From “Equal Opportunity” to “Friend/Enemy”

2,480 words

“War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.” — Heraclitus

Compliance measures and social trust are two key elements in any society, the ratio of which is a good indicator of how productive the people in it are and what the level of the general welfare looks like. Compliance measures usually come with threats to motivate compliant responses.

As compliance measures multiply, so do the threats that back them up. No society can be free of compliance measures, but how many are too many? Is there a tipping point into chaos or civil war? Threatened people tend not to trust each other. Mutual distrust breeds enemies. Enemies are disposed to war. “So, the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan)

How much of what we see going on around us — in the streets, schools, universities, non-governmental organizations, mainstream media, governmental policy, and judicial rulings — are the actions of those people disposed to wage war? There is not much assurance to the contrary.

By “compliance measures” I mean laws, regulations, and rules — formal and informal — that specify limitations or demands on human behavior that come with sanctions that punish violators. Recent examples that were previously non-existent are the government Covid-diktats that came unexpectedly like a tidal wave: mask-wearing, business shuttering, vaccine passports, bans on social gatherings, travel restrictions, and so on. For people who enjoy being ordered about and threatened by people who enjoy doing it, the Covid pandemic must have been nirvana.

By “social trust,” I mean that members of society trust each other to comply with the rules without the need for coercive, external compliance machinery backed by relentless propaganda directed at the core of your personality — assumed to be malignant — such as what we currently experience.

Consider this example of high social trust from an Amish community: an unattended Amish farmer’s wagon sits by the side of a rural road loaded with fresh produce, a “for sale” sign and a box for the buyer to leave cash payment for the produce, “pay for what you take” being the rule. No one takes the produce without leaving payment; no one steals the money from the box. No one believes he is entitled to take the goods without paying because the farmer’s family is “privileged.” The farmer does not have to divert his time and forego productive work to be there in order to ensure compliance with the rule.

No threats; everyone is better off. Such an arrangement could only exist where a very high social trust is firmly established, and where rule compliance is internalized.

Think for a moment about what factors from the above Amish example would contribute to the high social trust with internal rule compliance. Everyone speaks the same language and shares the same religion, social values, and even sartorial tastes. Everyone is of the same racial/ethnic group. They feel connected to each other through a common, cultural heritage. “Diversity is our strength” does not translate into Pennsylvania Dutch.

The desideratum for a society would seem to be a state of internalized compliance to the rules made possible by high social trust. Internally-motivated compliance means fewer external compliance motivators, as in individuals devoted to creating and initiating costly “processes” that enforce compliance with unpopular measures and punish the non-compliant. Such a society can invest and direct the bulk of its resources toward activities and projects that result in improvements and mutual benefit.

The United States is a society rife with unpopular compliance measures and is on a steep climb upward. As such it is full of increasingly distrustful people who regard each other as enemies. Mutual enemies don’t attend to the general welfare.

To get a deeper sense of this, let’s begin with the “external compliance motivator” people, better known as lawyers. Lawyers are the bulwark of the compliance industry, either defending their clients against rival compliance enforcers or pursuing compliance violators on the behalf of their clients. Also, like bees making honey, lawyers instinctively busy themselves making more laws and regulations: more laws, more employment.

America is up to its armpits in lawyers. According the American Bar Association, there are 1,327,910 licensed attorneys in the United States, one for every 250 Americans. China, with a billion and a half people, has 500,000 lawyers, one for every 2,900 Chinese. Yet, the Chinese in terms of internal compliance are in some important respects more like the Amish than, let’s say, many of the residents of Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, or most of the big American cities.

Lawyers run the compliance industry, a high-growth industry over the last five decades. Compliance entrepreneurs — mostly lawyers — gravitate to government positions where they design massive regulatory systems to extend over spheres of human activity heretofore free of moralistic meddling. First come the laws and regulations that aim to fix things that were not thought by most to be broken. Then come the enforcers, who populate the agencies created to employ them — agencies that grow with every government budget cycle. With every cycle, they discover or invent more things that need fixing; more laws are added to the books; and, of course, more enforcers are added to the payroll. Every incentive on the part of the enforcement personnel is to expand their regulatory (predatory) reach.

In the spirit of “fixing what is not broken,” a major turning point in American history was the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that produced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).[1] With an annual budget of $379,500,000 (FY18) and over 2,000 employees, EEOC has become a Leviathan that looms over the American workplace, an army of inquisitors dedicated to forbidding Americans from doing what every normal human being is inclined to do: discriminate.

Let us ransack the simile cupboard for the most appropriate one to capture the horror show that the EEOC has become. The EEOC is a government compliance agency with a sinister, built-in mission-creep that resembles metastatic cancer.

Metastasis means that cancer spreads to a different body part from where it started.

The EEOC as stage one cancer, 1961-65: How and where it started

On March 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order that required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”[2] That order created the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. On July 2, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson — the most corrupt politician in America prior to the Clintons — turned the Committee into a permanent Commission, the EEOC. The EEOC’s first Chairman was Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr.,[3] a dark omen of the coming metastasis.

At that point, the cancer cells were limited in their attack to government contractors and to matters of discrimination by race. The American workplace was, relatively speaking, healthy.

The EEOC as metastatic stage four cancer, today

By 2005, after 40 years and millions of taxpayer dollars rolling back discrimination, alas, discrimination was said to reach “systemic” proportions. Consider the EEOC as the paradigm of a government compliance agency: It ends up generating more (discrimination in this case), not less of whatever it was created to reduce. The EEOC’s “success” is captured by Bob Dylan’s lady in “Love Minus Zero”:

She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.

Behold failure, though, as it is perpetuated and bloated by a government commission: “In 2005, the EEOC established the Systemic Task Force (STF) to evaluate how the agency combats systemic discrimination.”[4]

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here.

To translate from government-speak into simple English: A powerful government agency was about to get a lot more powerful. “Evaluate” by a bureaucratic “task force” always means, “We demand a bigger budget and more employees.” Oh, yes, and fewer constraints on what the employees can inflict on unsuspecting American citizens trying to eke out a normal existence. After all, this is “combat,” what the folks in the anti-discrimination business say that they are all about; a fitting verb that reveals how these government compliance enforcers regard the people they have to deal with: as enemies.

In March 2006, the STF determined that the agency could not effectively address system discrimination without a nationwide system.[5]

“Without a nationwide system” — don’t think for a second — would be a problem.

[T]he EEOC was uniquely prepared to fight systemic discrimination because the EEOC’s broad authority, commissioner’s charges, access to data, exemption from Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, focus on injunctive relief, and nationwide coverage.[6]

What then does this “uniquely prepared” gang of unelected bureaucrats with oodles of power, resources, and “exemptions” do to “fight systemic discrimination”?

As a result, the commission created the role of Systemic Coordinator and Lead Systemic Investigator, and implemented programs that resulted in improved systemic expertise in the agency and all charges being investigated as potential systemic cases.[7]

Note the symbiosis working here: a deus ex machina “systemic expertise” now appears to form a cozy partnership with “systemic discrimination.”

Here is “creationism” as practiced by the commission bosses whose response to every newly-created crisis is to create a new position to attend to it. That means some high-level practitioner of Diversity-Babble gets tapped to play a “role” and don an imposing Kafkaesque-sounding title, someone who will implement more “programs” that will turn more “experts” loose on the people from whom their salaries are extracted.

A half-century or so after its creation, he EEOC’s reach is not limited to government contractors but to all employers in the United States who employ more than 15 people. Race has been joined by a multitude of forbidden categories of discrimination: religion, sex (including pregnancy, transgender status, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), and disability or genetic information. Government “servants” are now devoted to protecting the feelings of men in dresses who announce that they are women.

“Discrimination” has ominously metastasized into “systemic discrimination,” and all discrimination is now under suspicion as “potential systemic cases.” “Potential” is another handy qualifier that gives the agency suits carte blanche for limitless “poking around” into other peoples’ lives. Somehow, I can’t help but think that even LBJ, if he were alive today, might wonder what kind of Kool-Aid had been dumped into the DC water supply.

Just as cancer cells attack healthy cells, spread systemically throughout the body, and ultimately destroy it, EEOC coordinators and investigators attack, in their own language, entire “systems” infected with “discrimination.” They have turned the American workplace into a permanent, external compliance battle zone over which hangs continuous threats of lawsuits, fines, and forced reeducation: bosses, workers, and business owners under permanent suspicion of abusing those clients under the “legal protection” of the compliance-enforcing patrons. The lawsuits are conducted by government lawyers with unlimited resources — i.e., unlimited power. Resistance merely infuriates enforcers, and they just turn the screws tighter.

The EEOC’s pervasive anti-discrimination legal action against employers and workers is justified by the social justice moralism — advanced by the “diversity” industry — that has swept through our institutions, the most salient feature being “anti-racism.” From “systemic racism,” which is immoral and in “our DNA,” comes “systemic discrimination,” which is illegal and “potentially” everywhere. “Systemic,” with its connotations of pervasiveness and critical peril, is the adjective the enables the moralizers and their enforcers to “take off the gloves” and demonstrate who really gets to call the shots and take whatever “drastic measures” are required to make the right people happy.

The “diversity” industry — metastasized in education, corporations, and entertainment — is the moral compliance arm of the legal enforcers of the assault on (now) “systemic” anti-discrimination.

Putting aside the cancer simile, it is best, perhaps, to conclude with some of the language from the beginning — trust, threats, enemies, war — and the perspicacity of Carl Schmitt: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”[8]

The political actions and motives of the combined forces of social justice ideologues and government enforcers are clearly centered on an enemy: white, European-heritage Americans. Their language and actions indicate that the outcome they seek is not white accommodation, compromise, and equality of opportunity. Here is what a “distinguished” lecturer, a psychiatrist no less, who was invited to speak at Yale University School of Medicine had to say about white people:

I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fucking favor.

For anyone paying attention to what is coming out of the institutions of the ruling class and their propaganda organs, this kind of white-hate rant is becoming standard fare. Yale University seems to go all in for this sort of thing. From Yale’s Pierson College’s Dean in a restaurant review back in 2017:

To put it quite simply: if you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you! This establishment is not authentic by any stretch of the imagination and perfect for those low class folks who believe that this is a perfect night out.

Many white Americans still fail to comprehend that they are regarded as “the enemy” in spite of being told that they are in language, as we see above, that leaves no doubt. They still believe the “our democracy” agitprop. They still think that a constructive “conversation on race” is possible. They still imagine that a “racial policy” is achievable that finally removes whites from their status as oppressors and will bring racial harmony. Conservative Inc. remains obsequious to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “content of their character” jive and his “Dream” speech “where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Did MLK really want this to happen?

“The constitution,” “rule of law,” and “democratic election processes,” all piously parroted about as still operational, in reality function as popular fiction. They persist with their delusionary hold on many Americans because, as Schmitt quoting Kierkegaard states, they are “not thought about with passion but with comfortable superficiality.”[9] They divert attention away from the political crisis, the “extreme case,” the exception,” as Schmitt would put it, where we have been pushed by race-grievances ideologues who have declared war on white people and who are actively waging war.

There are only two players now: friends and enemies. We have been declared the enemy by the ruling class moralizers. The collective recognition of that status must come soon.

*  *  *

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Notes

[1] Wikipedia, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, George Schwab, translator (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), p. 26.

[9] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, George Schwab, translator (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), p. 15.