This (a) may or may not really have existed in the austere sense you're describing it, and (b) if it did exist, it existed in a world where people had much stronger community life than they do now. In a world where everyone is atomized, where nobody knows their neighbours, nobody attends church (and if they do, their neighbours don't, so it doesn't achieve the goal), and so forth... is it any wonder that people have turned to those who they spend 8 hours a day with for some sort of socialization?

If we "return" to not discussing anything with our peers and just being professional robots, to avoid 'chaos', we'll have lost our last healthy outlet for this sort of thing. Expect more depression, more radicalization, etc. when the only people who provide you with what feels like genuine social expression are those you find online who agree with you already.

> it seems to mostly result in chaos

I attribute this far more towards the current climate of virtue signalling: being outraged or outraged-on-behalf-of-others brings you social rewards, stimulating the part of your brain that evolved to feel good when you are socially accepted. We're abusing our own chemical reward mechanisms in an unhealthy way; where in the past people used to have thicker skin and knew it was unacceptable to get outraged in a professional environment, now people see it as part of the package, and HR backs them up.

You want a return to professionalism, let's fix that, rather than stripping work of its social components.

Absolutely not. It means your healthy outlet will be with your friends, those mututally selected for compatibility, and in contexts where such discussions are presumably welcome.

As opposed to the workplace, with people brought together by happenstance to cooperate productively, despite personal differences that are irrelevant to the production process.

> I attribute this far more towards the current climate of virtue signalling:

In many a historical era, tiny theological or political disputes have set neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother.

In the aftermath, the solution that civilized societies evolved was: don't discuss politics or religion! It worked. Let's restore it.

We didn't need to legislate certain privacy guarantees because they were simply expected and we didn't anticipate machine learning.

Similarly, we could rely on boundaried social contexts since we didn't have the ability to look into each others lives through facebook, nextdoor, etc.

So that solution might more have been a stopgap coping mechanism to delay our need to find another better solution, like societally learning to better respect each others differing backgrounds and values.

I have those. I'm very conscious, though, that that's not true for everyone, and it's hard to maintain these things later in life as everyone moves around and becomes too busy with their own lives.

But that's different than a scenario where someone is proportionately reacting to something outrageous by sticking up for someone to the actual offender, or sticking up for someone to the group that can resolve the offense. Those situations seem more analogous to outrage in professional situations when people targeting their actions in a way that might actually help bring about a positive change. (As opposed to posting it on Instagram.)

I think our chemical reward mechanisms are more often hacked by rewarding promotion of conflict, rather than rewarding promotion of resolution.

In America, plenty of people know their neighbors and have their phone numbers for security purposes, and over a 1/3rd of Americans attend church. So, in the context of discussing an American company, these are very off-the-mark statements.

As someone who has attended several churches in Silicon Valley over the last decade, I would put the percentage closer to 5%.

Initially you are a cool small company where you're making buttloads of money, people think of you as very cool/smart/hip, you feel great going to work, wearing company's colors in public, every time someone talks about the company it's to praise it and express their envy towards your job. People are encouraged to bring their whole person to work, that improves productivity and makes the office feel like home. Of course, this works very well because of all those things I said plus the fact that with a small sized company the make up of the team is mostly non-diverse and even when it gets some employees belonging to minority groups, they are very likely to be of a similar socio-economic background.

Then the company grows. Mistakes are being made, some more accidental than others but with a large company affecting everyone's lives and making offensive amounts of money it's inevitable it's going to do things some people hate it for or going to create enemies, people that dedicate significant parts of their lives to criticize everything there is to criticize about the company. Now the environment outside and inside is not as great or relaxing. You start to not wear the company colors anymore and notice that if you bring up the company you work for in conversation the immediate reaction is to complain or to criticize some past action. Also now you have a very large number of employees compared to the starting days, with different views/ideas/socio-economic backgrounds so there's lots of friction and it's extremely easy to say something that someone somewhere will find it offensive. I think in that situation a return to a more traditional "let's not talk about non-work stuff at work" approach seems better to me.

I suspect we were never there, it was just that a set of what today we consider "sociopolitical and personal opinions" were not seen as such, e.g. (content warning) groping the secretary, joking about the office retard, etc.

Forgive me but: When was this ever the case in the work environment?

I’ve never had a political discussion at work.

Finance is a well-known boys' club. Law? How could insurance companies not have the same issues, given that redlining and offering different rates to different races was only made illegal a few decades ago?

Are you sure pastry and bakeries don't have culture war issues? I was under the impression there's been plenty of culinary debate where chefs with the greatest respect were always male chefs.

Are you certain about this? I was under the impression that kitchens had a large reputation for foul-mouth, offensive behavior and attitudes, including along political lines.

We tried this already. People just kept moving the goal posts. Political correctness and microaggressions. The battle is never over because some people refuse to quit fighting it.