I don’t think that is what the poster was saying. If it was, they wouldn’t have used ‘kafkaesque’.
From what I can tell, they are saying the purpose of the statements is to weed out people who will be openly honest about concerns or be willing to debate pros and cons of a controversial position held by leadership.
They could still privately disagree or not go along, they’d just have to be able to do so while keeping up appearances.
Which in my experience academically and with big-corp is very accurate. There are plenty of folks who will spout DEI party lines all day long while only hiring Asian women, or Indian men, or white women, or white men, etc. as long as no one makes a stink about it in a way they’ll get in trouble.
Notably, those folks have also finely honed their ability to nuke anyone from orbit that attempts to get them in trouble for what they are definitely doing.
From an organizational perspective, it’s actually a very valuable skill - because to make this work, they have to placate stakeholders while also getting some key metric
that the organization needs ‘done’ well enough to offset their other shenanigans.
And in any sufficiently large organization, it’s essentially impossible to do that by actually doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing to the level you’re supposed to be doing them.
Which is why large organizations (and frankly societies) tend to be kafkaesque - they have too many conflicting interests and power bases that all have potentially legitimate reasons for applicability, but are irreconcilable-in-fact/impractical when ‘the rubber meets the road’.
From what I can tell, they are saying the purpose of the statements is to weed out people who will be openly honest about concerns or be willing to debate pros and cons of a controversial position held by leadership.
They could still privately disagree or not go along, they’d just have to be able to do so while keeping up appearances.
Which in my experience academically and with big-corp is very accurate. There are plenty of folks who will spout DEI party lines all day long while only hiring Asian women, or Indian men, or white women, or white men, etc. as long as no one makes a stink about it in a way they’ll get in trouble.
Notably, those folks have also finely honed their ability to nuke anyone from orbit that attempts to get them in trouble for what they are definitely doing.
From an organizational perspective, it’s actually a very valuable skill - because to make this work, they have to placate stakeholders while also getting some key metric that the organization needs ‘done’ well enough to offset their other shenanigans.
And in any sufficiently large organization, it’s essentially impossible to do that by actually doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing to the level you’re supposed to be doing them.
Which is why large organizations (and frankly societies) tend to be kafkaesque - they have too many conflicting interests and power bases that all have potentially legitimate reasons for applicability, but are irreconcilable-in-fact/impractical when ‘the rubber meets the road’.