Diversity is *Not* Strength (Identity Politics)

[ulli]

But Star Mariner:

those social engineers ARE part of humanity. Part of life, anyway. Like viruses in the environment.
As are the people who allow them charge ahead, up their power ladders, and do nothing about it, due to their innocence and perhaps naivete, or hoping that nothing bad will happen, ever.
Apathy has a huge part to do with this elite having accumulated wealth and power unlike the kings of the past.

But on the whole, the lower ranks still have my sympathy, given the shrewdness of the sociopaths.

The positive side of diversity is that when the masses say enough is enough, and pool their reserves together, seeing unity despite their divere backgrounds, the sociopaths don’t stand a chance.
Good laws are then needed, good legislators, elected with term limits, plus honest and brave law enforcement, to protect the rest of humanity against such sickos.

Posted by Star Mariner (here)
Some of the counter-points argued above I do not disagree with. I am certain that humanity, if left to mingle freely amongst itself, undisturbed and unmolested by the control matrix of social engineering, would no doubt soar to new and marvellous heights, in touching and exploring each and every surface of these, our many wonderful aspects of diversity. From that we would indeed draw great strength.

However when politicized (co-opted) as it has been, artificial divisions are created that weren't there before. It has created agendas, competition, and victimhood, and therefore discord. It is on this point I wished to dwell. When identity politics has us plant flags in this camp or that camp, we are thus encouraged to channel our energies into what 'makes us different', rather than what makes us the same.

What I'm trying to argue is that, contrary to what pundits and celebrities and political candidates vehemently claim (to score virtue-signalling points), politicized diversity is not a strength but an impediment. Collectively, I believe it's what humanity shares in common that ultimately gives us strength and cohesion. Even when we continue to have opposing opinions, belief systems, different creeds, sexualities, skin-colours or whatever, all these things are strongly outweighed by our basic common interests. The simple recognition, particularly of the spiritual, that we're all facets of just the same divine diamond, could end strife, disorder and war forever.

I'm very glad we're all different, and in so many ways. But if there's ever going to be a new and peaceful age for humanity moving forward, it will be built on the foundation of what, in our shared humanity, brings us together, not what sets us apart.

[Carmody]

Both perfection and chaos are dead things.

Neither has life.

Life exists in the stretch between the two.

[T Smith]

Posted by Denise/Dizi (here)

So I can't argue that cohesion indeed gives us strength, but if we have diversity in the group, we are more capable then, of addressing many many more things, as a less diverse group, tends to focus their attention on less things.

I couldn’t agree with you more. But I think this observation in relation to the OP may be a matter of semantics? I didn't infer from Star’s post that diversity is undesirable. See below:

Posted by Star Mariner (here)
...We are naturally diverse as individuals, and that's a good thing, a necessary evolutionary thing. It ensures that vibrant cultural richness and a multiplicity of ideas and viewpoints are upheld and carried forward, as well as a healthy genepool. Diversity is good...

Perhaps the precursor to the point wasn’t nailed down enough, i.e., diversity is not only desirable, it’s necessary… but in my view, the OP was advancing a more complicated idea, that diversity in and of itself does not make us more capable and able to address many more things (e.g. strong), but the ability to cohere diversity (e.g. cohesion) is what makes us strong, such that all those diverse components work in concert and are not atomized parts of a fractured and feckless whole. That cohesion is our sameness.

In other words, in this context, strength is not synonymous with virtue, ability, talent, resources, etc. They are not the same things. A society can have all the diversity in the world, but without cohesion of diversity, you have nothing…

This may serve as an apt analogy (at least how I inferred the meaning of the post): In order to produce water, one needs both hydrogen and oxygen. One could image an even more complex compound that requires multiple diverse elements. But let’s stick to water for sake of simplicity. If the goal is to water crops to feed the world, we'll need to produce water. Everyone agrees there can be no water without hydrogen or without oxygen; we will never sustain life with only hydrogen or only oxygen. One could argue, then, what makes water is not hydrogen or oxygen, or even hydrogen and oxygen together, but the cohesive bond between them…

Identity politics to me is kind of like throwing a bunch of oxygen and hydrogen in a tank (with the goal of making water) and hoping nobody lights a match…

[johnf]

I think that the title of this thread can be greatly improved by adding the word forced before the word diversity.
Natural diversity creates stability, I'm not sure strength is a very accurate word to use.
I have worked in many different diverse working environments where there was cooperation and respect.
One of those was a part of a graduate class in fisheries. We participated in a interdisciplinary study of a tide pool area.
There were various ethnicities involved, but back in the late seventies this didn't mean much. The mix was not forced, it was just the way
things worked then. But there were fisheries, marine botany, geology, invertebrate students involved, and we each went to work doing a survey of the area finding various species of the different types in different places, and after several hours of work we all sat down at a picnic table and made a large map of the area, and started coming up with a vary in depth picture of understanding of this area. We all understood better why we found the varying numbers of plants and animals in the various microcosms we encountered.



This experience changed who I was, and is something I will bring to all other experiences in my life. I have worked in various industries with a wide variety of people both culturally and ethnically. The levels of cooperation, respect and communication are what determined both the quality of the things accomplished, as well as how we all felt about each other at the end of the day. Wherever decisions were arbitrarily forced on us the quality of things suffered. Where ever decisions were made according to actual facts and needs of all concerned the quality on all levels improved. I hope I have

done justice to the spirit of this thread.


John

[T Smith]

Posted by johnf (here)
I think that the title of this thread can be greatly improved by adding the word forced before the word diversity.

I see your point, and yes, would agree. Although by putting "Identity Politics" in parenthesis sorta implies the same thing. And by not putting "forced" in the title also illustrates the hidden Orwellian nature of the slogan, as implied by the OP, i.e., as it stands in culture, the idea of Diversity is Strength, as employed by those who advance identity politics, is a very successful (but much more subtle) Orwellian slogan. It's subtle because both diversity and strength are desirable, and diversity can certainly produce and be strength, as you have aptly pointed out by your own experience. But engineering the slogan into being foists a much different and much more Orwellian connotation upon its meaning.

I'm not sure we're collectively so programed to swallow in whole the ideas that Ignorance is Strength, or War is Peace (although one could certainly argue to the contrary on this one) or Freedom is Slavery, but it's understandably easy to swallow the idea that Diversity is Strength. But when INGSOC starts saying it, not so much.

[Denise/Dizi]

Posted by T Smith (here)
Identity politics to me is kind of like throwing a bunch of oxygen and hydrogen in a tank (with the goal of making water) and hoping nobody lights a match…

That's fair..

It is semantics, and I don't much care for politics... But thank you for sharing your point of view.. Your last statement made me laugh.. That is kind like everything else in the world when it comes to politics, whether personal or otherwise.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. This is quite a difficult concept to coherently resolve!

First and foremost, I want to emphasize that diversity, on the one hand, is certainly a most desirable thing, and there are many instances where identity politics has a powerful and beneficial impact - as an example in generating tolerance of minority groups who might have been marginalized before. At the individual level, in the validation of identity, diversity is exceptionally, and positively, empowering.

The danger though, is when particularly the young, the vulnerable, and the suggestible, are encouraged to identify more with their perceived group than with the whole. That is where, on the macro level, 'forced' diversity can be disempowering. T Smith's excellent analogy of oxygen and hydrogen atoms in a water molecule is very on point. In focusing on our constituent parts, we tend to disconnect and diverge, convinced we belong merely to the fragment (our sub-group) and not the whole.

When identity politics reduces people to their base, biological attributes and dimensions, and when they believe this by itself defines them, it fosters the ideology that this only is what and who they are, that this factor alone, this label you are given, IS a sufficient foundation on which to build one's life experience.

I believe in its most dangerous expression, identity politics, when recklessly deployed, claiming to be the ultimate touchstone with which to articulate one's existence, risks giving rise to the equal and opposite doctrine, also identity politics by the very same token but on the far-right, and that is nationalism, and ultimately violence.

I wished to explore in this thread the idea that, given identity politics was at its root a benign, necessary and very desirable social development, it has transformed, one could say mutated, into a doctrine of dis-integration. As the march of globalization feigns with its efforts to bring us closer together, I feel the persuasion naturally has presented itself to many, to pinpoint and singularize only those things that make us different. So now, with wide swathes of particularly the younger generation scrambling for credibility, for definition, to belong solely to this tribe or that, and what's more engaging with their fellow beings with largely only a mobile phone in their hands, we, society, are losing something of the vital molecular bonds that unite us. As a result, the ground-tremors of social schism are already beginning to be felt. What does this portend? Where will all this lead to in the future?

[Orobo]

Hi,

I am missing something here in this discussion. It is mentioned a bit but not as I see it.

The migration is forced, I saw it mentioned. That is one thing.
The other is that The State, is pulling threads to make the split happen. There is an economic war around the world where SAPS are being set up and making kind of slavery zones. Bangladesh has the cheapest zone now, proudly so, where big companies flock to.48 dollars a month is the wage.
They try to set up one in Greece now, hence the resistance.
It is a thorough reorganisation by and for profit. WHO, UN, World Bank and whatever else is in there.
In the west industries are killed, under false pretences (climate, CO2), which hits the working classes hard. Less work and a lot more people competing for those jobs because of the open borders and "free work migration" like in Europe.
Housing prices are propped up by the flow of migrants making it hard for low income people.
Then The State favours migrants with the access to the housing market.
The migrants that are favoured to come to Europe are the ones with the worst chances of integrating ( Lowest average IQ (a whole other thread needed on this maybe but so it is), most violent religion/cultures )

I only have started now but you see the groundwork laid out for severe conflicts as it goes against all human ethics and morals. We are built to see and seek fairness, at least here in the west.

Then there is the favourable treatment and sentencing of foreign people in the court system. Just like how the laws are favouring women on all levels now.
The middle class is made to go down the drain, making the amount of people feeling and seeing the changes and challenges even larger.
All by The State.

I feel the discussion about diversity/ identity politics so far is too myopic as there are large factors in place to make sure the arising of natural conflict because of diversity+forced proximity, without fairness, totally overpowers any goodwill to get humans to feel safe and have time to learn to get along. It is so severe.

The problem is The Monster or Elefant in the room which is state power and who wields it. Our human nature is being played on the deepest level that goes beyond the kumbaya singing, and signalling that we are good people.
We are, but soon it will be only about brutal survival and machetes in the streets.... oh wait, that already started in Star Mariners UK. And here too in the north.

Diversity is not a strength, it is used as a weapon against us all.
And all possible discussion is quelled, making it even more dangerous than it already is. All is in place, and changing for the worst.

And I am feeling it, too, and hate it; the rising tensions, the fear that starts fuelling hate. I resist it, but feel it. I am honest here, it hurts to write this.
It is strong, it is inevitable, if things go along this path, that the sense for survival takes over the well meant efforts for communication and peace.

The disgust for The State and the direct physical threats against our peaceful people will get us all running. Running in the direction they want, because we can not help us.

Help us.

Note: This sounds ****ing terrible what I wrote, but it is what I see happening in and around me. People tell me.
Well I'll throw it in the discussion, and see what happens.

Love, O.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Here's an interesting 'prophetic vision' you might say, quite startling in its clarity.

I discovered this in an interesting article on a related topic the other day, concerning a table-top RPG game from 80s, called Cyberpunk 2020. It envisioned a dystopian world 30 years in the future - or our present. Here's what it had to say of 'Diversity'.



Paul Joseph Watson also picked up on this:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gBT621ygQEo

I know this topic is just identity politics, but it's emblematic, I feel, of something wider, bigger, more nefarious.

In the last couple of decades particularly, I have become convinced that humanity has reached the "Atlantean Threshold" and is now gaping over the perilous edge of oblivion, down to the abyss of materialism, nihilism, and decadence. In the past, the fall of civilizations can in large part be blamed on greed and/or ignorance, and a reckless misuse of power, a misuse of energy, by the magicians and masters at the top of the control pyramid. Is it any wonder we have reached this degenerative state given the sort of people we see at the top of ours? Power, almost always, ends up in the hands of those who desired it most, and who stopped at nothing (and no one) to hold it in their hands. And these factors alone makes them expressly unfit for the privilege. When corruption is let loose to corrode a structure, collapse is inevitable. It is doomed to fail every single time. So it really is no surprise we're 'not doing very well' at the moment.

[Orobo]

There,

I was waiting for a post, especially Star Mariner.
My post was dark enough to be a possible thread-killer... Away from any spiritual attitude or presence, this is what the describing of the enfolding reality brings.
The weird feeling I have is a profound surprise at that I see this manipulation of our society clearly, but the media presents it as fact that most people are with the program.

Is this so, I wonder?

If an agenda is rolled out by a powerful few, and the controlled media is in on it, there should be enough confusion to press forward anything and leave the populace scratching their head and move on with their lives after a short stop.
Paid shock troops like antifa and protesters complete the whole.
As long as some ideas are seeded in advance, like games and hints on tv and in films, it works like a charm.

And that is exactly what it seems like; a charm, as in spell. Like the greedy, rude dwarf in our tales from Europe of old. We have been warned, but our tales have been ridiculed and we lost footing, our roots. And the evil ones haven't. They remember.

So thanks to Them, we have the chance to; loose ourselves, wake up and reinvigorate our past and stand firm into the future. The fact that it probably has happened before, gives food for thought... A culture maybe ruined in only one or two generations.
This is why religion can be a useful tool, and definitely so if it is bonded with ethnicity.
Wonder why this is such a big no no?


Eternal vigilance for the goldfish-memory-people.

O.

[rgray222]

Watch the Hungarian Foreign Minister absolutely take apart Christine Amanpour from CNN.

One of the best lines I have ever heard:

"Putting an equal sign between the free flow of labor and illegal immigration is insane"
Péter Szijjártó

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WhsNXlK_Nuw

[Denise/Dizi]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
The mantra at the forefront of Identity Politics says that Diversity is Strength. It isn't. We are naturally diverse as individuals, and that's a good thing, a necessary evolutionary thing. It ensures that vibrant cultural richness and a multiplicity of ideas and viewpoints are upheld and carried forward, as well as a healthy genepool. Diversity is good, but it isn't that which makes us strong. Humanity finds its greatest strength, and acquires its greatest power, through cohesion. Cohesion is therefore true strength, not diversity.

Diversity = difference. And when you push, pedal, and promote differences, you fracture cohesion. Breaking it, and us, into separate parts. This is where Identity Politics becomes thoroughly destructive. In generating this mindset, even in light of its surface benefits (acceptance, tolerance, inclusivity), the marginalization of one group or another invariably results. One "identity" gets smothered by another. All gay people were once together, and now, in many instances, they stand apart. Gay men against gay women, gay men and gay women against trans people (who stole their thunder), and even gay black men against gay white men... It never ends.

Identity Politics emerged at a time of great social upheaval. It was long overdue, but at last black people got equal rights, women were liberated, and homosexuality was decriminalised. But then it changed. Identity Politics grew shoots, multiplied, and mutated like a virus. New groups and identities were created (invented), new abbreviations and acronyms sprang into being. And with each new subdivision, people grew more and more estranged from their fellow human being.

Identity Politics pretty much takes top billing these days in the political conversation. But why? I think most of us on PA are aware enough and savvy enough to detect an insidious agenda at work here. Maybe it's because, so long as we're busy fighting amongst ourselves, we're not fighting them, the Powers That Be. This is a matrix of control, and social engineering par excellence, make no mistake. To divide, or to diversify, is to conquer (the social fabric). In my opinion, Diversity is only Strength in the same way that War is Peace, or Freedom is Slavery, from 1984 by George Orwell.

This ideology wants to remind us that we're all different, to focus on that perceived difference, even construct our entire reality around it. In politicizing diversity, and making movements out of it, all we see, and shall continue to see, is the further breaking of bonds between people. The true message should really be the opposite: no, we're not all different, we're all One.

THANK YOU! I HOPE PEOPLE BOTH READ AND UNDERSTAND THIS... It is our diversity that helps us move forward as a group with cohesion! We give and take as one... Not as people fighting eachother for personal recognition...

[Tintin]

A terrific post from an S Tominaga whose bio on X says he's a Bitcoin inventor. Whatever the case may be, this cuts beautifully through all the fug:

They keep hawking collectivism the way a bored priest hawks salvation: with rehearsed indignation, second-hand certainty, and the faintly obscene assumption that people exist primarily to be improved.

They do not begin with the individual—breathing, erring, choosing, building, failing, trying again.

They begin with “society,” that grand abstraction into which living persons are poured like wet concrete, then smoothed flat so no inconvenient edges remain.

One is tempted to congratulate them on the consistency of their error.

In Marx’s day, the majority did not want it; they wanted bread they had earned, a home that was theirs, children who might do better, and the dignity of not having their lives narrated by an ideological chaperone. Now, with the advantage of a century’s evidence and a library’s worth of funerals, the majority still does not want it. And the activists, never chastened by reality, merely rebrand the same coercive sameness with softer packaging: “equity,” “community,” “solidarity”—as if changing the label changes the contents.

People want to be people.

Not units.

Not “stakeholders.”

Not interchangeable cogs in some hygienic apparatus where the soul is treated as a rounding error. They want distinct lives with distinct consequences, because consequence is the price of agency, and agency is the only thing that makes a life more than managed respiration. They want the right to be unequal in the only sense that matters: unequal in talent, in taste, in appetite, in ambition, in the peculiar shape of their love and the peculiar burden of their grief. Equality of law is a civilised triumph; equality of outcome is a civilised suicide.

There is a line one hears, usually delivered with the calm of someone who has never built anything: that equality is “fair.”

The word is a narcotic. It floats through the mouth like virtue and lands in the world like a brick.

Because a society that is truly equal—equal in possessions, equal in status, equal in speech, equal in reward—cannot be achieved by persuasion. It requires ceaseless supervision, because difference is not an ideological deviation; it is the default condition of being alive. The moment you demand equal outcomes, you must criminalise excellence as hoarding, ambition as aggression, and preference as prejudice. You must convert the ordinary human act of wanting more—more skill, more beauty, more space, more time, more peace—into a punishable offence.

Thomas More’s Utopia is useful precisely because it is so politely monstrous. It does not roar; it smiles. It does not threaten; it arranges. And in its arrangements one can see the true shape of the “equal” society: not a paradise, but a well-swept prison in which the bars are painted the colour of virtue.

More offers a world without private property, a world where households are standardised, labour is compulsory, and citizens are shuffled from house to house to prevent attachment from crystallising into independence. He offers communal meals, regulated work, regulated leisure, regulated travel. He offers uniformity, not as a regrettable instrument, but as an ideal. He proposes that gold and silver be despised by making them the material of chamber pots and shackles, as if one could legislate value out of human nature by staging a moral pantomime. He does not merely limit greed; he attempts to abolish the concept of the “mine,” and therefore to abolish the interior frontier without which a person cannot be a person.

The genius—if we must use so generous a word—is that it is all done for “the common good.” That phrase, once enthroned, justifies any intrusion. It is an all-purpose warrant for the state to enter your home, your time, your choices, your conscience. The common good becomes a solvent in which all private goods dissolve. And once dissolved, they cannot be recovered, because you have lost the one thing that makes resistance intelligible: the idea that your life belongs, in the first instance, to you.

Consider the implied predicate of Utopian equality: if everyone must be equal, then nobody may be permitted to be exceptional in any publicly consequential way. But exception is not a vice; it is the engine of civilisation. It is the surgeon who stays late because the patient is not a statistic. It is the engineer who refuses the cheap fix because the bridge will carry children. It is the writer who will not flatten language into slogans because the sentence itself is a form of honesty. The equal society cannot tolerate such people, because they create gradients—of competence, of admiration, of influence—and gradients offend the ideology in the way sunlight offends a cellar.

Here is the inescapable logic, unpleasant precisely because it is tidy.

If equality of outcome is the goal, then difference of outcome is the enemy. If difference of outcome is the enemy, then difference of capacity must be managed. If difference of capacity must be managed, then education becomes not cultivation but calibration. If education becomes calibration, then excellence becomes antisocial. And if excellence becomes antisocial, then the only safe virtue is mediocrity.

In such a world, McDonald-ised factories are not a metaphor but a destiny. Not because everyone literally flips burgers, but because every human role is reduced to a standard operating procedure with interchangeable personnel. The system cannot rely on conscience or genius, because those are private assets; it relies on compliance. It cannot tolerate the unpredictable splendour of human idiosyncrasy, because idiosyncrasy produces outcomes you cannot pre-approve. So it builds lives the way franchises build menus: limited options, identical presentation, and a smile that costs extra.

And the activists—those who promise liberation through collectivism—do not see the trap because they are seduced by the fantasy of control. They imagine themselves the benevolent planners, not the planned. They dream of herding humanity into a better paddock and call the fencing “care.” They forget that the shepherd is always one bad day away from becoming the butcher.

One might put it to them gently, in the old manner, with a sentence that does not so much inform as perform: “You offer equality as though it were mercy, but you can only deliver it as administration; and administration, when it is total, is simply tyranny that has learnt to use indoor voices.”

They will reply, indignantly, that people will be “free” in the equal society—free from want, free from exploitation, free from hierarchy. The claim is as touching as it is false. Freedom is not the absence of discomfort; it is the presence of choice. Want is not abolished by edict; it is displaced into new forms—status games, bureaucratic favour, ideological purity, and the quiet bribery of conformity. Hierarchy does not vanish; it migrates. When you abolish the visible hierarchies of market and merit, you do not create equality; you create the invisible hierarchies of permission and access. The powerful become those who decide what is “fair,” and fairness becomes whatever benefits them.

The majority does not want this, not because they are too stupid to appreciate the dream, but because they are wise enough to smell the cost. Ordinary people understand, in their bones, what the theorists pretend not to notice: that a life without ownership is a life without shelter, even if the roof is technically provided; that a life without reward is a life without direction, even if the pantry is full; that a life without privacy is a life without dignity, even if the surveillance is justified as “accountability.” They know that being herded, however gently, is still being herded.

There is a reason Utopia is chilling once the charm wears off. It is not because it contains whips and chains in every chapter. It is because it contains something far more corrosive: a complete, self-satisfied system in which the individual is never quite allowed to be alone with his own mind. The terror is not spectacle; it is totality. The evil is not cruelty; it is the abolition of the space in which a person might become himself.

Equality of law is civilisation’s way of saying: no man is born a master. Equality of outcome is civilisation’s way of saying: no man is permitted to become one. And if one insists on a world where no one may rise above anyone else, one eventually discovers the only stable arrangement: everyone kept low, while a small cadre stands above them to ensure it stays that way.

That is the “equal” society.

Clean.

Ordered.

Correct.

And dead in precisely the places that make life worth the trouble.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Posted by Tintin (here)
A terrific post from an S Tominaga whose bio on X says he's a Bitcoin inventor. Whatever the case may be, this cuts beautifully through all the fug:

Doesn't it ever. What a great piece, every sentence a banger. Should be required reading everywhere. You could just slap the following on every billboard across the country, in every town, city, and motorway service station.

If equality of outcome is the goal, then difference of outcome is the enemy. If difference of outcome is the enemy, then difference of capacity must be managed. If difference of capacity must be managed, then education becomes not cultivation but calibration. If education becomes calibration, then excellence becomes antisocial. And if excellence becomes antisocial, then the only safe virtue is mediocrity.

perhaps add at the end:

...and if mediocrity is to be our standard-bearer, then advancement of society ends. We become stagnation and death.

Freedom is not the absence of discomfort; it is the presence of choice.

Bang on.

[T Smith]

Posted by Tintin (here)
A terrific post from an S Tominaga whose bio on X says he's a Bitcoin inventor. Whatever the case may be, this cuts beautifully through all the fug:

They keep hawking collectivism the way a bored priest hawks salvation: with rehearsed indignation, second-hand certainty, and the faintly obscene assumption that people exist primarily to be improved.

They do not begin with the individual—breathing, erring, choosing, building, failing, trying again.

They begin with “society,” that grand abstraction into which living persons are poured like wet concrete, then smoothed flat so no inconvenient edges remain.

One is tempted to congratulate them on the consistency of their error.

In Marx’s day, the majority did not want it; they wanted bread they had earned, a home that was theirs, children who might do better, and the dignity of not having their lives narrated by an ideological chaperone. Now, with the advantage of a century’s evidence and a library’s worth of funerals, the majority still does not want it. And the activists, never chastened by reality, merely rebrand the same coercive sameness with softer packaging: “equity,” “community,” “solidarity”—as if changing the label changes the contents.

People want to be people.

Not units.

Not “stakeholders.”

Not interchangeable cogs in some hygienic apparatus where the soul is treated as a rounding error. They want distinct lives with distinct consequences, because consequence is the price of agency, and agency is the only thing that makes a life more than managed respiration. They want the right to be unequal in the only sense that matters: unequal in talent, in taste, in appetite, in ambition, in the peculiar shape of their love and the peculiar burden of their grief. Equality of law is a civilised triumph; equality of outcome is a civilised suicide.

There is a line one hears, usually delivered with the calm of someone who has never built anything: that equality is “fair.”

The word is a narcotic. It floats through the mouth like virtue and lands in the world like a brick.

Because a society that is truly equal—equal in possessions, equal in status, equal in speech, equal in reward—cannot be achieved by persuasion. It requires ceaseless supervision, because difference is not an ideological deviation; it is the default condition of being alive. The moment you demand equal outcomes, you must criminalise excellence as hoarding, ambition as aggression, and preference as prejudice. You must convert the ordinary human act of wanting more—more skill, more beauty, more space, more time, more peace—into a punishable offence.

Thomas More’s Utopia is useful precisely because it is so politely monstrous. It does not roar; it smiles. It does not threaten; it arranges. And in its arrangements one can see the true shape of the “equal” society: not a paradise, but a well-swept prison in which the bars are painted the colour of virtue.

More offers a world without private property, a world where households are standardised, labour is compulsory, and citizens are shuffled from house to house to prevent attachment from crystallising into independence. He offers communal meals, regulated work, regulated leisure, regulated travel. He offers uniformity, not as a regrettable instrument, but as an ideal. He proposes that gold and silver be despised by making them the material of chamber pots and shackles, as if one could legislate value out of human nature by staging a moral pantomime. He does not merely limit greed; he attempts to abolish the concept of the “mine,” and therefore to abolish the interior frontier without which a person cannot be a person.

The genius—if we must use so generous a word—is that it is all done for “the common good.” That phrase, once enthroned, justifies any intrusion. It is an all-purpose warrant for the state to enter your home, your time, your choices, your conscience. The common good becomes a solvent in which all private goods dissolve. And once dissolved, they cannot be recovered, because you have lost the one thing that makes resistance intelligible: the idea that your life belongs, in the first instance, to you.

Consider the implied predicate of Utopian equality: if everyone must be equal, then nobody may be permitted to be exceptional in any publicly consequential way. But exception is not a vice; it is the engine of civilisation. It is the surgeon who stays late because the patient is not a statistic. It is the engineer who refuses the cheap fix because the bridge will carry children. It is the writer who will not flatten language into slogans because the sentence itself is a form of honesty. The equal society cannot tolerate such people, because they create gradients—of competence, of admiration, of influence—and gradients offend the ideology in the way sunlight offends a cellar.

Here is the inescapable logic, unpleasant precisely because it is tidy.

If equality of outcome is the goal, then difference of outcome is the enemy. If difference of outcome is the enemy, then difference of capacity must be managed. If difference of capacity must be managed, then education becomes not cultivation but calibration. If education becomes calibration, then excellence becomes antisocial. And if excellence becomes antisocial, then the only safe virtue is mediocrity.

In such a world, McDonald-ised factories are not a metaphor but a destiny. Not because everyone literally flips burgers, but because every human role is reduced to a standard operating procedure with interchangeable personnel. The system cannot rely on conscience or genius, because those are private assets; it relies on compliance. It cannot tolerate the unpredictable splendour of human idiosyncrasy, because idiosyncrasy produces outcomes you cannot pre-approve. So it builds lives the way franchises build menus: limited options, identical presentation, and a smile that costs extra.

And the activists—those who promise liberation through collectivism—do not see the trap because they are seduced by the fantasy of control. They imagine themselves the benevolent planners, not the planned. They dream of herding humanity into a better paddock and call the fencing “care.” They forget that the shepherd is always one bad day away from becoming the butcher.

One might put it to them gently, in the old manner, with a sentence that does not so much inform as perform: “You offer equality as though it were mercy, but you can only deliver it as administration; and administration, when it is total, is simply tyranny that has learnt to use indoor voices.”

They will reply, indignantly, that people will be “free” in the equal society—free from want, free from exploitation, free from hierarchy. The claim is as touching as it is false. Freedom is not the absence of discomfort; it is the presence of choice. Want is not abolished by edict; it is displaced into new forms—status games, bureaucratic favour, ideological purity, and the quiet bribery of conformity. Hierarchy does not vanish; it migrates. When you abolish the visible hierarchies of market and merit, you do not create equality; you create the invisible hierarchies of permission and access. The powerful become those who decide what is “fair,” and fairness becomes whatever benefits them.

The majority does not want this, not because they are too stupid to appreciate the dream, but because they are wise enough to smell the cost. Ordinary people understand, in their bones, what the theorists pretend not to notice: that a life without ownership is a life without shelter, even if the roof is technically provided; that a life without reward is a life without direction, even if the pantry is full; that a life without privacy is a life without dignity, even if the surveillance is justified as “accountability.” They know that being herded, however gently, is still being herded.

There is a reason Utopia is chilling once the charm wears off. It is not because it contains whips and chains in every chapter. It is because it contains something far more corrosive: a complete, self-satisfied system in which the individual is never quite allowed to be alone with his own mind. The terror is not spectacle; it is totality. The evil is not cruelty; it is the abolition of the space in which a person might become himself.

Equality of law is civilisation’s way of saying: no man is born a master. Equality of outcome is civilisation’s way of saying: no man is permitted to become one. And if one insists on a world where no one may rise above anyone else, one eventually discovers the only stable arrangement: everyone kept low, while a small cadre stands above them to ensure it stays that way.

That is the “equal” society.

Clean.

Ordered.

Correct.

And dead in precisely the places that make life worth the trouble.

Wow. What an incredibly articulate truth

[Mike]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Sounds great superficially. But it's just the glittery wrapping paper concealing a very sinister "gift" - Marxism.

They knew they couldn't peddle Marxism/communism openly and win the hearts of normies, so they simply recast it as "diversity, equity, and inclusion". The perpetrators of this stuff knew class warfare wouldn't really work in places like the US, because capitalism actually works quite well, so they simply inserted race, sex, "gender", and so forth where class used to be. Instead of the bourgeoisie vs the working class, they pit man vs woman, gay vs straight, trans vs straight, white vs black etc.

That's all it is.

It has a nice ring to it. A positive emotional valence. How can you possibly be against diversity, equity, and inclusion, right? Well you can if you're a horrible racist, or bigot, or transphobe, or whatever. That's the game being played, in a nutshell.

Equity never meant equality to the cultural Marxists; it meant equal outcomes.
Inclusion never really meant fairness; it meant exclusion (exclusion of everyone who resisted the Marxist movement)
Diversity was never designed to unify, it was designed to create weaker fault lines along already fragile fault lines existing between different groups of people.

In other words, the way it was presented to the public and the way it's actually practiced are 2 entirely different things.

The entire movement was designed to pathologically obsess about mostly superficial differences all while demanding rigid ideological agreement.

It's intrinsically authoritarian because it has to be; you have to force people to act against their human nature, and cultural Marxism/communism/socialism all demand human beings act against their nature. It can't result in anything other than destruction and chaos ultimately.

[rgray222]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion have almost single-handedly destroyed the American educational system. The role of standardized testing in American schools remains in place, but it is mostly "optional", and that has spelt disaster for an entire generation of Americans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges adopted test-optional policies, which remain in place today at about 80% of the institutions. The primary reason for this testing nightmare is to promote equity and access for economically disadvantaged students. The American education landscape is in systemic failure, with only 22% of high school students being grade proficient in math and 35% being grade proficient in reading. Educators started to actually believe their own propaganda, that diversity, equity and inclusion are substitutes for education. They failed to comprehend that education prepares children for a diverse world.

The most striking aspect of this disaster is that many Americans are attempting to hold onto a systemically failed education system. They have bought into the manmade catastrophe called diversity. They are so afraid that Trump might improve the American educational landscape that they are willing to allow their children to receive less than mediocre educational outcomes.

Trump is on the right path by closing the Department of Education and removing all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

[Mike]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
Diversity, equity, and inclusion have almost single-handedly destroyed the American educational system. The role of standardized testing in American schools remains in place, but it is mostly "optional", and that has spelt disaster for an entire generation of Americans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many colleges adopted test-optional policies, which remain in place today at about 80% of the institutions. The primary reason for this testing nightmare is to promote equity and access for economically disadvantaged students. The American education landscape is in systemic failure, with only 22% of high school students being grade proficient in math and 35% being grade proficient in reading. Educators started to actually believe their own propaganda, that diversity, equity and inclusion are substitutes for education. They failed to comprehend that education prepares children for a diverse world.

The most striking aspect of this disaster is that many Americans are attempting to hold onto a systemically failed education system. They have bought into the manmade catastrophe called diversity. They are so afraid that Trump might improve the American educational landscape that they are willing to allow their children to receive less than mediocre educational outcomes.

Trump is on the right path by closing the Department of Education and removing all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Yeah, nodding my head as I read along here.

Bill started a really good thread about the awfulness of the educational system and began by lamenting the stale and robotic nature of it all, which up until a few years ago was my exact lament. It still is my lament somewhat, but now it's far far worse with these dreadful radical activist teachers and their "critical theories". They are awful creatures. The worst kind of people. I'm actually nostalgic for the days when it was all just stale and robotic. At least a kid had a chance. Nowadays kids don't really have a chance.

There's loads more I'd like to say about it all, but I've said so much about it all already all over the forum, and I think when you keep repeating yourself people just tune ya out. So I'm trying to pick my spots now moving forward.

Re Department of Education: Another great Trump move, far as I'm concerned,