1,565 words

In my lecture “What’s Wrong with Diversity,” I lay out some basic arguments for why it is a bad idea to make one’s society racially and ethnically diverse. But I didn’t discuss a problem that starts as soon as diversity becomes a goal that institutions must promote.

Promoting diversity corrupts every institution, one institution at a time. Corruption means: undermining the ability of an institution to perform its proper function. Pursuing diversity turns every job into a racket. It turns every institution into a hollowed-out farce.

This process can proceed for a long time, until an institution—or a society as a whole—is tested. The test can be a war, a pandemic, civil unrest, an economic crisis, or a convergence of all of them. If the corruption is sufficiently advanced, even a minor crisis can precipitate a collapse. A healthy man will be barely slowed down by a cold, but a feeble man can be killed by one.

What makes an institution good? Institutions are created to perform certain tasks. The fire department puts out fires. The military defends the homeland. Hospitals cure the sick. If every institution is founded to pursue a certain goal, you measure its goodness by how well it attains its goal. If an institution is excellent, everything about it is oriented towards performing its particular function.

But what happens if — in addition to all the important things that institutions do — they must also be diverse? Then you’ve introduced another value that necessarily competes with the specific goal of every institution.

Why does diversity compete with rather than complement the goals of various institutions? Because we live in a finite world, with finite resources. Thus, when an institution decides to pursue a new goal, it must redirect resources from its primary goal.

Yes, Mercy Hospital must cure the sick, but we must also ensure that our doctors and nurses are “diverse,” meaning that they include members of groups that don’t generally go into medicine. Any hospital that promotes diversity does so at the expense of its ability to promote healing.

Of course the advocates of diversity claim that there’s a vast amount of talent that is overlooked because of racism, sexism, and homophobia. By combatting these prejudices, they claim, every institution can perform better. Promoting diversity simply encourages institutions to pursue excellence in an unprejudiced manner.

But that’s not how diversity is promoted. If our institutions awarded diplomas, jobs, prison sentences, etc. in a completely unbiased manner, based solely on merit, we would find that blacks are underrepresented in prestigious professions and overrepresented in jails, because of certain inherent biological traits: lower than average IQ and higher than average time preferences, aggression, and sociopathy. We would find that women are underrepresented in professions that require physical strength and fighting skills. We would find that men are underrepresented in professions that involve empathy and multitasking.

Human beings are not biologically equal. Since different jobs require different biological abilities, not just different learned information or skills, people are not equally qualified for every job. Thus, if merit is our only standard for awarding degrees, jobs, etc., we will find some groups overrepresented, and others underrepresented, in every category.

At this point, the promoters of diversity put their cards on the table. They reject the idea of biological inequalities. Thus, they expect that all groups should be proportionally represented in all institutions of society. Hence, if blacks are underrepresented in universities and overrepresented in prisons, that is not a sign of justice but of injustice.

So, to promote diversity, institutions must assign people status based not on objective merits but on the basis of quotas. This creates incentives for every institution to award members certain groups jobs they don’t deserve. This has two major consequences.

First, it is unjust, for undeserved degrees and jobs come at the expense of those who deserve them. Thus promoting diversity replaces unjustified racial bitterness and resentment with justified racial bitterness and resentment.

Second, replacing qualified people with less qualified ones undermines every institution’s effectiveness.

Institutions can be hollowed out for a very long time by promoting diversity over excellence. Nobody notices, nobody cares, until the institution is tested in an emergency and fails. Think of the fire department, for instance. The fire department is only called on in emergencies. The rest of the time, firemen are polishing chrome, lifting weights, and riding their fire trucks in parades. Why not, then, have firemen of every color, and firewomen too? Why not have a fire cat alongside the fire dog? It’s great for public relations. But what if there’s a fire, and the 90-pound female fireman can’t carry a 170-pound male fireman from a burning building? That is the moment of truth.

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s a wonderful metaphor for a hollowed out, corrupted society: a gigantic oak tree that has stood for hundreds of years only to come crashing down in a storm, which brings to light the truth, namely that the mighty oak was merely a rotted-out shell.

When institutions become hollowed out, they take on a farcical air. People don’t do their jobs so much as they go through the motions of doing their jobs. So it should come as no surprise that jobs increasingly do not get done.

Hollowed out institutions become rackets. Every employee has two motives: contributing to the goals of his institution and taking home a paycheck. When your work no longer serves its purpose, when you are merely going through the motions because of the paycheck, your job has become a racket. But institutions that are manned by people who have no personal commitment to the institution and its goals beyond a paycheck are fragile. Therefore, it should come as no surprise if they collapse in a crisis.

But is the problem diversity per se? Isn’t the real problem here egalitarianism? Wouldn’t institutions work best if they only recruited the best people for the job, regardless of race, sex, and so forth? And if a nation is just a collection of institutions, wouldn’t the best nation be diverse as long as it is a meritocratic?

The false assumption here is that a nation is just a collection of institutions. In truth, a nation is an organic community, an extended family. My lecture “What’s Wrong With Diversity” deals with why diverse societies are worse than homogeneous ones.

Nations are more than just the sum of their institutions. Nations create institutions as vehicles of their collective life. A living people is an end in itself. Institutions are merely means to that end. This is why dysfunctional institutions harm society as a whole.

The idea that a nation is merely a collection of institutions leads to the absurd idea that France could still exist even if the French people were replaced by aliens, as long as the institutions remain intact. In fact, the only thing that would be preserved is the French economy.

But France is bigger than its economy. The French economy is merely a tool of the French people. Economics should never be an argument to debase the homogeneity of a nation. No sane Frenchman should care if French tourist attractions and vineyards are flourishing in 200 years if the French have been replaced by Africans. That would not be France. It would simply be a parody of France, a farce.

But don’t we deserve the very best? Doesn’t our country deserve the very best? So shouldn’t we recruit the best people from around the world to work in our institutions?

This is a very flattering pitch for immigration and diversity, but it doesn’t hold water.

First, there is really only one best person in any field, so this is hardly an argument for mass immigration. When employers give meritocratic arguments for mass immigration, they’re simply deceiving us. They don’t want the best. They simply want to drive your wages down by creating more competition for your job.

Second, chances are, you can’t afford the best person in the world, and if you could, he can always perform his services without becoming an immigrant.

Third, if we really can’t afford the best, then most of us just settle for the good enough. But somehow white countries were good enough to be the best in the world before mass immigration.

Fourth, white countries were never tempted to import nonwhites before the collapse of their educational systems and birthrates, largely due to bad ideas and bad policies, principally egalitarianism and feminism. Rather than deal with these problems, the leaders of white countries seek merely to palliate them by opening their doors to the Third World. But since the same problems are afoot in the Third World, this is hardly a sustainable solution, and aren’t we all about “sustainability” these days?

Finally, how did it become progressive and virtuous for white countries to “brain drain” the Third World of their doctors, engineers, etc.? White countries already have far more doctors per capita than Third World countries, so why do immigration advocates preen about using the services of doctors who are desperately needed in their homelands?

Diversity plus egalitarianism will destroy any institution, which undermines the rest of society. Diversity plus meritocracy may help institutions, but it still makes the society around them worse off as a whole. Far from being a strength, diversity is a form of corruption. That’s how diversity destroys everything.