DEI policies undermine material progress
By undermining the Five Keys to Progress and How Progress Works
Yesterday, I published an article that argued that DEI policies undermine the effectiveness of Western institutions and undermine their legitimacy. Unfortunately, it gets worse than that.
In this article, I argue that DEI policies undermine the foundations of human progress. They do so through two main causes.
This article is part of a multi-part series on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI):
What’s wrong with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? (podcast; video).
DEI policies undermine material progress (this article).
more articles on DEI coming soon…
See also my other articles and podcasts on Ideology:
Why Ideologies Threaten Progress (Part 1 of 3-part podcast series)
Why ideologies fail (podcast)
Descent into a man-made Hell: Understanding modern Totalitarianism
You might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
DEI forces a relentless centralization
The first reason DEI undermines material progress is that the policies and practices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion force a relentless centralization. DEI dramatically increase the power of bureaucracies, the Human Resources departments, and the DEI departments that permeate American institutions. All of the above enforce a relentless ideological conformity that undermines the diversity of ideas.
A core concept of my Substack column and book series is The Five Keys to Progress.
I believe that the Five Keys to Progress is an essential unifying concept for understanding human material progress. They are critical because they are the necessary preconditions for a society changing from a state of poverty to a state of progress, and they are actionable in today’s world. In other words, the concept not only helps to understand the world but also how to make it better.
I am not going to explain in detail each of the Five Keys, but I do want to mention the Third Key to Progress:
Decentralized political, economic, religious, and ideological power. It is of particular importance that elites are forced into transparent, non-violent competition that undermines their ability to forcibly extract wealth from the masses. This also allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based on how much they have to offer to each individual and society in general.
The DEI movement essentially wants to use institutional power to enforce a Post-Modernist Leftist ideology that focuses on the oppression of women, racial minorities, and non-traditional sexualities. Most importantly, they want to transform the goals of all institutions to become vectors of Leftist propaganda and activism.
This is very similar tactic to the German National Socialist tactic in the 1930s of subordinating all German institutions to the National Socialist party and then leveraging those institutions to control the economy. While under Communism, the Communist party to controlled the state and then the state controlled the economy, the National Socialists maintain party dominance indirectly.
If American institutions had ideological pluralism within and between them, then DEI activists could not achieve their goal. Totalitarian rule does not require wholesale nationalization of corporations. That is only one of the many roads to Totalitarianism and one that is very unlikely in wealthy Western nations.
A far more likely path to Soft Totalitarianism in wealthy Western nations is a small minority of ideological activists subsidized by government funding and mandates capturing institutions and changing them all toward a common ideological goal.
I am not saying that the Woke has some grand plan that they are operating under. Instead, their behavior is the outcome of a rigid and dysfunctional ideology that views anything that works, including Merit, as a system of Oppression that must be annihilated to achieve a state of Social Justice.
Forcing all institutions to work toward Social Justice necessarily undermines the “transparent, non-violent competition” that I mentioned above in explaining the Third Key to Progress. And remember, the reason why this norm of competition evolved was because this competition checked “the ability of elites to forcibly extract wealth from the masses.” This transparent, non-violent competition also “allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based upon how much they have to offer to each individual and society in general.”
So far from fighting Oppression and achieving Social Justice, the policies and practices of DEI enable a small minority of aggressive upper-class activists to extract wealth from the masses. And the seemingly harmless and beautiful terminology of DEI gives them a social camouflage that tricks many of their opponents into publicly defending the dangerous practices despite their misgiving (“What’s the big deal? Can’t we just stop fighting about these ridiculous culture war issues and focus on more important issues?'”).
In other words, the results of DEI are exactly the opposite of what DEI activists say that they are trying to accomplish: elite domination.
Now I do not doubt for a minute that the vast majority of DEI activists and employees believe that they are fighting Oppression and achieving Social Justice. They do.
But embedded within their ideology (and almost all other ideologies) is an unwillingness to look at the actual results of their policies. So every bad result of DEI policies is ignored or used as a rationale for doubling down on more DEI.
How Progress Works
DEI policies and practices also undermine how the vast decentralized problem-solving network that is a modern society functions.
Another core concept of my Substack column and book series is How Progress Works. This concept consists of a series of human behaviors that existed long before modern material progress existed. Indeed, some of them are common to non-human species although to a much lesser extent. These human behaviors are likely encoded in our DNA and reinforced and differentiated by culture and institutions.
Once a society acquires the Five Keys to Progress, however, that society can transform itself into a vast, decentralized problem-solving network. Instead of people competing against each other for scarce resources such as food, status, and land, individuals can focus on solving each other’s problems at scale by cooperating through market exchange.
A good way to think of it is that once the Five Keys to Progress create a critical mass for preconditions for the network to emerge, these lower-level factors are what enable the network to produce progress.
I go into more detail in my How Progress Works article, but the key human behaviors that make material progress work in our daily lives are:
People learning new skills to support those technologies. Without these skills, technologies are not useful, a fact that is often forgotten.
People cooperating within organizations. Those people work together using a wide variety of skills and technologies to accomplish a common goal.
Competition between organizations for scarce resources. In the past, this was usually food, while now it is usually revenue. This competition forces organizations to embrace new technologies, skills, and processes to out-compete other organizations. It also forces people within the group to cooperate more closely and enables new organizations to be founded and older organizations to fail.
People copying successful technologies, skills, and organizations and then modifying them to solve different problems. This enables innovations that work to spread into new companies, new sectors of the economy, and new geographical regions. This step is critical to ensure that progress is widely shared.
Consumption of vast amounts of useful energy. Without energy, none of this can happen
DEI undermines How Progress Works
The policies and practices of DEI undermine all the above.
Technological innovation cannot happen without people learning new skills to support those technologies. Institutions therefore need to hire, fire, and promote to a large extent based on the skills their employees and potential employees have that relate to the specific technologies the institution uses and sells. Any deviation from merit, no matter how well-intentioned, will undermine the quality of the outputs of the organization.
As I mentioned in my previous article, the policies and practices of DEI undermine the cohesion of organizations by playing each individual off against each other. Some conservatives complain about “virtue signaling,” but they get the problem only half right.
DEI incentivizes a relentless zero-sum status competition where virtue, as defined by the principles of DEI, is the measuring stick. DEI creates a competition to see who can signal their virtue the most. Being seen as virtuous is not enough. One must be more virtuous than most other people within the organization. And in the social media era, this causes an information cascade of zero-sum status competition within organizations.
DEI policies and practices incentivize all members of the organization to compete against each other (rather than cooperate to accomplish common goals) based on:
How fervently they publicly advocate for the concepts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (even if the majority are falsifying their real opinion), particularly via social media.
How many diversity checkboxes each individual has to justify their hiring and promotion and avoid being fired.
The greater this symbolic zero-sum competition within organizations, the lower the overall levels of cooperation and the less the employees believe that their hard work, merit, and accomplishments will be rewarded materially. This inevitably undermines employee morale.
The policies and practices of DEI also undermine competition between organizations by giving them very similar over-arching goals: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The very reason that the institution was established (build cars, teach children, distribute news, reallocate capital, etc) becomes secondary to the mission of promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Now, in practice, this is impossible, but the corporate Public Relations and advertising will do everything to make it appear that that DEI is a critical mission to the institution.
So while DEI pushes employees to compete in a zero-sum status competition, the organization itself has a strong self-interest in forcing its competition, investors, suppliers, and customers to do the same. If any of them keep the focus on Merit, the entire system falls apart.
This is exactly how Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) works. Corporations put pressure on other corporations to cooperate on an ideological goal at the expense of the profit motive and merit. Any institution that fails to play the game get punished by all the others. Cooperating “stake-holders” become more important than customers.
DEI cannot work in a competitive environment because the concepts are actively opposed to merit-based decisions and competitiveness. Any organization that maintains merit-based hiring, firing and promotion will gain a huge competitive advantage over organizations that do not. If a critical mass of merit-based institutions exist within a sector of the economy, then then one of two things must happen:
The non-merit-based organization collapses, or
The non-merit-based organization is forced to partially roll back DEI policies and practice to maintain their competitiveness.
Because DEI gets at the key factor of what types of people are working within the organization, minor changes are not enough. A major, if not complete, rollback of DEI is necessary.
DEI is an Anti-Progress world view
DEI activists are inherently skeptical of the human material progress that I document in this Substack.
Worse than that, DEI activists are actively trying to undermine the foundations of material progress. A key theme of this Substack and my book series is that modern material progress gradually evolved over the course of the last 800 years through trial-and-error experimentation. Through an almost random process of evolution, the things that worked stuck, while the things that did not work were discarded.
While modern societies are inherently imperfect, those technologies, skills, organizations, and culture that remain are largely “traditions that worked.” Unfortunately, the Woke and Critical theory activists see all this as Inequality and Oppression and want to tear it down. And they have evolved a style of action, argumentation, and terminology that enables them to be surprisingly effective at doing so once they are ensconced in institutions dominated by the Center-Left.
None of this is a coincidence
All of this is a logical consequence of accepting Woke and Critical theory ideological assumptions.
Human societies are dominated by a zero-sum competition between groups. Material progress that benefits the masses is an illusion.
Those groups can best be understood as falling into two categories:
Oppressors
Oppressed.
All inequalities within society are and were created by what members of the Oppressor group have done or are doing to Oppressed groups.
The means by which Oppressors achieved their dominance is by inventing “social constructs” that mask the oppression inherent in the system: Progress, Democracy, Liberty, Merit, Family, Patriotism, Competition, Opportunity, etc.
It is the moral duty of all good people to:
Publicly stand up for the Oppressed groups and
Relentlessly criticize the immoral gains of members of Oppressor groups.
Compensate members of the Oppressed groups for past discrimination and oppression.
If you view human material progress as a system of oppression that hurt Oppressed groups, then it is perfectly “rational” to view every concept central to society as a means of Oppression that needs to be torn down.
So from the Woke perspective, the Five Keys to Progess and How Progress Works do not lift up the masses materially. They are just a clever rhetorical trick to oppress the majority and mask the oppression inherent in the system.
You do not need some grand plan like the “Long March through the Institutions” or a conspiracy. All you need is three things:
An aggressive minority within the upper class who support the key ideological assumptions of Critical theory (i.e. the Woke).
A much larger group of Center-Leftists who dominate the upper and middle ranks of institutions.
This larger group sees the Woke as a somewhat irritating and misguided set of individuals who nonetheless are valuable allies against the darker forces in society (i.e. conservatives, the billionaires, the rich, Republicans, Trump, MAGA).
For whatever the wrongs of the Woke, the Center-Left see them as having good intentions and a willingness fight against the correct enemy. In other words, both the Woke and the Center-Left believe that Equality is the prime goal, although they have different means to achieve that long-term goal.A conservative opposition to the Woke that is increasingly sidelined within:
institutions and
the means of communication (media, social media, entertainment industry).
the education system (K-12 and universities).
The Woke are just another extractive elite
The policies and practices of DEI are inherently parasitic and extractive.
Extractive institutions of the past extract the food surplus from the peasants so the elites who dominated those institutions could use them for their own purposes:
Conspicuous consumption that displayed the elite’s social status
Religious institutions and rituals that displayed the elite’s superior morality
Building up security apparatus to protect elites from internal and external threats.
Military conquest
Leveraging previous military conquests to extract food surplus from additional farmers
The Woke are just the latest phase of elites leveraging centralized institutions to extract from the masses and glorify their own status and morality. Unfortunately for elites, the egalitarian rhetoric inherent to the new means of extraction actually undermines their ability to do so over the long run.
DEI sabotages the internal workings of any organization that embraces the concept. It is like a cancer that grows out of control and eventually kills the patient. You simply cannot run an organization within a competitive environment based on DEI principles. They are based on exactly the opposite of what organizations need: employees who were selected and promoted based on merit, working together for a common goal that customers are voluntarily willing to pay for.
DEI requires:
Employees not selected based on merit but on demographic characteristics that are correlated with a lack of merit.
Employees competing against each other to prove they are a bigger victim than all the other employees.
Organizational goals being subordinated to ideology
Secrecy
A cultivated public image of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that is the opposite of what is actually going on within the organization
A lack of competition from other organizations
A constant flow of revenue that is not tied to individual choice. This is the biggest weakness. The entire system relies on compulsory extraction of other people’s money because DEI cannot be effective in a competitive system. The most convenient form is government subsidies and mandates.
Just like a Totalitarian regime, DEI policies and practices expand to control everything. When they are put in place, they seem impossible to overcome. For the individual trapped within an organization, the fight seems hopeless.
But DEI is also inherently fragile
But just like Totalitarian regimes, DEI policies and practices are inherently fragile because they are trying to force an ideology that fundamentally contradicts the material world. The contradictions are impossible to avoid, and eventually lead to the sudden and total collapse of the system.
So now that we can see the problem, what is to be done?
That topic I will reserve for another article.
See also my other articles and podcasts on Ideology:
Why Ideologies Threaten Progress (Part 1 of 3-part podcast series)
Why ideologies fail (podcast)
Descent into a man-made Hell: Understanding modern Totalitarianism
You might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: