I’ve been thinking a while about this, but I would like to expand on my post #103 and what I think is going wrong right now. This is what I said:
The trouble is “the top”, to which this thread refers, is in so much trouble as they are out of touch. They believe that the Next Gen Air Force is what the very noisy Gen Y/Millennials are screaming for - with some proper virtue signalling - when actually they are in a minority and likely to be retiring when Next Gen Air Force 2035-2040 comes around. So ‘the top’ would appear to be missing this disquiet from the newer generations of the RAF who are getting more and more annoyed - of course, they communicate in their own way and you only have to see some of Gen Z’s memes to see how proper p!ssed off they are. Some of us younger Gen Xs are ‘read into these memes’ and it shows what a huge gulf there is between what the majority of the RAF wants and what ‘the top’ believes they should be doing. The final thing to say is that Gen Z do things, they are activists and will be great leaders - I can see them leapfrogging the Twitterati Gen Y within the Armed Forces. With some similar values to Gen X, then I like that, and the fact that many are fed up with Gen Y’s social media ‘cancel culture’. They want to go toe-to-toe and confront some of this and that is why you see our kids attending more live demonstration than ever before.
This video seems to explain another angle to it, but also compliments it. It’s only 15 mins long and discusses why political correctness is not that good for the workplace from a pretty non-partisan viewpoint:
I was particularly taken by “the marketplace of ideas is taken over by Big Brother’s little Minions…”. This is why there is a problem right now. You have an Oxbridge educated Chief who was tasked to deliver a report on social mobility, equality and diversity (the so-called Wigston report), who was leapfrogged as the second youngest CAS ever (Portal being the youngest in WWII) by the hapless Gavin Williamson who wanted to see someone younger as Chief. They have surrounded themselves with Minion WOs on Twitter who will call out anyone publicly on social media and at work if their ideas or beliefs do not align to their’s or their Chief’s - so much so, that true beliefs are driven underground. Then when you have a survey on the [incorrect by definition] use of the word Aviator instead of the Airman, and that survey reportedly returns an opinion of over 75% against it, but you just press with it anyway. That seems to generate a very unhappy workplace culture indeed. That TED talk explains everything that I see wrong right now and that is not just in the RAF, but across large sections of society. People are frightened to voice opinions as that “marketplace of ideas is taken over by Big Brother’s little Minions” and so we see the current discontent.
If there was ever anything retention-negative right now, then it is the current [hopefully temporary] culture being driven. I say temporary as I tend to agree with Ricky Gervais on such matters:
I wanna live long enough to see the younger generation not be woke enough for the next generation. It's going to happen. Don't they realise that, it's like, they're next. That's what's funny.We kicked out the old guard. We did it. There's only so woke and liberal you can get and then you start going the other way. But it's inevitable.