25 March 2024

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion is a fundamentally low-grade, Orwellian anti-liberal project

Sunday Telegraph editor, and vehement classical liberal, Allister Heath, writes about the "DEI" movement, which has spread like a cancer around US universities and corporates, in scathing terms:

DEI is only interested in racial or gender diversity. It doesn’t really care about poverty, class or geography. It loathes diversity of thought; it preaches an imbecilic groupthink that can never be questioned. It denies the scientific method. Its more extreme North American proponents occasionally even reject the idea that 2+2=4, claiming it implies “covert white supremacy”, the sort of lunacy that would have made even the Soviet pseudo-agronomist Trofim Lysenko blush.... 

The woke demand performative adherence to dogma, even when it is evidently contrary to reality, hence “Gays for Palestine” chanting pro‑Hamas and pro-Houthi slogans, even though both terror organisations are brutally homophobic, whereas Tel Aviv celebrates gay pride. Eliminating objective reality is every tyrant’s dream: citizens can no longer judge the validity of what they are being told. 

That's it, it's the latest part of the 20th century post-modernist excrescence that denies evidence, reason and genuine diversity between individuals.  Indeed it is a movement of neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution, with staggering parallels with that most murderous period in China's history.

...DEI advocates group “justice” that is at once unjust and inequitable, based on confiscation and redistribution. People don’t matter, only aggregate statistics. Individual merit counts for nought: DEI judges people solely on their membership of a tribe based on racial or sexual characteristics. This is a reversal of centuries of Western progress towards individual dignity, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals and a readoption of pre-modern group politics....

DEI is horrifically exclusionary, seeking to cancel anybody who fails to pretend to agree: it embraces the permanent inquisition, the auto-da-fé, excommunication and (metaphorically) burning heretics at the stake. Staff are “encouraged” to take the knee, to wear special lanyards, to share pronouns. Employees are divided into “allies” and “adversaries”, with the “good” in-group pitted against the “bad” out-group. “Micro-aggressors” are denounced.

This toxic philosophy is as destructive to individual freedom as Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, Islamism and all other forms of mystical authoritarianism, because it is mystical. It is entirely based on the feelings of the proponent, it is inherently inconsistent and immune to evidence. It is a social movement that has life because of well-meaning people who take the claims of the philosophy on face value, but is catalysed by generals of sociopathic misanthropists who lead armies of dimwitted malcontents and grifting inadequates, keen to shame, cancel and scream at those they deem "the enemy".

Diversity movements, activists, units and managers are about the exact opposite. No business should have a bar of it, and should purge its marketing and human resources departments (especially the latter, which is an administrative overhead all businesses should minimise). 

Government should purge it as well, eliminate it from all government agencies and make all staff who exist to promote the concept within government redundant.  I wont be holding my breath though.

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