JOIN USOf useful idiots and king-makers
If you are not familiar with the term ‘useful idiot’, perhaps it is time you did. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, the term refers to ‘a person who is easily persuaded to do, say, or believe things that help a particular group or person politically.’ With or without a political context, the term is quite descriptive of any number of prominent figures, especially in the fields of information technology, business, and journalism. King-makers are few, useful idiots are legion.
I am sure that you, as an ordinary Indian, are quite proud, perhaps even envious, of the fact that hyphenated Indians (as in Indian-American) are currently serving as the CEOs of three top IT companies (Alphabet/Google, IBM, Microsoft), have served as heads of global business conglomerates (Pepsi, Citibank, MasterCard) or hold cabinet-level positions in western governments. For reasons that will become clear, you should neither applaud nor try to emulate the achievements of these people, even though they are granted immediate access to whoever is India’s Prime Minister.
If you are a large multinational corporation wishing to tap into the buying potential of India’s 380-million middle-class customers, who better to send to India to represent your corporate interests than an India-origin executive from the head office? It is implicitly assumed that such a person would get a sympathetic hearing with India’s decision-makers because of “shared cultural values”. Such a strategy has usually worked in the past, as evidenced by the establishment of US-based fast-food franchises and banking/credit card operations or the defusing of corporate malfeasance by companies such as Pepsi – all because of the intervention of India-origin CEOs.
It doesn’t even have to be CEO. When India liberalised its economic policies in the early 1990s, Pepsi and Coca Cola reinserted themselves into the Indian market in a big way, using, as brand ambassadors, the winners of the 1994 Miss Universe and Miss World contest who miraculously happened to be from India. I don’t believe in miracles. Perhaps you do?
Wasn’t it Shakespeare who wrote “Uneasy is the head that wears the crown”? If you are the CEO of a company, you can be replaced overnight by the company’s board of directors, unless you own 51% or more of the voting shares in the company. If Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do something about fake news and propagandising hate speech, he could do so without fear of retaliation since he owns 60% of Meta/Facebook’s voting shares. Even if Alphabet’s CEO really cared about internet privacy issues or AI ethics issues, there is not much he could do without jeopardising his position. Sometime ago, Twitter’s CEO was fired because his company policies alienated some very powerful people. To quote novelist Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Two years ago, wasn’t it rather ironic that Alok Sharma, given his previous role as the UK’s Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, chose to lambast China and India at COP26 in Glasgow, over which he was presiding, for not doing enough to cut down on carbon emissions! His message was directed not so much at China as India. China isn’t easily bullied. According to the International Energy Agency, the average CO2 emissions per person in 2019 were calculated to be 7, 5 and 2 tons in China, UK and India, respectively. And yet…
If you do not like the message, you can always shoot the messenger. However, in many situations, the messenger is the actual message being conveyed. The original message is downplayed to the sender’s ultimate benefit.
If you don’t know who is in control of the conversation, look to the White House, Whitehall, or the Great White Way lit up by the powerbrokers sitting in corporate boardrooms across Europe and America. They have the answers.
Roger Marshall, a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic.