Lessons of History
Everyone following the news has surely noted the recent string of transportation and communications systems breakdowns plaguing our society. These include communications blackouts, hacking of corporate databases, train wrecks across the country, plant explosions and planes falling out of the sky or colliding on the ground. Even navigating your way through an airport has become a nightmare. Nothing seems to work anymore. Everyone can sense something is wrong. When the government shut down the economy during COVID, a measure increasingly acknowledged as unnecessary, everyone assumed the economy could be turned back on like a light switch. It didn’t turn out that way.
Serious damage has been done to our economy
Serious damage has been done to our economy. Small businesses had been savaged by the closures and many killed off. Vital health care workers had been fired for not taking the experimental mRNA shot. Pilots, air traffic controllers, teachers, and military personnel were purged for the same reason.
But when it came time to turn the switch back “ON” things did not return to normal as expected. The system had been damaged and remains so today. Alarming headlines prove the point.
Dependent on highly specialized skills and expertise, our complex society is performing less and less well. Covid restrictions turned off the most complex society in history. Complex systems require skills and expertise to operate, and these knowledge networks were damaged by COVID shutdowns. It will take time to rebuild them. But there is something in the way. Diversity Equity Inclusion theology (that’s right it has become a leftist theology) is interfering with the rebuilding process. DEI pulls society and institutions toward mediocrity and away from meritocracy. Nothing could be more fatal to a complex society and economy. At worst, it leads to a kakistocracy where institutions are governed by the least able and least skilled.
At a time when society needs to focus like a laser on restoring markets, harnessing expertise, and honing product quality, we have become distracted by Diversity Equity Inclusion, an echo of Marxism guaranteeing not equality of opportunity but equality of outcome. In an amazingly short period of time, this new theology worked its way into many executive suites, weakening and displacing traditional core corporate values.
Meritocracy–Competence is color and gender blind
Any number of once proud corporations have dashed themselves on the rocks of DEI. Think of Bud Light, Disney, Harley Davidson, Gillette, Target, and, worst of all, Boeing. Delta Airlines has incorporated DEI into hiring and training practices and even banned the use of Ladies and Gentlemen from flight welcomes.(1) At the same time, Delta flights are losing emergency slides in midair, having tires blow up injuring workers, and planes crashing into one another on the runway…but at least they have their pronouns right.(2),(3),(4) And notwithstanding big DEI investments, airlines still manage to lose 25 million bags a year.
The perniciousness of DEI’s impact on corporate and institutional culture cannot be overstated. Once hired, DEI officers do immediate damage and set about undermining the very values that made their enterprises work. New DEI training consumes time and resources and distorts reward and promotion criteria. The focus on competence, never mind excellence, is replaced by racial, gender, and other extraneous factors. This gums up the inner workings of an institution and inevitably leads to a steady decline in performance.
And always remember this about meritocracy–competence is color and gender blind.
The most dangerous aspect of DEI is that it pushes society away from a reverence for excellence. Nothing could be more detrimental for a complex economy. Meritocracy has been an implicit element in the West’s Judeo-Christian ethos for more than 2000 years. Under this ethos everyone is welcome to compete, but no one is guaranteed success except based on outcome.
Lee Kuan Yew is one of the most influential figures of our time
Lee Kuan Yew is not a name broadly known in the west, but it should be. He took the small state of Singapore from an impoverished island with no resources except its talented people, and turned it into a technological, financial super-power. He provided the model for today’s Asian economic tigers. He influenced China’s turn toward a more open market economy. Lee Kuan Yew is one of the most influential figures of our time. He advocated for a meritocracy rooted in the best and brightest, not based on empty college degrees but on bottom line performance and skill. On this question, he would not compromise an inch. There was room in Singapore for every citizen willing to work but the best would lead. You can argue with the ethos but not the results. Singapore is a rags to riches success story.
Today in the west we are fast drifting away from Lee Kuan Yew’s imperative as we enter uncharted territory where merit is decided by some absurd point scale based on gender, race, sexual orientation, or other extraneous criteria. Amidst this madness, meritocracy has been abandoned.
How would you feel if the pilot on your next flight was not the best aviator but instead someone who best met Diversity Equity Inclusion scores? We are dangerously close to this dystopian reality.
Societies Slip down the Evolutionary Slope
Today we are witnessing a rising tide of systemic breakdowns in air travel, rail and transportation, food production, communications, etc. Our databases are regularly hacked and our data stolen, our food and energy facilities are suddenly exploding. Even our bloated, overstaffed civil service is less and less effective. Try getting a passport issued or a military service record corrected today.
The degradation of standards in our public schools and the turning of post-secondary institutions into mindless woke factories has accelerated our economic decline. Graduates who can’t spell or write a coherent sentence are a sure sign of decay. The amount of money pouring into education, especially in the US, is enormous yet is producing less and less value per dollar spent. Who needs another Gender Studies graduate who can barely write a coherent paragraph? One can sense a terrible reckoning coming for both public and higher education.
Western society enjoys prosperity on a scale never seen before in history and unmatched today by most of the globe. This is not an accident. The West’s Judeo-Christian values produced the finest scholars, scientists, and engineers in the world, at least up until now. Couple this with a strong religious and work ethic and you have the makings of an economic and cultural miracle.
“What’s past is prologue, what is to come in your and my discharge.”
But none of this success is guaranteed going forward. Writers in 5th century Rome commented on how ordinary things were, even amidst a rapidly collapsing Empire. They had grown accustomed to the signs of decay and chaos. For them, the end came at first gradually and then suddenly. One of the first things the barbarians did upon occupying Rome was to end the bloody and cruel gladiatorial games. Who then were the barbarians?
There is a long pattern of societies rising to prosperity and success only to fade back into a more primitive and less prosperous state. The Mayans built incredible cities like Tikal but suddenly abandoned them, and no one knows why. Later Mayan temples are often described as “decadent” as they are architecturally flawed. They reflect a society that retained a faint memory of its glorious past but had no capacity to recreate it. The vital skills and knowledge had been lost.
Therein lies a warning for the west. As Shakespeare reminds us “What’s past is prologue, what is to come in your and my discharge.” If things are to change then we must change them, there is no one else.
Originally from Montreal, Canada, Barry Sheehy holds degrees from Loyola (Concordia) and McGill Universities, as well as the Canadian Armed Forces Decoration. Mr. Sheehy’s lifelong passion for history has continued since his early years as an officer in the Canadian Armed forces. After leaving the military, he entered the entrepreneurial world of business consulting where he acquired clients from New York to London and as far away as Dubai and Hong Kong. Barry is the author or contributing author of several books and over fifty published papers and articles. Barry’s ongoing interest in history eventually focused his attention America’s most complete, surviving, antebellum Southern city, Savannah, Georgia. He was particularly interested in the city’s wartime experience. After many years of exhaustive research, Sheehy began the task of final development, aided by an all-volunteer team of skilled professionals in 2005. With rigorous cross checking from both previously published works and newly discovered original materials, Sheehy has written the most extensive historical study of Civil War Savannah ever undertaken, including “Savannah: Immortal City” and “Savannah: Brokers, Bankers, and Bay Lane.” His latest book “Montreal, City of Secrets” appeared in September 2017.
First published: https://canadafreepress.com/article/dei-a-marker-on-the-road-to-dystopia
References
- Delta’s top DEI officer jettisons ‘ladies and gentlemen’ gate announcements as part of equity push | Fox Business
- FAA Investigating: Delta Air Lines Boeing 767 Emergency Slide Falls Off In Flight,
- Delta plane tire explodes at Atlanta airport, leaving two dead and one seriously injured
- 2 Delta planes collide while taxiing at US airport
