Bossman Jerry Greenfield at Botulism and Japanese Beetles, or Ben & Jerry’s, has thrown in the towel. It wasn’t a rush of conscience at giving school children, soccer moms and pensioners diabetes, or making them stupid, or sending the former to early graves, but a directive from his parent Unilever, which made adjustments to its ‘leader activism limits’ policy that don’t “align with his values”.
Some 70 years after co-founding the radioactive confectionery, and 20 years post its acquisition, Greenfield is off to act himself blind elsewhere. The product will still be there to kill you though − leave a tub of the petrol lard out in a Kalahari summer for two weeks and come back to find it still cold. Green, but cold, so, cheers Jerry.
Quite what he thought he could do has been a subject of intrigue for generations, as nobody has ever remarked: “Good grief! this new Ben & Jerry’s flavour tastes just like climate justice” or “This particular flavour takes me back to when I protested for recognition of ISIS, and we met that black panther hunk who came back to our squat and made love to me and my husband Eddie”. The only relevant ‘limits’ should have been explicit: ice-cream − crap, expensive, hysterical and weed killer ice cream − that’s all.
One of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the West is the world’s finest cigars, hand-rolled on the delicate inner thighs of Latina virgins, being subjected to health and safety tsunami warning-banners, while this fluffy, lumpy ricin gets off scot-free.
There’s been a similar ‘values-do-not-align’ eruption closer to home, where the musician David Scott, or The Kiffness, has lost a half a million-buck brand collaboration because… “his values do not align” with the brand’s. In the absence of any further information to date, we are resigned to Scott’s response to the murder of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk as reason for the cancelation.
But Scott didn’t set cities on fire, throw a Molotov cocktail inside a police wagon, force said police to kneel, topple a statue or superglue his hand to an arterial road. As openly devout as Kirk was, Scott merely affirmed his faith, expressed his support for the exchange of ideas ̶ which Kirk literally spent his entire life doing, and condemned the brutality of his murder. Vanilla, reasonable − by any scrutiny.
There has been a lot of comparison between the response to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and what happened shortly after George Floyd died in May 2020.
Then, many corporations got massively offended. Helen in HR at Marc Jacobs got offended, so went to LinkedIn, then Jackie or Jax in HR at L’Oreal − funnily enough − also got offended. They ensnared the Irish Collison brothers at Stripe, the global payment fintech company, who passed the offence on to Disney, Walmart, Nike and, of course, Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen at Ben & Jerrys. They were determined to absorb the mother-load − they started shovelling the stuff into offence processing machines, turning on the taps, taking their shirts off then lying underneath with their mouths open.
It started when Ben & Jerry’s former CEO Matthew McCarthy, who could never quite answer convincingly when asked whether his company was a socialist recreational room or a business (evidently, it was/is a capitalist money printer), got wind of the events in Minnesota and called his chair to issue an announcement, then a woman called Anuradha Mittal. “Maybe do some…slam poetry,” he suggested to Anuradha.
And what emerged was consistent with that: a blend of some light, early 2000s R & B − like Brandy or Destiny’s Child − and an agreeably smoked-up Samuel Coleridge Taylor in-Xanadu-did-Kubla-Khan statement.
Corporations are not humans. They are objectively collectivist vehicles that exist to trouser as much cash as possible − and that’s the trade-off: a purpose that may include hurting people by sacking them, or being economical with the figures on occasion − but absent of the rights of individual freedoms, especially speech.
“Not aligned to our values” suggests that every single company employee has been sampled, which for 99% of corporations cannot be true, or that the corporation’s owners have agreed among themselves, which would invite suspicion over use of the term “our”. But much more importantly, “not aligned to our values” as a public announcement implies that we care about what they think, when this hasn’t been the case for a while.
Because we know. In 2020, their offence and opportunism and pandering and statements led to grudging obedience especially in large corporations, whose staff could no longer have substantive conversations about the perils of absent fathers or the lunacy of scrapping cash bail — lest a note from Helen or Jax in HR landed on the desk requesting a meeting.
This was essentially a censorship campaign dressed up as solidarity or empathy: a compulsory wall of silence that, as one consequence, made finding a basis from which to form healthy arguments harder. And even then, we all knew: they make this face for long enough, the wind will change direction − and then we’ll have to listen to a whole load of other, in some cases new “values” that have mysteriously appeared.
Companies are fickle and capital is cowardly. We accept this, and only ask that they do what they do best and keep their mouths shut about the rest.
[Image: bookdragon from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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