Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Death By Diversity

     Let’s imagine for a moment that you own and operate a business. Perhaps it has a few hundred employees. Perhaps it has a black-ink balance sheet: steady revenues, positive profitability, ample cash reserves, and good credit. And perhaps its product line is a leading-edge technology that required quite a bit of scientific and engineering knowledge to develop, and requires almost as much to maintain and advance.

     Would you hire illiterates, or persons without proven scientific or engineering expertise, or persons without mathematical skills, or persons whose physical handicaps severely retard their productivity, or persons who actively detest “unbelievers” to work in your company?

     A silly question, isn’t it? Of course you would! If you were to refrain from doing so, the DiversitocratsTM would be all over you like a cheap suit. You see, what matters isn’t that the product you make improves the lives of its customers. What matters isn’t that you employ several hundred people, enabling them and their families to live independently of the Omnibenevolent State. What matters isn’t your property rights over what you and you alone have built.

     What matters is that you bow to the Diversitocrats.TM They cannot abide a dissenter.

     Actually, it’s worse than that. If your company is all white, and its scientists and engineers are overwhelmingly male, the DiversitocratsTM actively want to see it – and you – crash and burn. You are a bleeding canker upon their vision of Social Justice. You must be destroyed before you can mislead others into thinking that there’s an objective reality whose laws can’t be repealed, modified, reinterpreted, or otherwise finessed.

     Never imagine for a moment that the DiversitocratsTM are genuinely interested in diversity. They merely hate whites, men, the able-bodied, and Christians. They conceal that ravening hatred behind a facade of concern for nonwhites, women, the handicapped, and anything but Christians. They’re certainly not interested in diversity of thought or opinion. If you differ with them, you’re a target. Only if you agree with them – by which I mean wholeheartedly and without a scintilla of divergence on any point however small – will you be allowed to exist. Under their continuous scrutiny, of course.

     Their hatred is best evidenced by their enthusiastic support for the Islamic invasion currently overrunning Europe, with America soon to follow.


     A recent piece at Atlantic Centurion illuminates one of the most significant symptoms of the Diversitocrats’TM ascendancy:

     According to business-news themed clickbait site Inc.com:
     The spotlight and the magnifying glass have been on tech companies’ dismal diversity numbers for the past year. Hiring diverse candidates shouldn’t have to be a struggle. Yet, the latest numbers from companies like Facebook and Intel show that the needle is barely moving. As a result, there’s a new position in fashion within tech company c-suites: say hello to the head of diversity. Recently spotted job listings show tech companies are making diversity an executive level position.

     Ding ding ding. Diversity!TM No explanation—just keep drumming it in. We need more of it! Companies are basically hiring “Chief Diversity Officers,” if they didn’t already have them. We can’t all be cutting-edge progressives from the get-go; some organizations need an extra push. Whether this is due to media campaigns from leftist journalists, internal initiatives or both is hard to generalize, but the fact of the matter is that the Diversity is Our Greatest Strength® meme has taken root among the business elite. They nominally believe that a diverse workforce, whatever that means, is better than, say, meritocracy or standardization.

     But that’s just where it starts. The “Chief Diversity Officer” will of course have a department beneath him. In hiring for that department, he will select disproportionately for non-whites, for women, for the disabled, for the scientifically and technologically illiterate, and of course for non-Christians. There are three reasons for this:

  1. It’s the way he swings;
  2. It will tug the company’s “diversity quotient” (DQ) in the right direction;
  3. His subordinates will become his evangelists and enforcers to the rest of the company.

     And of course, when the Gospel of DiversityTM has done its fell work upon the firm – when revenues slide, profitability craters, and the scientific / technological component of the workforce is rendered inert by Diversity-induced friction, the “Chief Diversity Officer” will scream that it’s because the company culture is racist, sexist, ableist, Christianist, etc. He will claim that these problems can only be fixed by more Diversity.TM

     If you work in a company with more than a few dozen employees, this is all but certainly already a part of your world. If your company is currently too small a fish for the DiversitocratsTM to care about, beware as it moves upward in revenues and general visibility. The Diversitocrats’TM crosshairs will settle on your company sooner or later.


     I retired from my job in defense engineering earlier this year. I didn’t do so because of Diversity,TM but because my commute was taxing me physically and, at any rate, after nearly five decades in real-time software research and development, I’d had enough. But in the last few months before my retirement, I noticed that corporate was pressing our department in particular to hire more women, more non-whites, and more disabled persons.

     Mind you, a defense engineering company needs scientists and engineers. It needs persons strong in the sciences, mathematics, and the associated skills of unbiased examination and rational thought. Its natural preference will be for college graduates in the STEM fields. There is no conceivable reason for such a company to seek out other sorts of employees. Yet that is exactly what corporate was doing, even as the company was shedding revenues, contracts, and divisions.

     The corridor walls grew ever more thickly festooned with “Diversity is our strength” propaganda. One promotional poster, which seemed to be everywhere, set my teeth to grinding:

Put Us On The Fast Track:
Hire People With Disabilities!

     If that makes the least shred of sense to any Gentle Reader, please explain it to me.


     Imposed DiversityTM is bigotry enforced at gunpoint. It claims to combat a long list of evils, but in reality it promotes one of the greatest evils of all: the privileging of some on the basis of characteristics that are irrelevant to whatever real value they may have to offer to others. It is racism. It is sexism. It is religious bigotry, and many things as bad or worse.

     Do you think it a coincidence that the DiversitocratsTM are all hard-left “liberals?” Oh, excuse me, “progressives?” Do you think it a coincidence that the “minorities” they champion – apropos of which, women outnumber men in these United States and have outnumbered us since the World Wars at the very least – all share their politics by an overwhelming margin?

     At this time – but by no means is this guaranteed for the future – the DiversitocratsTM have not descended to fasten their grip on companies that rely on nontraditional employees: i.e., job-shoppers and self-employed contractors. Neither will they attempt to shackle a company of fewer than about 100 employees; the quotas by which they impose their will upon a company don’t yield adequate numbers to be worth their time. But ultimately, the Floyd Ferris Principle will prevail:

     "Since the deadline for the signing of the national Gift Certificates expires tonight at midnight," said Dr. Ferris, in the tone of a salesman extending a special courtesy to a customer, "I have come to obtain your signature, Mr. Rearden."
     He paused, with an air of suggesting that the formula now called for an answer.
     "Go on," said Rearden. "I am listening."
     "Yes, I suppose I should explain," said Dr. Ferris, "that we wish to get your signature early in the day in order to announce the fact on a national news broadcast. Although the gift program has gone through quite smoothly, there are still a few stubborn individualists left, who have failed to sign-small fry, really, whose patents are of no crucial value, but we cannot let them remain unbound, as a matter of principle, you understand.”

     [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. Emphasis added by FWP.]

     Heed this warning and prepare.

1 comment:

Bruce said...

Amen, Francis.

And that is why I am a firm of one and have no intention of "growing" my firm any larger than what I personally (with a bit of an assist from my lovely dear wife of almost 36 years) can handle. It will do fine for the remainder of my work life.