Good People usually work in the public sector, broadly construed as any occupation financed almost completely by the taxpayer. NHS, universities, schools, the Armed Forces, the Emergency Services, BBC, local council staff and officials, and publicly-funded arts organisations. It's about a third of the UK workforce. It's not everyone in the public sector. Good People are usually managers rather than doers, and policy-oriented rather than operational. They see themselves as being funded by the Government, and prefer political parties that hand out money, which has usually been the "left-wing" parties. They loved the EU, because of its generous grants, hence their existential panic over Brexit.
Their education stressed going along with the prevailing group-think, which can happen in the Science Faculty (think "Climate Science") as well as the Arts. They are usually not engineers or researchers whose work can be disqualified by an experiment. Good People often believe in "experts" rather than "facts" and "experience", not least out of collegial courtesy, since many of them are "experts". This makes Good People sitting targets for frauds, grifters, marketing departments, visionaries, snake-oil salesmen, and pseudo-scientists.
A qualifying Good Belief must meet a number of criteria: it must work against the interests or beliefs of regular people; it must have a very low probability of ever being turned into legislation; and it is must have a very low probability of Capital ever turning into a profitable product or service; and it must not be detrimental to the Good Person. Also, it helps if it is more expensive than the mainstream alternative.
Refusing to use modern medicine is not a Good Person belief, since it can cause harm to the Good Person. Veganism is a Good Person belief, as is keeping kosher. World Peace is not a Good Person belief, because who doesn't want that?
Being "for" homosexuality was a Good Belief. It had resisted changes in legislation for hundreds of years; it is not well-regarded by the common herd; even after the 1967 legislation, Capital has been hesitant to aim products at the Gay market, partly because it is too small to support major spending; and of course, if the Good Person was gay, it was a bonus, and if they were straight, it didn't matter. Until their children came out. By the 2010's the Police across the world were happily taking part in Pride marches, as were lots straight people and politicians. Homosexuality is now nothing remarkable.
Which was an utter disaster for the Good People. For about five decades, the Good People had been able to distinguish themselves by professing a belief that homosexuality should be nothing remarkable. And now the Bad People agree. Which means the Good People needed to find some other cause to distinguish themselves. If that cause was going to be around sexuality, it was going to be pretty far out. And it turned out to be just that.
Climate Change had some things going for it. The facts are iffy as heck, which means that one must believe. Bad People want facts, Good People are Believers. Nothing bad was going to happen because of Climate Change (if was real) in the short-term: climate disaster has been ten years away for the last thirty years. For a couple of decades after the start, there was no hope of it turning into legislation, there were no serious alternative energy sources, and few demands on individuals' behaviour.
Having baited the Good People, the Climate Change con-men pulled the switch. They continued to press for legislation from whichever body might find it a constructive-looking gesture. They let the investment banks in by inventing so-called "carbon offsets". They persuaded Governments to subsidise wind farms, which made alt-energy a better investment. Nobody ever pushed the "energy security" issue, because that smacked too much of Nationalism, and Good People are not Nationalists, but energy security (from the increasingly volatile Middle East) was the unspoken benefit of all this. The con-men flooded the culture with pseudo-science, graphs compiled by methods so dodgy as to make political polls look honest, and frequently-published forecasts of possible disaster and death. The Good People found they had been suborned into a full-fledged activist movement, and it took a few years for them to disassociate themselves from it. People who use phrases like "climate emergency" sound like the cranks they are. Sadly, that crankishness has been embedded into Government policy, and it will take our politicians a while to extricate themselves from it.
"Diversity" is a Good Person belief. They are insulated from it by their postcodes and occupations, and by the fact that Good People are inter-nationally the same. The legislation had long been in place, it cannot be turned into a product or service, and it provided a lot of cheap labour, often to look after Good Children. Furthermore, "diversity" could mean that one's wife was now up for a lucrative part-time Directorship. In the meantime, "diverse" neighbourhoods and organisations have much lower levels of social trust, participation, co-operation and communication. Crime figures are carefully never printed or discussed. It was hi-jacked by a number of interest groups, all of whom measured it by looking at outcomes, while simultaneously denying they were imposing quotas.
"Being nice to illegal immigrants" was briefly a Good Cause in 2016. The Economist - the reference Good Person source - even suggested that a million people was not so many given the population of Europe, and we could absorb them. It never occurred to the witless writer that there were several hundreds more of those millions in the queue. Women in Germany and Sweden felt guilty about having to explain that the men who molested or raped them were, well, not native Swedes. The official obfuscation of the crime figures was driven by one thing: the incumbent Governments were all left-wing socialists, and they were terrified that the right-wing would get support if the truth was made public. Also, the fact that these immigrants seemed to have the phone numbers of lawyers, and detailed instructions about the welfare payments they could get, and of the European rail system, started to seem a little odd.
The immigrants had NGOs helping them, and those NGOs needed money. That money did not come from millions of donors, but from a handful of wealthy activists who have more money than they will ever need, and are looking for elite social recognition, which they get through backing Good Causes. The emergence of that class was something new in the 2000's: there had been rich people before, but they used their wealth to help themselves, even when founding institutions in their names. The new class did not want popular publicity and recognition, but only to belong to an elite. They did not elderly men and women gluing themselves to the M25: they did it through PR companies, NGOs, and lawyers who realised there was a nice living to be made pandering to them. Small in number, these are the most dangerous kind of Good People, as they can and have inflicted huge amounts of harm on ordinary people.
Illegal immigration in the USA is a large-scale political grift: the main beneficiaries are some large religious organisations who are paid to place illegal immigrants, and they do so because the Democratic party uses the immigrants to jerrymander voting districts. It is hidden, badly, behind the facade of a Good Cause, which is used by Democrats to pose as morally virtuous. Good Causes are now often hi-jacked for very different purposes.
Capital has been hi-jacking Good Causes since the start: Good People make up a decent-sized, high-margin market segment. Electric cars. Fake meat. Green electricity. The Whole Foods chain. Feminism was hi-jacked to get women into the workforce (notice how they got the jobs, but never the creches that the original feminists were asking for). MeToo was hi-jacked by managements and used to remove people - usually older white men - from their jobs or contracts on a mere allegation. ESG / DIE scores were invented specifically to whitewash the activities of hedge funds and investment banks. In return it was exploited by the certifying agencies, who realised they could push extremist agendas, and the hedge funds simply would not care.
The ability of Capital to react at speed does not help: no sooner does a cause become Good than marketing departments start to think about how they can
They are basically the kind of people who, 50 years ago, were churchgoers. Now that churchgoing had died out, they need other ways of demonstrating their goodness.
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