that venerates metapolitical talismans such as EDI, ESG and internationalisation to the point where it will not see them challenged. It’s not good for any corporate behavioural or cultural change, no matter whether planned or unplanned, to proceed unchecked in micro-political climates of fear where braking and reverse gearing discussions are verboten or deemed suspicious.

Taking both Promethean Dualism and Prudence together, then, helps establish a more comprehensive business case for building conservative-liberal diversity for adversarial scrutiny in organisations. Yet an important further part of the overall rationale, as I have already argued in my essay on Promethean Dualism, has to do with the promotion of social peace in various respects. More ethical and viewpoint pluralism along the conservative-liberal axis within corporations favours the pursuit of authentic institutional neutrality. This in turn offers all the reputational advantages that go with maintaining strategic ambiguity towards hot button culture war issues, considering especially that waves of public sentiment whipped up around such issues seem to grow more volatile and unpredictable every year.

While all of this does of course factor into the business case for greater conservative-liberal diversity, such diversity can obviously offer broader public benefits too - as should arguably matter more to all of us. Welcoming more popular conservative views within corporations favours societal defactionalisation and depolarisation simply by fudging over perceived ethical and ideological splits between the institutions and the people – in effect, returning us to historical norms enjoyed by previous generations where these differences were not so acute as to be intolerable to both culture-warring blocs. Maybe think of this ‘fudging over’ as helping to restore what liberals who see the world through market relationship googles call the ‘social contract’, and likewise what conservatives attuned to deeper collective obligations call the ‘intergenerational contract’ or ‘social covenant’.

Here’s a little more about the broad problem-solutions framework I think within. I think it’s important to say a little about how this essay’s ideas all stand ‘on the shoulders of giants’, as it were, within a rich and distinctive academic tradition. Last year I wrote a book called ‘Re-reading Pareto on Elite Power and Societal Bipolarisation: a critical perspective on metapolitics and democracy’, published by Routledge. The broad social theory framework formed of Vilfredo Pareto’s seminal contributions to classical elite theory and general sociology more than a century ago is notable for its historical pessimism and underlying historical consciousness. In its combined sociological and historical imaginings, elites come and go. History is a ‘graveyard of aristocracies’. Ultimately their own cultural and psychological rigidity (or animal spiritedness as I also call it) tends to doom them – for they often will not adapt as times change. Finding much of merit within that broad social theory tradition, my book criticised today’s liberal elites for going too far in their legal, political and cultural (let’s also lump these domains together and say metapolitical) offensive against conservative non-elites.

Inspired by Pareto’s open elites ideal, my book considered the flexibility and adaptation benefits of mixing cultures and psychologies of liberalism and conservatism throughout elite institutions of all kinds. Chief among these benefits, I argued, are the dampening down of our culture war and the re-democratisation of our political systems to once more achieve practical working settlements between liberals and conservatives. That’s precisely the position I will now advance here, and which I plan to continue to advance throughout further similar essays. My overarching concern throughout my Pareto-inspired Substack writing will be to argue that there are lots of things corporations can do to promote conservative-liberal diversity which are good for business and for society as well – and which operationalise Pareto’s ‘open elites’ ideal for social peace and stability as times continually change. That being my basic concern, I should also take the opportunity here to highlight that although this essay may seem to be preoccupied with liberal elite bashing in some respects, my true underlying purpose is really to create theory which promotes sustainable flourishing of both conservative and liberal metapolitical currents across institutions of all kinds. Everyone is talking about ‘sustainability’ these days. Here I’m making sustainability about metapolitical sustainability in particular, recognising the desirability of having institutions that admit the full range of metapolitical expressions of human nature to ensure societies remain more or less at ease with themselves over time.

The structure I will now use to deploy the concept of prudence for this advocacy cause is as follows. Firstly, I will draw on Titian’s famous painting showing the three faces of prudence (which the left hand part of the above image is closely modelled on) to clarify core meanings of prudence and hopefully begin to convince the reader that balancing conservative and liberal perspectives in organisations is a sensible way to promote management in temporal depth – focusing especially on why this may promote more enlightened forward-looking views of risk. Secondly, I will look more closely at the commonplace organisational cultural problems this can help mitigate. This will entail theorising absence of temporal depth in terms of hypernormalisation and temporal provincialism – these being cultural problems which I believe are particularly useful for identifying what’s gone wrong with the left-liberal monocultures which have grown hegemonic across contemporary elite institutions of all kinds in recent years. The section will also use a simplifying organisational actor typology of Arriviste, Parvenu and Déclassé to denote temporally provincial – and in many instances metapolitically contrasting - outlooks that get stuck in the future, the present, and the past respectively – all of whom should be valued for their critical scrutiny of one another. Thirdly, I will say a little about commonplace corporate ethics codes today. This will highlight how integrity, near-ubiquitous across such codes, provides a solid foundation for cultivating prudence in organisations of all kinds – as indeed can very simply involve fleshing out people’s understandings of all that integrity can mean, by turning to all that prudence can mean. In the final substantial section I will explain based on some of my previous writings (and with reference to classical understandings of Prudence that associate closely to the image of the goddess Prudentia with her serpent and mirror as shown in the image at the top of this essay) that prudence is an ethically-faded yet ethically-revivable concept which warrants being pushed to the fore within organisations of all kinds as a lynchpin for risk culture, ethics culture and entrepreneurial culture. That discussion will establish prudence within a rich framework of cultural and psychological meaning, making the overall business and society case for promoting prudence via greater conservative-liberal diversity more compelling. I will then conclude with some final brief reflections on my metapolitical co-optation of prudence. I will concede in my concluding overview that prudence can have no political masters – and I will make that point with due reverence for the concept itself. Ultimately its power derives from its usefulness as a sensitiser to the nature of moral conscience and moral selfhood as arise from what Edward Shils once called the ‘sacred centre’ of European civilisation. Considered as such, prudence becomes a master concept for everyone to approach and use in their own way, hopefully leading them to become more metapolitically aware and tolerant as they improve themselves through it.

Titian’s Three Faces of Prudence

Titian’s Allegory of Prudence (c.1550–1565) is recognisable on the left side of the AI ‘adapted’ (ok, some might say ‘butchered’!) image positioned above this essay. It is a compact meditation on time, knowledge, and moral judgement, commonly interpreted as a visual philosophy of prudence. It provides a solid first step towards appreciating core meanings associable with that term. The painting presents three human heads aligned horizontally. We see an old man looking back into the past, a middle-aged man looking head on towards the present, and a young man looking forward into the future. These images and their temporal focus meanings further associate to three animal heads positioned immediately below them. This added symbolic psychology associates the past-focused older man to the animal spiritedness of the wolf, the present-focused middle-aged man to that of the lion, and the future-focused younger man to that of the dog.

I will leave it to others to trace these animal symbolisms from the Renaissance via medieval and Greco-Roman thought all the way back to ancient Egypt if they wish. There is much to be gained in doing so – but let’s keep it simple here. The wolf, associated with memory and devouring, represents the past as something that can consume or instruct us – or indeed abandon us as memory fades. Its backward-looking nature evokes experience, regret, and dangers already survived, which prudence must remember accurately and without becoming entrapped. The lion, emblem of strength, vigilance, and sovereignty, stands for the present, that moment of action in which judgment must be exercised with due courage and restraint; prudence is ineffective unless it governs power now. The dog, traditionally a symbol of loyalty, foresight, and watchfulness, soothes and reassures as it points toward the future, embodying anticipation and care for what is yet to come - since prudence ultimately aims at courageous pursuit and safeguarding of outcomes not yet realised.

Taken together, then, the animals express a classical moral logic: true prudence arises from remembering the past, acting rightly in the present, and providing wisely for the future. The inscription beneath the animal heads opines similarly follows: “From the experience of the past, the present acts prudently, lest it spoil future action.” Taking stock of all this symbolism, then, we can start to appreciate prudence as a concept fundamentally concerned with wise governance of action across time - or governance and management in temporal depth as we can also call it when looking from the contemporary organisational perspective.

Building from there, we can further value the painting for what it reveals about temporal consciousness, both in terms of its variance over the life course and in terms of the varying perspectives of successive generations. In other words, we can appreciate prudence even more when we equate it to transcendence of age-bound temporal limitation, as can only be achieved within human collectivities rather than by any given individual, and via intergenerational learning between younger, middling and older age groups. Many scholars consider this the main point of the painting, highlighting the intergenerational transmission of wisdom as being at stake. They claim the painting’s three human faces are really portraits of Titian himself, his son, and his nephew, implying a meditation on legacy, responsibility, and generational transmission. Seen in this light, prudence becomes an ethical obligation to hand on wisdom without burdening the future with the errors of the past. That gives us a powerful way to understand historical consciousness too – emphasising its underlying motivations as being deeply personal over and above mere history-curiosity. More particularly, and with reference to all Erik Erikson has said about generativity versus stagnation as a life stage conflict, it allows us to appreciate more of prudence’s rich psychological plenitude for meaning making in terms of what the political psychologist David Winter has called generative historical consciousness.

Overall, then, looking from a contemporary organisational perspective, the three faces of prudence concept gives us prudence as something arising through knowledge management over time in organisations, so that it may be brought to bear on collective governance bodies and in management teams more particularly. Consider also that we can get even more out of the concept when we think of a particular governance and management object: risky innovation. More specifically, the young man in Titian’s painting can be considered akin to liberal Prometheus: passionate for change, world-open, hopeful, brimming over with creative imagination. The older man can be considered akin to conservative Prometheus. Aware of the naivety, impetuousness and foolishness of youth, he offers a wisdom which has seen it all, yearns for better days, yet is fearful of what may come. In the middle we find the middle-aged man at the height of his powers and responsibilities. He must focus with realism on the here-and-now, contra the competing idealisms of those younger and older. Only with wise counsel coming from both sides can he manage with the wisdom that is Promethean Dualism.

Let’s now link these ideas more squarely to the management of risk in organisations. Here’s yet another way to think through the various meanings of Titian’s painting, this time allowing us to understand prudence more particularly as a risk term, and at the same time of risk itself as requiring team rather than individual management. Joseph Pieper’s classic neo-Thomistic view of prudence as forward-looking clearsightedness is elaborated in his 1965 book on the Four Cardinal Virtues. It provides by far the best introduction to the concept you will ever read. Drawing on his simplifying framing of prudence as clearsightedness, consider the idea that while the young man can be expected to dwell most upon matters of risk foresight, we can expect the middle-aged man and older man to dwell more upon matters risk oversight and risk hindsight respectively. Now overlay the idea that organisational striving for rare moments of risk insight, which can make all the difference to an organisation’s prospects, depend upon mixing all three. While all three men are temporally imbalanced in their risk imaginations, put all three together as a collective management team and risk insight generation becomes far more likely.

When we talk about Promethean Dualism and Prudence as balancing-techniques for collective governance and management, then, we are to a large extent talking about the same thing from different angles. Most of what we add into the mix when we switch focus from Prometheus to Prudence is recognition of some liberal to conservative transition within the normal life course, as well as conservative-liberal metapolitical variability between successive generations throughout history. Who would not wish all three faces of Prudence to be present, scrutinising and challenging one another, on any governance or management body? Consider that this is something easily achievable, moreover, simply by taking age seriously as a form of diversity – as per the growing academic literature on age diversity and organisational performance which seems to be reaching broadly positive findings today.

To sum up, by taking prudence to mean an ethically charged forward-looking view of things which balances passion and resolve to act at one end, with caution and apprehension at the other end, then, we can appreciate that the three faces of Prudence and the two faces of Prometheus are inextricable from one another. Taking them together allows us to achieve a richer understanding of what conservative-liberal balance can look like in organisations, and what its advantages are.

Now let’s continue to straddle business and society concerns as per the Promethean Dualism essay, aligning themes of age diversity, wisdom attainable through prudence, and institutional neutrality especially. And let’s start off with a problem specification which depicts today’s liberal elites as believing that civilised organisational cultures and values began in the 2010s, and that theirs are eternally good and true, contra the culture and values dark ages which prevailed throughout history until that time.

Hypernormalisation and Related Constructs

The concepts of hypernormalised elites, temporally provincial elites, and the related elite social actor figures of Arriviste, Parvenu and Déclassé, can all be woven together as variations on a shared sociological and moral theme: elite institutions and actors whose authority is fragile because their orientation to time, legitimacy, and meaning is distorted. Each concept describes a failure of elite institutional consciousness, not primarily in competence or power, but rather in how they situate themselves within history by preferring either the past, the present or the future as the best guide to culture and values.

The hypernormalised elite concept is perhaps most famously associated with Alexei Yurchak’s (2005) book on elite downfall in the last years of the Soviet Union – aptly entitled Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Drawing on the (2016) Adam Curtis BBC HyperNormalisation documentary on the subject has more recently become commonplace to apply the same ideas to today’s liberal elite hegemony. At the core of the theory lies the idea that sometimes elites operate within systems of belief and practice that are widely recognised as failing or hollow, yet which elite power itself demands are unquestionably regarded by all as normal. These elites perform rituals of authority - strategic plans, narratives of inevitability, symbolic commitments, and the like - while privately recognising their emptiness. Hence their elite status is maintained through performative conformity rather than conviction. Time, for hypernormalised elites, collapses into an endless present. The overriding task is to keep the system going today, regardless of long-term incoherence or future cost. The Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe is sometimes regarded as epitomising problems with hypernormalised elites on their last legs. Recognising that construction work on Chernobyl’s new Reactor 5 installation continued even as the crisis at Reactor 4 was rapidly spiralling out of control, some have started to refer to the oppressive denialism of late stage hypernormalised elites in terms of their entering into ‘Reactor 5 cultural moments’ which symbolise and expedite their final extinction.

The temporally provincial elite concept has origins in post-colonial theory where it denotes viewing western modernity as an advancement model all should follow. Yet it also works well as a term for the hubris and epistemic arrogance of liberal progressivism in its disdain for earlier more conservative eras. Perhaps the best way to approach the concept is by appreciating the irony it conveys. To dismiss other elites of different times and places as temporally provincial is to be temporally provincial oneself. And that being so, there may often be some element of projection involved when an elite starts to doubt itself while unable to confront that doubt directly – as we can associate with the psychology of elite hypernormalisation.

Applied to contemporary liberal elites, however, the concept associates less directly to fragile delusions of an eternal present and more to the idea that times are better now, such that narcissistic ego-maintaining downward comparisons get drawn with conservatives deemed still trapped in the past. The result, however, remains much the same. They operate with the same narrow time horizon. They lack historical depth and intergenerational imagination, mistaking recent arrangements for permanent truths. Their ‘provincialism’ is not geographic but temporal: they treat their own moment as uniquely enlightened while remaining blind to how fragile or contingent their norms are. Hence, they struggle to steward institutions across time, often confusing novelty and experimentation with inexorable progress. While hypernormalised elites get trapped in a cynical paralysis, then, the main defining feature of temporally provincial elites is more a developmental arrogance. For liberal elites we can equate this arrogance very straightforwardly to liberal progressivism, especially where we theorise this as a ‘big god’ secular religion of mass social control which is moved by magical belief in its own manifest destiny to claim sovereignty over history itself.

The elite social actor figures of Arriviste, Parvenu and Déclassé provide older sociological archetypes that further illuminate the psychology behind these elite pathologies. Arrivistes are those who have recently entered elite status. Often possessed of a calculated strategic ambitiousness, they are on the ascendent. They bring new ideas by which to promote themselves, yet they lack ease, legitimacy, and deep embeddedness. Meanwhile the Parvenu is typically caricatured as socially gauche, anxiously displaying status symbols to compensate for insecure belonging. Expect much ‘virtue signalling’ from them on their online profiles, as well as much uncritical moral conformity in their organisational lives – as we very commonly see manifesting today in robotic and shrill overuse of EDI and ESG discourse. For the Déclassé, organisational stewardship and status are slipping away or have slipped away. Dislocation and alienation will often bring compensatory striving for status with a reactionary ideological character which may be fearful of offering critical wisdom within organisations.

These simplifying typologies teach us much about diverse temporal orientations within organisations, as are likely to associate to conservative-liberal diversity in complex ways. Contemplate for example that in previous decades arrivistes have tended to be liberal ideologues emboldened by the continuing metapolitical inroads which liberalism has made – emanating from the civil rights movements and its legal and ideological legacies especially. Today, though, many of these same individuals have become parvenus and are even starting to become over-the-hill déclassés. Meanwhile, generations Z and Alpha seem to be increasingly bringing a new conservatism with them as they enter the institutions to become the new arrivistes.

Summing up, then, what unites all three types is their misalignment between position and responsibility, in a continuously turning wheel of career fortune which is likely to continue to speed up as the world speeds up. Hypernormalised and temporally provincial elites come into being when Arrivistes inherit institutions they do not fully understand and cannot imagine transmitting. They occupy positions whose moral grammars and logics they have not internalised. One settled as Parvenus, they impose new ones they believe are better – yet they cannot take external challenge well and quickly become prone to short-termism, performative virtue signalling, and symbolism-over-substance governance. Once the ideological wave they have surfed to advance their career has crashed against the rocks, they start to recognise deep down that because their authority is not grounded in historical understanding and ethical continuity, they cannot lead and govern with the gravity and grace they once envisioned for their ideal selves. Déclassé types notice this, sometimes because they have been through it all themselves, and they become animated by their concerns. Nonetheless they will often suffer in silence as they await their pensions.

Let us return, then, to our ideal of elite institutions defined not by access or success alone, but by governance and management in temporal depth with historical consciousness, indeed with prudence, which appreciates that power is always held in trust, shaped by the past and answerable to the future. Where this sensibility is absent, we might conclude, elites become curators of appearances rather than custodians of meaning. Hypernormalised elites, temporally provincial elites, and endless successions of Arrivistes, Parvenus and Déclassés who all follow one another on the same wheel of career fortune, can all be understood together as expressions of the same problem as has become all too commonplace today: elite status detached from memory, humility, responsibility… and, one might add, integrity.

Integrity

So, looking beyond experimentation with greater conservative-liberal diversity on governance bodies and in management teams, what can be done to promote solutions culturally within organisations? Let’s start to frame our solutions in terms of the need for organisational cultures based on integrity. This may seem like an odd solutions frame to jump in with here. However, consider that I’m trying to recommend practical solutions based on things organisations already do. Integrity has become a lynchpin ethics term within the ethics codes and policies of many organisations today. It is prominent, for example, in the Barclays Way, which was widely recognised as an industry-leading cultural change programme in the wake of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, which had seen many large financial institutions implicated in short-term profit driven recklessness. Focusing on the need for a clearer, shared culture and stronger ethical standards, the Barclays Way was designed to rebuild trust, strengthen accountability, and align colleagues around consistent values and behaviours across the bank. It defines integrity as doing the right thing - acting honestly, ethically, and responsibly, taking accountability for actions, and speaking up when something is not right, even when it is difficult or uncomfortable.

That view of integrity gels neatly with the term’s more widely recognised core meanings across organisations of all kinds – prominent among which is candour in raising concerns which project the ethical self into the workplace. Indeed, that is also a core meaning of ‘prudence’, as is explained shortly. Here, though, we can start to appreciate that promoting integrity in organisations can build cultural pathways for building temporal depth via constructive challenge – especially where integrity’s nature and contribution to ethics codes is explained to workforces with emphasis laid upon candour.

More fully though, integrity occupies a central place in contemporary ethics culture by expressing a need for integration (as indeed the word integrity most directly suggests) where values, identity, and action assemble together into a coherent whole. At its core it refers to alignment between what individuals and organisations claim to stand for and how they actually think, decide, and behave - especially when doing so is costly or inconvenient. Indeed, as we will soon see, all these points feature prominently in conceptions of ‘prudence’ also. In ethics cultures concerned not merely with compliance but with character, then, integrity functions as both a moral compass and a stabilising force.

In modern organisational contexts, integrity has shifted from being understood solely as personal honesty to being recognised as a systemic quality attributable to governance and management systems or teams. It involves consistency across time, situations, and pressures, and across levels of an organisation, qualifying it very much as a term of temporal depth. An organisation with integrity does not treat ethics as an external constraint but as an internal guide that shapes judgement, priorities, and trade-offs of all kinds – including of course intertemporal ones. This makes integrity particularly important in environments of complexity and uncertainty, where rules cannot anticipate every dilemma and where ethical failures often arise from false confidence in behavioural and cultural conformities rather than from ignorance.

Integrity is also closely tied to identity and self-governance. People act with integrity when they experience ethical commitments as part of who they are, not merely as expectations imposed from outside. As William Sumner argued when organisational sociology was still in its infancy, when people first encounter the corporate world, they do so having already been raised in folkways which have socialised them with very different culture and values expectations. Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft applies well here too. Perceived contrasts between the two realms can shock people as they enter the workplace. Subsequently there is always a private part of the corporate person that remains split off from their corporate self, which corporations are always better advised to try to harness than to ignore or deny. Set in this context of eternal tension between clashing social realities, integrity can be valued as supporting the intrinsic motivation of the private person in the workplace. Individuals must carefully regulate their own behaviours where violating their values would fracture their sense of self. Ethics cultures that appeal to integrity sanction giving serious attention to these dilemmas. Resulting enrichment of organisational culture can make organisations more resilient overall, as compared than those relying heavily on surveillance or incentives, which can be gamed or eroded over time.

Importantly, integrity also underpins trust and credibility. Stakeholders - employees, customers, regulators, and the public - use perceived integrity as a shortcut for judging reliability under uncertainty. Repeated gaps between stated values and actual conduct rapidly corrode trust, while visible integrity in difficult circumstances can generate legitimacy that no formal control system can easily replace.

Finally, integrity plays a protective role against ethical drift. By emphasising coherence between values and actions, it helps organisations remain alert to gradual compromises, normalisation of deviance, and self-serving rationalisations. In contemporary ethics culture, integrity thus serves not only as an ideal but as a practical safeguard, enabling ethical judgement, sustaining trust, and anchoring responsible action when certainty and comfort are absent. No wonder, then, that integrity is promoted heavily today within corporate ethics codes. There could be no better foundation of ethical meaning aligned to corporate advantage, for promoting prudence within corporate culture.

Integrity Through Prudence

Back in 2016 I wrote a discussion document called ‘Why Risk Cultures Need Prudence’ for the Centre for Risk Research at Southampton University. You can download it from the researchgate website. Therein I tried to advance a theoretically rich re-conceptualisation of risk culture by arguing that it should be grounded not in behavioural compliance or risk appetite frameworks, but in the cultivation of prudence as a virtue. Its central contribution was to reposition prudence as the most fundamental organising concept for healthy risk cultures, capable of integrating ethics, psychology, foresight, and organisational governance in ways current risk culture discourse often fails to achieve.

The document challenged narrow contemporary understandings of prudence as cautious foresight or risk aversion, recovering instead much older virtue-ethics meanings rooted in the phronesis (practical wisdom) of the Ancient Greeks. In this richer view, prudence is not merely about managing future uncertainty but about who a person is: a fusion of ethical concern, intellectual clarity, and self-knowledge that shapes judgement under pressure. This reframing positions prudence as intrinsic motivation and ethical self-governance leading to self-cultivation, contrasting sharply with dominant approaches to organisational ethics that rely on rules, incentives, or outcomes.

Second, the document offers a novel contribution to risk culture theory by arguing that prudence addresses a different and more intractable risk level problem than conventional risk culture models. Rather than calibrating acceptable levels of risk-taking, prudence targets the grey zone of concealed, biased, or reckless risk-taking that arises from psychological and ethical derailment. It argues that prudence is uniquely suited to this challenge because it engages employees’ personal moral compasses, supports cultures of candour and whistleblowing, and sustains vigilance against normalisation of deviance.

Third, the paper develops a psychologically sophisticated account of prudence as mindfulness and self-governance. Drawing on Pieper’s Neo-Thomistic view, it identifies four qualities of mind originally specified in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica - memory (memoria), openness to learning from others (docilitas), clear-sightedness under pressure (solertia), and foresight (providentia) - and shows how these map directly onto contemporary risk management challenges such as hindsight bias, groupthink, crisis decision-making, and risk identification. Importantly, mindfulness is reoriented inward: prudence entails monitoring not just external threats, but the internal cognitive and ethical conditions under which risk judgements are made. At this juncture we might usefully return to consider the symbolisms of wise and morally grounded judgment that are offered by the statue of Prudentia in St Peter’s Basilica. The mirror represents self-knowledge via reflection on the self’s past experiences, while the serpent signifies an alert anticipatory intelligence. Together they express the virtue of prudence as the ability to understand oneself, anticipate consequences, and act wisely.

A further major contribution is the introduction of ‘false prudence’ as a key explanatory construct for reckless risk-taking. False prudence is presented as a psychologically astute but ethically degraded form of self-governance associated with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (aka ‘the dark triad’). By linking classical virtue ethics to modern leadership and organisational psychology in this way, the document provides a powerful framework for understanding why some forms of intelligence, ambition, and charisma become sources of extreme risk rather than safeguards against it.

Finally, the document links prudence to generative historical consciousness - a concern for future generations and long-term flourishing - thereby grounding risk management in care, stewardship, and sustainability. The concluding provocation is that promoting prudence may accomplish everything risk culture initiatives aim to achieve, and more, by revitalising ethical personhood as the foundation of organisational risk governance. Overall, the document’s distinctive contribution lies in synthesising virtue ethics, psychology, and risk theory into a compelling alternative paradigm for understanding and cultivating healthy risk cultures that also work as cultures of ethics, innovation, and intrapreneurship within corporations.

Then in 2024 I followed up with an academic paper, written with colleagues, and entitled ‘Prudence as an Ethical Foundation for Risk Management’. This was published in the Society and Business Review journal. It proposed a virtue-ethics-based framework for understanding and shaping organisational risk management through the concept of prudence. Its central contribution was to distinguish between true prudence and false prudence as fundamentally different forms of foresight, each generating very different risk cultures, ethical outcomes, and patterns of behaviour within organisations.

Drawing on classical virtue ethics (especially Aristotle, Aquinas, and Joseph Pieper), it defined prudence as a fusion of foresight, ethical motivation, and practical wisdom. Prudence is presented as not merely cautious calculation but as a morally charged capacity to think ahead clearly and act courageously under uncertainty – ultimately because the moral self and its ongoing cultivation are recognised to be at stake. Risk management, in this view, is best understood as a form of ethically informed foresight embedded within everyday management practice, rather than a purely technical or procedural activity.

The paper’s first major insight is its articulation of true prudence as an ethical ideal. True prudence is characterised by clear-sightedness, openness to learning, humility about bias, and the courage to act on difficult truths. It envisions ethical integrity in in terms of integrated ‘being, knowing, and doing’. In this scheme, ethical character motivates the search for truthful forward-looking knowledge, which in turn informs responsible action. Hence in organisational settings true prudence supports proactive risk awareness, honest communication, stakeholder-minded decision-making, and willingness to speak truth to power.

In contrast, the paper theorises false prudence as a corrupted form of foresight driven by fear, self-protection, and short-term self-interest. False prudence is linked to narcissism and the broader ‘dark triad’ of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy as it was in the earlier 2016 paper. Here, though, the concept is used more to underscore the precariousness of risk foresight in organisations, which can easily become temporally constricted, morally impoverished, and strategically manipulative – depending upon the balance of true versus false prudence in the organisational risk imagination. Rather than improving risk management, false prudence leads to recklessness, information suppression, ethical blindness, and cultures that reward image management over genuine risk awareness.

A key further theoretical innovation is the paper’s use of Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development to deepen the contrast between true and false prudence. The authors associate true prudence with generativity - the life-stage orientation toward care, mentoring, and concern for future others - while false prudence is aligned directly with stagnation and narcissistic self-absorption. Generativity provides the emotional and moral energy that sustains long-term foresight, professional integrity, and ethical responsibility, whereas its absence encourages defensive, short-sighted risk behaviour.

Overall, the paper’s primary contribution is to reframe risk management as an ethical practice shaped by character and motivation. By offering a clear binary between true and false prudence, grounded in virtue ethics and developmental psychology, the authors provide organisations with a rich meaning making tool for reflecting on the kind of risk culture they are implicitly cultivating - and the kind they should deliberately aim to create.

Concluding Thoughts

Prudence has been discussed above as a term of intellectual and ethical sovereignty, as can be extremely useful for building institutional neutrality in circumstances where entire elite institutional cultures and values drift towards dangerous metapolitical excess and overreach. Yet despite being a great sensitiser to matters of organisational and more broadly elite-institutional metapolitics, it seems wise to affirm that it can adopt no particular metapolitical stance itself.

Prudence cannot be co-opted to serve any metapolitical cause because, being inseparable from concrete circumstances, and from evanescencies of character and lived judgment, it naturally maintains critical distance from all the abstract rules and values through which metapolitical excess always seeks to impose itself. To build prudence in organisations, therefore, is to cultivate conditions in which diverse conservative–liberal character traits can make important critical contributions in unique, spontaneous, and unpredictable ways. This can be expected to enrich the governance and management mix, especially when matters of risk and innovation are placed at issue, while at the same time tending to attenuate metapolitical excess over time.

Let me end on a conundrum, intended to illustrate that prudence can have no political masters. Which of the following two corporate employees do you think embodies true prudence more?

Employee A is a senior executive who has played a leading role in advancing the organisation’s sustainability agenda. He has overseen measurable progress on carbon reduction and circular economy initiatives and sees this work as an expression of prudent leadership, grounded in long-term responsibility and personal commitment.

Employee B is a more junior manager who is called into a disciplinary meeting chaired by A. B has publicly criticised the company’s ESG approach on social media, arguing that his critical perspective reflects popular concerns about the global ESG industry which he believes the company has chosen to remain wilfully blind towards. A views this action as inconsistent with the organisation’s stated values and believes it risks undermining its approach to environmental risk management.

When given further opportunity to justify his action, B explains that he felt motivated by a powerful sense of personal judgment and conscience. He argues that prudence sometimes involves accepting personal risk in order to raise concerns honestly, even when doing so may bring severe professional consequences. He contrasts this with what he perceives as more conventional forms of leadership, aligned closely with prevailing norms and incentives, whose big weaknesses tend to be those of uncritical conformity. Of course, he says this with A firmly in mind.

The more important question we should be asking, perhaps, is not which individual is more prudent, but rather can we respect both A and B for their critical perspectives formed through very different experiences of prudence. A feels he represents institutional responsibility, continuity, and delivery against agreed priorities. B feels he represents challenge, dissent, and the willingness to test assumptions. Each has encountered and harnessed prudence very differently. For A, generative historical consciousness is the thing most inspiring about prudence. For B it is speaking truth to power. Perhaps A is something of a Parvenu amidst organisational hypernormalistion of ESG ideology and practice, while B is more of an Arriviste who, finding doors closed, trips straight to being a disgruntled Déclassé. That is for historical consciousness to speculate on, and perhaps for history to set the record straight on in due course. If A and B both try to think about their dispute with historical consciousness, then they may end up tolerating each other more.

Organisations that take prudence seriously are likely to benefit from making space for both A and B by cultivating institutional neutralities more open to metapolitical pluralism. By encouraging open, respectful dialogue and allowing principled disagreement within clear boundaries, they can reduce polarisation, improve decision-making, and strengthen their capacity to manage complex and contested issues over time.

Introduction

One of the most useful things Substack essays can do is offer portable concepts that people already half-recognise. At their best, such concepts reduce daunting amounts of real-world complexity to simple mental models. They are easy to grasp and apply. They support people to more efficiently do things that already matter to them. I hope you’ll agree that all this is true of the concept of Promethean Dualism which I develop here. Admit it - it’s a catchy name. And as the essay title indicates, I make some very ambitious claims for it. I’m even for the most part serious about the title’s ‘saving democracy’ claim. Ok, this wording does exaggerate for effect. Nonetheless I believe the general mechanism I have in mind has very significant potential for impact. It needs to factor into political, regulatory and corporate discourse – and now. To the best of my knowledge, I am the first person to write about it and propose its widespread instantiation within organisations of all kinds either directly as best practice or indirectly via regulation. So, let’s get started… and let’s try to stay focused on the idea that Promethean Dualism is something very simple which all organisations can do quicky, easily and to any extent they wish, offering possibly enormous organisational and more broadly societal benefits. Fundamentally it involves harnessing liberal-conservative diversity and putting it to work in corporations.

This is intended as the first in a series of substack essays which will hopefully be uploaded several months apart from one another. It’s probably best to think of them as hastily written unreferenced working papers, or ‘brain dumps’ as I like to call them, which I will probably develop into full academic papers in due course. All will draw selectively from my ongoing academic work on whole-of-society factional bipolarisation between relatively liberal elites and relatively conservative-nationalist-populist-tribalist masses. The most significant example of this is surely my 2025 book ‘Re-reading Pareto on Elite Power and Societal Bipolarisation’, published by Routledge. Readers are free to accept or reject its simplifying liberal elites versus conservative non-elites model for contemporary ‘culture war’, upon which this present essay is grounded in certain key respects. My book goes through the model in detail.

All my essays will try to introduce some fresh thinking you won’t find elsewhere. I will do my best to pinpoint precisely what is new in each case, although this will prove tricky given that my work is entirely theoretical. In the present essay, where Promethean Dualism will be explained in terms of very basic human factors in governance and decision-making, a hurdle I will face is simply that in the study of such matters there is really nothing new under the sun. I will however clarify that while the specific practices I have in mind when I write about Promethean Dualism are not new at all (they all have small literatures dedicated to them), what is novel is my bundling them together within a mythological wrapper and highlighting the full range of associable benefits (as per this essay’s rather grandiose title).

The mythological wrapper, I believe, frames the theory’s ideas for optimal general appeal – e.g. by simplifying them, by giving them more mnemonic power, and in other ways too which will take some explaining. It’s really their general appeal, I argue, that unlocks the full range of benefits. Ultimately, my theory of Promethean Dualism makes a bold play for helping people cultivate fuller, fairer and more balanced thoughts about aspects of both the physical world (especially risky new technology) and the social world (especially culture war politics) which matter enormously today.

We get to more of the theory itself very soon. Before that I do need to set out a few preliminary thoughts on contemporary liberal versus conservative factional bipolarisation. My purpose here is not to analyse this in any detail but rather to establish it as problem context from which the essay will develop Promethean Dualism as a big partial solution. I envisage Promethean Dualism as liberal-conservative diversity that can simultaneously enhance professional competence for governance and decision-making and contribute to reversing factional bipolarisation on the grand social scale. Although compelling arguments for it can be formed independently on both levels, the greater picture is that the theory challenges us to link the realms of business and politics in subtle ways, seeing more of both as a result.

I believe that it is mainly the theory’s political fortunes that are likely to drive its prospects for transforming views of technical best practice in organisations, rather than vice versa. More fully, I believe that if the political winds continue to blow in its favour (as they seem to be with today’s ‘vibe shift’ in the UK) then possibilities for regulatory and organisational momentum will increase, at which corporate uptake could start to work its magic upon political commonsense in an ongoing feedback loop which ultimately benefits both corporate and political realms. So, summing up, I envisage Promethean Dualism first as a political lever for supporting what regulators do, second as a regulatory lever for supporting what corporations do, and third as a corporate lever for fostering more mature democratic character via technical best practice, both within the institutions and across society more generally. At the same time, though, let me reiterate that a compelling case for Promethean Dualism can be made purely on a corporate level, given likely benefits in terms of institutional neutrality and management of reputation, safety, and performance.

Sensitivity to mutual conditioning influences connecting all three of the above realms is probably best considered a form of realism, contra naïve views that cultivation of organisational best practice can ever happen free of influences from higher ideological advocacy powers, and that the corporate world has no moulding influences upon political consciousness warranting careful scrutiny by regulators and governments. I think it would be intellectually dishonest to underplay Promethean Dualism’s political aspect. Although in previous decades we took liberal-conservative viewpoint diversity for granted, rights to free expression on the conservative side have sadly become one of the most contentious issues within culture war politics today. Hence to make Promethean Dualism either a regulatory or corporate matter today is a political act. There’s no hiding that.

I regard liberal-conservative bipolarisation as a civilisational problem. Universalist liberal progressivism pressing down from above and particularist conservatism loyal to people and place pushing back up from below might find easy settlement with one another were they merely incommensurable by moral logic. Such differences do not by themselves threaten social cohesion. Indeed, both liberal and conservative moral logics are necessary and mutually enabling for any society. Most 20^th century social and political theory is concerned, one way or another, with managing tensions between them. The true underlying problem comes with our present historical moment. The forces of modernity have finally transformed the character of elite institutional power to the point where conflict has grown unmanageable. Liberal elites and conservative non-elites have not merely drifted apart; rather, it has grown painfully obvious that both sides now want wholly incompatible things. Adding urgency to the conflict, of course, is the Thucydides trap problem which everyone is talking about today: due to mass immigration and differing birth dates, conservatives desiring ethnic continuity within nationhood are increasingly outnumbered by political coalitions formed of globally minded liberals and ethnic block votes.

Hence liberals and conservatives are now placing demands and expectations upon one another which cannot possibly be met. This has raised tensions which may yet prove uncontainable within democratic political systems. Consider this problem from the national security perspective: ask people on both sides of the liberal elite versus conservative non-elite culture war divide what they believe the greatest national security threats are and they will point the finger straight at each other.

To elaborate this problem slightly as one that deepens through fear-driven factionalisation on both sides, consider that each side seems to be factionalising internally through resolve to protect and push forward as a civilisation-building agenda precisely what the other side identifies as imminent and existential threat. Or, to refine this idea using risk terminology, each side seems to be factionalising around a primary object at risk set which is at the same time the other side’s primary risk object set.

Let’s not upset anyone too much by going into significant further detail about the nub of the conflict. I’ve probably said enough already. I’ll leave it to the reader to flesh out the above risk object and object at risk categories. Actually, I think that is a very useful exercise. It should be set as an essay or class discussion question in schools, colleges and universities to cultivate civic reasonableness and tolerance. If you are a teacher reading this, why not give it a go and let me know how you get on?

It’s a question that requires a great deal of sensitivity. Both liberal elites (and their many hangers on) and conservative non-elites (and their many censorship-scarred online intellectual advocates) share a deep understanding of what divides the two great social blocks. Nonetheless both sides are all too easily offended by suggestions that their culture war opponents might have any legitimacy or reasonableness. The problem with elaborating a view of the nub of the conflict is that this faces the hard choice of either demonstrating in-group fealty through a frantic manicheanism for one side or the other, or of validating both sides to at least some small extent. That’s because to sum up the nub of the conflict with any kind of concern for balanced fairness is necessarily to aspire to capture the fundamental reasonableness of the differing moral logics both sides operate by. And that is just not something millions upon millions of factionalised minds want to contemplate nowadays. Identity has become factionalised today as fragile political pseudoidentity, which has become an ego-defensive necessity as the traditional sources of identity have increasingly failed in the modern world.

To some, this culture war problem of factionalised mind may seem more like something Swift would impute to the Lilliputian mind, as opposed to something a serious commentator on societal bipolarisation might diagnose as mass political psychopathology for modern well-educated, knowledge-based yet bipolarised societies. Nonetheless I stand by it. I would go as far as to add that if we were to take the closed-minded manicheanism of today’s liberal institutional elites and time-travel it back to Swift’s writing desk as a blueprint for making the Lilliputians seem comedically foolish, he would probably have rejected it as far too absurd for his intended readership. Elites who demonise demands for simple exclusivities and continuities of peoples and nations, branding that as ‘hate’ even though it obviously expresses basic human needs and aspirations? And who then write laws which jail the ‘haters’ for years on end for even the most trivial expressions of dissent, even when almost nobody notices what they say? Stuff and nonsense, surely. Who would believe that, even as fiction?

Suffice to say, we have a big problem on our hands. It now dominates political life and seems to escalate every year. While many remain afraid to talk about it, the greater underlying problem is that the factionalised mind cannot think reasonably about it. This essay is really all about giving the factionalised mind a workaround towards reasonableness which relies on context-switching its view of liberal-conservative difference from politics to technical practice within organisations. It reframes and re-contextualises liberal-conservative tension to become Promethean Dualism within technical best practice, thus encouraging both liberals and conservatives to take a more reasoned and balanced view of one another.

Finding working settlement between liberal elites and conservative non-elites is perhaps the greatest challenge facing European civilization today. We need to find ways to talk about balance which are somehow viable for both sides. We also need to find ways to inject these ideas of balance into how we construct the theory and practice of statecraft – and by extension the regulatory craft (recognising that regulation is for the most part how states get things done). Similarly, we need to find ways to plug these ideas of balance more directly into how corporations and associated professions of all kinds handle issues of institutional neutrality and free expression – or diversity of thought and opinion if that is what they prefer to call it. Cultivate whole-of-society balance on all these fronts and you can start to reduce whole-of-society culture war through the emergence of a balance-based ideal of democratic character. Only whole-of-society re-democratisation with heavy corporate involvement, I believe, can possibly revive democratic political systems to once more accomodate materially significant conservative-liberal political difference. This just might allow them to move back from the brink of their present ongoing destabilisation into what I prefer to call anocratic decay. I take that term to mean volatile alternation between weak and distrusted governments which increasingly deploy authoritarian measures (e.g. turnkey techniques of digital totalitarianism, lawfare and anarcho-tyranny) to secure themselves against one another. Our ongoing destabilisation in this direction may not end well for anyone. In 2025 the David Betz civil war thesis became well known for showing what further deterioration may start to look like in the very near future. His nationalism versus post-nationalism framing of the conflict nub makes it very clear how conservative-liberal difference manifests as severe threat to social peace nowadays. Contra Betz’ view that it is too late for solutions, I believe we need to recognise what is at stake and do everything we can to bring society back from the brink.

Tragically, the academic social sciences have become almost no use at all in the search for balance-based solutions – so partisan have they become for the liberal progressive cause. You can’t theorise across nationalist versus post-nationalist echo chambers when you are trapped in the post-nationalist one and you are deeply shocked and disgusted when anyone steps outside it. Let me therefore try to fill the gap to some extent, by looking for balance-based solutions in perhaps the last place most people will think to look: the corporation. Many see the modern corporation as neo-liberalism incarnate – indeed possibly the most powerful driver of liberal ideological excess in the modern world which will not rest from its zealous conversion work until it has turned all into de-ethnicised individual units of production and consumption. Few regard it as a social force which might have any interest at all in balancing out liberal and conservative worldviews. And yet this is exactly where I believe we should be looking for our solutions. Moreover, I believe that the best corporate levers for creating more politically balanced societies are ones that can appeal directly to today’s corporations narrowly preoccupied with their own ends, as per shareholder value assumptions about the legal purpose of the corporation. Deep down, corporations don’t really care about liberal ideology or about any other type of ideology. Their post Occupy Wall Street great awokening may have suggested otherwise for a while – but the grim reaper hanging over that short term experiment has always been its effects upon competency and profit. Corporations can be more timelessly relied upon to care a great deal about making very careful trade-off judgments which manage safety and reputation to optimise performance and profit. So, if integrating some liberal-conservative political balance can help them balance their pursuit of these organisational goals, then they can be expected to experiment with this right up to the point of maximum value extraction.

Steering corporate practice to heal today’s deep culture war divisions is something we should all be talking about much more. My input here is to advocate for the depoliticisation of the corporation organically and from within the corporation itself, via a new ideal of reputationally astute institutional neutrality (which despite being mostly a higher education term has very close corporate analogues). I align this to a new ideal of technical best practice for safety and performance, focused on governance and management of risky innovation. That’s really what my proposals for Promethean Dualism amount to in a nutshell. Politics-brained culture warriors reading this will probably be thinking, huh? Yes, this is a completely new proposal, from straight out of nowhere and, I hope, with sufficient appeal to get both culture warriors favouring corporate depoliticisation, and corporate technicos seeking easy incremental best practice improvements, on board together albeit for wholly different reasons.

Promethean Dualism is really a form of diversity which warrants certain comparisons with gender diversity in boardrooms. Both are metapolitically highly significant although they push in directly opposite directions. One pushes corporations more to the left-liberal view of things. The other offers metapolitical correction for left-liberal excess. Both therefore raise similar issues of soft political capture and use of the regulatory state. Indeed – an excellent 2025 report by the Policy Exchange on ‘Corporate Cancel Culture’ offers important insights into how gender diversity on boards became a regulatory requirement in the UK despite very mixed evidence of pathways to improved corporate performance. Promethean Dualism’s likely pathways seem far more compelling. Why gender diversity on boards should boost corporate performance is far from obvious – and the dynamics of corporate cancel culture do seem to have at least something to do with its rise. Why Promethean Dualism might be expected to sometimes boost performance, by stark contrast, is pretty much clear from the start.

For nearly quarter a century I have been both a business school academic concerned with corporate practice in its forward-looking aspect (i.e. risk management) and an academic writer on Vilfredo Pareto and the classical elite theory tradition within sociology. Not many people spend their academic careers contemplating the niche formed of the two. And so there now follows a ‘business in society’ article which pushes this combined specialism in a completely new direction. It makes big claims about how to co-improve business and society, focusing on wise corporate governance and management of the ‘Promethean Flame’ (i.e. risky innovation). This could be the most politically loaded proposal for improving corporate best practice you will ever read, and yet you can take the politics out of it entirely and it will still make sense. The Promethean Flame expresses our deepest civilisational anxieties – especially as we have become advanced technological societies. Here I argue that corporations need to bring conservatives and liberals together to manage it safely and effectively – at all levels of scale. That’s Promethean Dualism.

The Myth

The Prometheus myth presents as many subtle variations in meaning as there are versions of it - and there are indeed many, which I need not catalogue or differentiate in any significant detail here. My focus is instead on the basic mythic schema shared by almost all of them. This schema is fundamentally dualistic: it resonates differently with liberal and conservative experiences of risky innovation, inviting us to recognise and appreciate both perspectives and their synergising roles in the ongoing human story of technological civilisation-building.

At the centre of the myth stands the Titan Prometheus, stealing fire from Zeus and passing it to humankind. Human agency for civilisational progress could now begin. The fiery Promethean furnace thus lit is most fully interpreted as both human and technological in character. Through the metaphor the human world emerges as perpetually precarious, pivoting between creation and destruction. Ethical and intellectual frailties of both mind and will bring chaos on the human side. These are sometimes elaborated via Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, where techno-pathologies of hubris, epistemic arrogance, and frenzied drive towards exploitative domination all get theorised together. At the same time, on the technology side, the disruptive and transformative potential within technology itself continually threatens to exceed capacities for wise human custodianship. The resulting notion of a simultaneously human and technological furnace for civilisational progress and destruction clearly speaks loudly to modern public anxieties. As trust in elite institutional power continues to hemorrhage, suspicions over who owns technology, what they want to do with it, and why, are growing more distinctively Promethean.

A big part of this problem is that while humans always remain unreliable custodians, the harm they are likely to cause as technology advances will most likely escalate over time. And yet we can’t throw out the human and technological downsides while retaining their upsides. All we can do is try to watch the fire as best we can. Such is the combined psychological, cultural and technological realism that is ‘Promethean Dualism’, where we try to tame enthusiastic technological advance with some degree of constructive critical apprehension.

This critical apprehension is powerfully evoked within the myth. Zeus chains Prometheus to a rock as punishment for his transgression. In Hesiod’s original telling of the myth this act seems to have been motivated by a desire to punish insubordination and reassert divine authority. Yet in the later tellings of Aeschylus, Plato, and especially later philosophers, there is much more explicit recognition that Zeus acted from a foreboding that humans would not make good use of their new capacities.

In nearly all versions of the myth, this sense of foreboding gets transferred directly onto Prometheus himself. Each day, for thousands of years, a bird of prey devours his innards. Hence his punishment signifies his crippling guilt and anxiety over what humanity might do with the gift he has bestowed upon them. Although the image of Prometheus bound carries a superficial resemblance to Christ-like atonement, it is more convincingly rooted in forward-looking radical uncertainty.

For Hesiod it took a hero – Hercules - to finally free Prometheus. Hercules was both son of Zeus and champion of humanity. For Hesiod he seems to represent both divine-human reconciliation and a make-do workaround recognising that we need to find ways to make the best of this predicament. While Hercules’ freeing of Prometheus does not happen in all versions of the myth, we might usefully shortcut to the meanings of alternate versions by recognising that Prometheus can never really be free, and we wouldn’t want him to be either. This is simply because vigilance of risky innovation must always remain necessary and must always remain anxious too. Indeed – anxiety is the emotional seat of all vigilance, as any risk psychologist who knows about the workings of the brain’s surveillance system will tell you.

Taking stock of the myth’s basic conceptual structure, then, we find dual meanings both for the fire and for Prometheus as follows:

1. On the liberal side of the myth, the Promethean flame is of course risky innovation and its human drivers. Prometheus symbolises precarious governance of these drivers as the light-spirited trickster and sprint-hurdler over Chesterton’s fences who breaks authority’s rules to pass the torch to the underdog. Notice the liberal character portrait I overlay here, to form a blueprint of the innovator whose passion for doing what they perceive to be good can easily become their undoing. If you hesitate to accept this view of psychological liberalism as close to tricksterism, and perhaps wish to read more about it, perhaps consult my 2025 book on elite power and societal bipolarisation where I argue for their close overlap in considerable detail. I say quite a lot there about why we can expect to find the liberal trickster pattern spread disproportionately around the higher echelons of many organisations.

2. On the conservative side of the myth, the Promethean flame is also unintended destructiveness in the absence of sufficient governance and forethought. Prometheus himself, then, also corresponds to the risk-averse conservative whose apprehension over innovation and its consequences is both deeply paternalistic and yet also somewhat misanthropic – or let us be kinder and call it psychologically realist towards human folly. He may also be the recovering, deeply regretful innovator, as per common reference to Oppenheimer as ‘The American Prometheus’. Notice how these are psychological themes we associate strongly with conservative or authoritarian personality. As you might guess, my 2025 book looks at this pattern in some detail too, emphasising that such personalities value persistence of the familiar (sometimes called ontological security) above all else. Conservatives have of course been subject to much corporate cancellation in recent years, for expressing centuries-old folkish commonsense on matters of cultural permanence and continuity.

Clearly the two form antipodes to one other. Tensions are inevitable. Whether we harness these tensions and put them to good use within adversarial governance and decision-making or allow them to fester is up to us. Welcome, then, to the rich character sketch that is Promethean Dualism, where the optimistic liberal trickster and the anguished pessimistic conservative both oppose one another and yet together provide character-based 360° adversarial scrutiny of risky innovation.

The Prometheus myth persists today because it perfectly captures anxieties of technological humanity in complex and fast-moving reflexive modernity. Paul Virilio famously said of this world that the faster it moves, the more its technological products threaten us with ‘integral accidents’: the ship gave us the shipwreck, electricity gave us electrocution, etc. This accident-prone world has blighted us with epistemic overload too. It skids around from one catastrophe to the next with no regard to the categorical boundaries – e.g. formed of political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental domains – within which ‘experts’ position themselves. Factor in global interconnectedness too and it becomes plain that we live in a world marked by ‘poly-crises’, a chaos of unpredictable ‘black swan’ events, which shows no signs of slowing down and de-complexifying to more manageable epistemic proportions any time soon.

In this world, uncertainty over outcomes for literally all significantly scaled human endeavours has become the norm. Think of it this way: the gap between intentions and outcomes for all risky innovation undertaken at scale has grown ever more apparent. This is surely a factor in our diminishing trust in institutions of all kinds. Recognising this, we can say that all corporations undertaking risky innovation at scale face growing reputational challenges over diminishing prospects for competency. Promethean Dualism can surely be a big part of the solution.

The Origins of a Governance and Management Theory

In my 2010 paper, “From the Myth of Prometheus to Strategic Resilience,” published in the Prometheus journal, I first outlined my theory of Promethean Dualism along quite narrow governance and management lines. The culture war was not as heated as it would soon become. Corporations didn’t appear as politically partisan as they very often do now. Conservatives weren’t being systematically cancelled from them just yet. I was therefore not moved to give much thought to the theory’s broader political implications.

My paper argued that although risk and innovation are conceptually unrelated, we routinely bind them together through deep-seated cognitive paradigms rooted in personality and culture. The first of these is the Promethean conservative paradigm, which—despite Prometheus’s common association with liberal rebellion—emerges from the other half of the myth: the destructive potential of fire, the tragedy of human hubris, and the suffering of Prometheus as a figure who unleashes forces beyond human control. Read through this conservative lens, the Prometheus myth encodes a dread of innovation, grounded in suspicion about human nature, fear of unintended consequences, and a tendency toward reductionist explanations that attribute complex risks to human fault. This paradigm frames innovation itself as a source of danger. It resonates strongly with psychological patterns of conservatism and authoritarianism as have been illuminated by many decades of psychometric research. It encourages governance logics concerned with restraining excess, curbing abuses of power, and protecting against human fallibility.

My second paradigm - strategic resilience - reflected the liberal strand of the Promethean heritage: the belief that purposeful transformation is central to human progress, and that failing to innovate is riskier than change itself. In this reading, the myth symbolises humanity’s capacity to reshape its world and to avoid stagnation through continuous invention. Modern business culture has increasingly embraced this liberal, future-oriented worldview, equating innovation with opportunity, adaptability, and survival in high-velocity competitive environments. Indeed, most large corporations recognise continual transformation as a necessity today. Ability to manage this well became widely regarded as an important source of competitive advantage throughout the 2010s. This is also precisely when ‘resilience’ discourse became ascendent with core meanings of managing crisis uncertainty and ongoing strategic agility fused together as a combined set of capabilities. My 2010 paper was therefore perhaps marginally ahead of the hype in its attention to its strategic resilience paradigm.

My paper further argued that both paradigms are psychologically real. They are supported by powerful psychometric evidence linking risk tolerance and innovativeness with liberal traits, and risk aversion with conservative–authoritarian traits – such that there arises a compelling argument for harnessing both for organisational sense-making. This, I argued, is likely to benefit from explicit corporate recognition that the Prometheus myth’s dual mythic narratives continually compete beneath our cognition: the conservative Promethean fear that innovation invites destruction, and the liberal Promethean hope that innovation is the only safeguard against decline.

Let me therefore summarise Promethean Dualism as a Governance and Management Framework for corporate use as dynamic tension between the two mutually supportive paradigms as follows:

1. The Consequential Paradigm: Prometheus as the figure who anticipates the fallout of his actions and ultimately bears the cost. This paradigm emphasises heavy resourcing of foresight, scrutiny of internal risk especially, systems awareness, scenario planning, resilience capabilities modelled on how high reliability organisations manage unexpected crises, and the cultivation of candour and professional challenge emphasising caution within the organisational culture.

2. The Generative Paradigm: Prometheus as the archetype of invention. This paradigm legitimises boundary-crossing, experimentation, structural disruption, and environmental scanning capabilities turned outward in search of transformative possibilities. It maps neatly onto contemporary innovation cultures: agile development, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and rapid capability expansion.

These are of course illustrative contents. People may populate the two paradigms with concepts referring to particular business structures, processes or capabilities as they see fit. They have a bewildering array of high-level strategy, risk, uncertainty, innovation and agility-based management concepts to choose from today. Whatever people come up with, Promethean Dualism is simply the disciplined synthesis of the two paradigms. The point is to reject extremes of both naïve optimism (“innovation is inherently good”) and conservative paralysis (“innovation is inherently dangerous”). Instead, Promethean Dualism treats innovation as an ambivalent domain requiring continuous recalibration. Maybe think of organisations which implement it for better governance and management of risky innovation, then, as high wire acts where the balancing pole continually jerks up and down erratically at both ends so that the acrobat can remain steady.

Notice also how this balancing act comes close to what is often termed organisational ambidexterity today. This relates more specifically to challenges of balancing organisational resources between innovation and exploiting existing capabilities. It similarly links very closely to the idea that organisations need to maintain dynamic entrepreneurial capabilities for leaning fast into opportunities for innovation whenever these present themselves. Knitting the three concepts together, we can say that Promethean Dualism can help organisations achieve better governance of their dynamic entrepreneurial capabilities, so that better resourcing judgments can be made quickly under high uncertainty.

The point of the balancing pole is of course to prevent the acrobat from falling. Similarly, Promethean Dualism comes with the warning that organisations may fail precisely because they lean too heavily or for too long into either of its two paradigms. Overemphasising the generative mode leads to overconfidence, inadequate scenario mapping, and brittle systems. Overemphasising the consequential mode produces stagnation and lost opportunity. Promethean Dualism signifies the human tension between creativity and caution that should always remain the default position.

Implementing Promethean Dualism

Let me simplify down further here. While the management paradigms outlined above are hardly cost free for corporations, I will now explain that practical working implementations of Promethean Dualism for specific governance and management decision-making bodies can be incremental, hassle free, and perhaps even cost free in many cases. The main costs are probably recruitment costs associable with ensuring both conservative and liberal representation.

In a nutshell, by Promethean Dualism I mean 360° adversarial scrutiny of risky innovation. Implementing it in corporations can therefore straightforwardly entail some piecemeal conservative-liberal representation re-balancing on corporate or management bodies to complement that which is already there. What matters is that this happens to the point where both conservative caution and liberal enthusiasm retain at least some voice and influence. The key thing to avoid is what has happened in academia over the last several decades, where conservative voice and influence have been almost entirely choked off. Each governance or management body presents a unique challenge. Even having one or two people on any such body who are a combination of knowledgeable, active and independent, can make all the difference. To duplicate such inputs through high quality conservative and liberal representation can be a very tough call. Promethean dualism becomes valuable within such contexts, nonetheless, as a consideration weighing upon the minds of those who must make the appointments from whatever limited pools of candidates are available.

My vision of Promethean Dualism is one where some balancing of conservative-liberal balancing of governance and management becomes justifiable for the most part on safety management and associated business management grounds. That follows straightforwardly from the fact that it takes risky innovation, in all its forms, as its immediate management object. The icing on the cake is that this also builds institutional neutrality while accruing further reputational benefits in terms of intensive concern shown for safety governance and management.

This reference to institutional neutrality requires some elaboration. The term is commonly used within university contexts to refer to institutional level silence, epistemic humility and tolerance (e.g. the 1967 Kalven principles) and to viewpoint protection for individual academics and students so that they may pursue truth without fear of the woke mob (e.g. the 2014 Chicago principles). In corporations these principles require some adaptation. A particular concern is to preserve fiduciary legitimacies of corporate actors in bewilderingly complex stakeholder environments across plural markets, jurisdictions and cultures. These problems grow difficult to manage, of course, when we factor in today’s culture war. Somehow specifications of mission-bound and value-bound speech must be found which permit corporations to muddle through, and which allow for some degree of internal pluralism knowing that too much or too little in either liberal or conservative metapolitical directions might easily result in reputational whiplash. Viewed within that context, Promethean Dualism becomes significant as a lever permitting corporations to steer through changing metapolitical times via ongoing metapolitical correction. This might happen incrementally, and stealthily if preferred, either on particular governance or management bodies which are of stand-out reputational significance, or it might happen right across entire corporations via cultural change programmes.

We know that psychological conservatives tend to approach risky innovation with negative affect. Psychological liberals tend to approach it with positive affect. Promethean Dualism harnesses this most ‘political’ of all diversities, recognising it as the diversity we may often need most for better governance of decision-making whenever some matter of risky innovation comes up for corporate discussion. This is of course very often, and at all levels of scale, within advanced technological societies. At root, then, this diversity is affective in character. It simply deals with positive and negative emotional orientations to risky innovation. While diversity of pertinent technical knowledge must surely be acknowledged as the diversity that matters most for any management team challenge involving risky innovation, basic affective orientations are also likely to matter enormously as drivers of professional challenge to ensure healthy levels of critical scrutiny and avoidance of groupthink – especially in time stressed information poor decision contexts.

Working from this simplified view of Promethean Dualism as affective diversity, here are some best practice proposals for improvements to corporate governance and management decision-making, focused on conservative-liberal balanced scrutiny of risky innovation in all its guises. Taking this as a human relations management challenge, for example, consider that psychometrics solutions for balancing conservative and liberal representation in governance/management teams are easily arrangeable. These tap pertinent affective orientations quite directly. Various widely used instruments tap differing general attitudes towards: (i) risk (e.g. Zuckerman’s Sensation Seeking scales, Weber et al.’s Domain specific risk taking (DOSPERT) scales, Meertens & Lions’ Risk Propensity scale), (ii) innovation (e.g. the Costa & McCrae NEO-PI-R Big Five Openness to Experience scale) and (iii) conservatism-liberalism (e.g. the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism scale and Altemeyer’s Right Wing Authoritarianism scale ). HRM professionals can administer these if they are keen to document evidence of balance, and they can also hybridise them as they see fit.

Or more informally, anyone wishing to include conservative-liberal balance within any governance or management body formed at any level of scale can simply make fast-and-loose character judgments to ensure that at least some conservative-liberal dynamic gets included. In fact, that’s probably better, because what really matters in Promethean Dualism, I would suggest, is dynamic tension between unpredictable and ineffable characters capable of expressing the full range of conservative and liberal perspectives.

Moreover, consider that Promethean Dualism comes in a mythological wrapper which gives it durable mnemonic value. This qualifies it as well suited for organisational training aimed at encouraging Promethean Dualism as a mindset which everyone should aspire to within organisations. At that point, it ceases to be a form of diversity which encourages adversarial analysis for risky innovation, and it gets internalised as a formula for mindfulness within the risk culture, the safety culture, the entrepreneurial culture, the business culture, and so on.

My corporate call-to-action really is as simple as sketched out above. Indeed, one must wonder why nobody has thought of it before. While it is conceptually simple, as well as cheap (or even wholly cost free) and extraordinarily easy to implement, the benefits on offer are potentially enormous. Given its intrinsic low pain vs high potential gain nature, I would argue that all corporations should be amenable to at least some experimentation with it. Business and regulatory pressure to implement the corporate logic of kaizen (continual improvement), when applied to corporate governance and decision-making in particular, mandates open-minded ‘do what works’ experimentation aimed at optimising governance and management decision-making structures and mixes to achieve better corporate outcomes. That spirit of ongoing experimentation is really what Promethean Dualism needs to hook into.

Conclusion

Promethean Dualism gives corporations a rationale, should they desire it, to stealthily extricate themselves from the left-liberal positionings in the culture war which they have increasingly become embroiled in over the last few years – without even having to acknowledge that these positionings ever existed. Let’s not generalise about reasons for the left-liberal ‘great awokening’ of the corporate world which seems to have gathered pace since the Occupy Wall Street years, or of the respective roles which the growing transnational capitalist classes, and the rainbow lanyard classes below them, have played in this. Some corporations are now back-pedalling at speed, either because they have run into ‘get woke go broke’ problems they didn’t see coming, or because they now wish to adapt to changing US legal, regulatory and public preference climate under the Trump regime. Others are unrepentant and are doubling down on implementations of EDI and ESG metapolitical ideology.

Despite all this metapolitical heterogeneity the corporate world does, on the whole, seem to be a metapolitical crossroads where it is now more likely to value metapolitical wiggle room such as any theory and associated corporate best practice intervention might provide. A new real metapolitik has emerged, recognising that corporations now need to tread vary carefully around worsening societal conflict and radical uncertainty over what the metapolitical character of government and regulation might look like in the very near political future. Promethean Dualism can show the way forward towards a new strategic metapolitical ambiguity within the corporate world, as can allow it to adapt as the metapolitical winds continue to blow violently and unpredictably in both directions. Today’s liberal elites will most likely be very uncomfortable with Promethean Dualism’s call for balance as they will perceive it as ceding hard fought metapolitical ground to their culture war enemy. Likewise, though, in a conservative corporate culture its call for balance may be perceived as threateningly liberal. In all cases, though, to persevere with it is to maintain a metapolitical gyroscope, of sorts, for adjusting to changing times.

Promethean Dualism can always remain justifiable, at the same time, in terms of its standalone corporate logic and with reference to already widely accepted corporate practices it dovetails neatly with. Corporations are nowadays generally quite responsive to arguments for improved governance and management decision-making via various forms of diversity associable with improved outcomes. Academic journals specialising in corporate governance now offer vast empirical literatures on that. There are also significant smaller sub-literatures which take a broadly positive view on diversity of conservative-liberal viewpoint and cognition. This only seems to turn negative where increasing the diversity imports culture war animosity to the point where this undermines collegialities.

My proposals for Promethean Dualism also align well with high Reliability Organisation (HRO) literatures which call for conceptual and organisational slack of all kinds to better manage crises in the making. Such literatures often recognise adversarial sparring as making positive contributions – an idea which has a very long ancestry. Ipcha Mistabra (aramaic: On the Contrary) practice adopted by the Israeli military, and likewise Advocatus Diaboli (Devil’s Advocate) practice used by the Vatican for sainthood decisions from the medieval period right up to 1983 (at which point its use was reduced) both famously demand the presence of adversarial views to counter biases in group decision making. This is what red-teaming, in all its forms, ultimately amounts to as well. Red teaming practices have become prominent within risk management over the last decade or so – not least due to the need to simulate cyber-security threat. Promethean Dualism simply repackages all this thinking by harnessing conservative-liberal tension in particular.

Promethean Dualism also dovetails neatly with philosophies of risk tolerance such as have become prevalent in all kinds of organisation. Zero risk philosophy says that whatever is being managed can and must be kept safe – such that following risk control interventions it must present zero residual risk. This has its place. Sometimes cast-iron safety cases must be made. By contrast, risk tolerance philosophy says that zero risk ambitions are often delusory and can ultimately threaten reputation. Instead, it recognises that residual risks always require ongoing vigilant risk management, using risk assessment to target limited risk control resources at where the risks seem greatest. Clearly risk tolerance will often be the more appropriate philosophy for governance and management of innovation. In other words, innovation is often risky. Promethean dualism operates by debating uncertainties over just how risky it is on a case-by-case basis.

Corporations are political entities - not in the partisan sense, but in the deeper metapolitical sense of being systems shaped by cognitive dispositions, social norms, and internal power dynamics. When an organisation becomes ideologically unbalanced, predictable distortions arise:

• Overly generative cultures (liberal-heavy) produce rapid innovation but accumulate unpriced risk, regulatory blind spots, ethical oversights, brittle systems, and reputational volatility.

• Overly consequential cultures (conservative-heavy) produce stability but fail to adapt, miss emergent opportunities, and become vulnerable to disruptive competitors.

Metapolitical monocultures - of either kind - are essentially anti-Promethean: they enact only half of the myth and lose its structural wisdom. Promethean Dualism argues for the opposite: organisations must deliberately engineer cognitive heterogeneity into their decision-making environments. This should not be as token diversity, but as strategic architecture for organisations operating in high-velocity, high-consequence environments where safety, reputation and performance all require painstaking co-management.

Thank you for bearing with me until the end. I thought it best to get my ideas circulating around before formalising them in an academic paper. They do seem to have come of age amidst contemporary societal bipolarisation - and substack seems like the perfect outlet for reaching intelligent political and corporate audiences. If you work in a corporation and are in a position to experiment with Promethean Dualism at any level of scale, please do get in touch and let me know how you are getting on with it. It would be lovely to learn of some proof of impact to help build momentum. Let’s make Promethean Dualism happen.

Why Liberal Elites Devour Themselves

Many thanks to Prof. Edward Dutton (The Jolly Heretic) for interviewing me to discuss the book.

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