Amerika

As usual, democracy got caught doing something stupid again and everyone is playing dumb in order to avoid being criticized for offering up anti-equality opinions. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, finally got caught for enough plagiarism (like MLK) that they had to fire her.

The New York Times, always careful to deflect from the real issue, asks one of the vital questions:

How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

Note that the Bret Stephens there — no relation, not even the same spelling — has specialized in this kind of misdirect that appeals to conservatives. You point to the detail and ignore the principle, attack the implementation and ignore the theory, and therefore conservatives can feel righteous and superior but in their anger do nothing.

We should look at one of the best books to summarize the Communist problem, Red Storm Rising, for our answer about how to write effective propaganda:

There is an unwritten rule in Soviet publications, both military and civilian, that you can criticize, but not generalize. What that means is that individual screwups can be identified and castigated at length, but for political reasons it is unacceptable to make general criticisms applying to a whole institution. You see, a critique that pointed to an all-pervasive condition would ipso facto critique Soviet society as a whole, and thereby the Communist Party, which oversees every aspect of Soviet life. It is a thin, but to them a philosophically important, distinction. In fact, when individual malefactors are named, the system as a whole is being criticized, but in a politically acceptable way.

Stephens argues that the implementation was faulty, not the theory:

But the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.

However, that is obviously incorrect because we see the same thing in other industries and other countries where appointing diversity candidates has become a kind of ritual in order to be accepted at Davos or Bilderberg, wherever they drink adrenochrome standing in the shadow of the rotting treasures of a greater past.

The problem is not the implementation; the theory is faulty.

What is the theory here? We live in the shadow of The Enlightenment™ which brought forth individualism, or the idea that the desires of the individual were more important than social, natural, and divine orders. These were things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, reason, and diversity of opinion, but they required equality first.

Equality means that you do not take the word of someone more seriously because they are an aristocrat, high-IQ person, or known success. Everyone has the same voice. Even a broke clock is right twice a day, so we throw out common sense and focus on the 0.001% of the time that the clock is right.

However, equality is also not found in nature, which means that it is a theory, not a fact. When fact and theory are in conflict, people choose theory in order to make everyone else feel good. If they noticed that the theory was wrong, they would have worries for the future of their civilization and themselves.

It was obvious from the beginning that equality would lead to subsidized incompetence. The only way you “prove” that peasants are equal to kings is by appointing some peasants to serve as kings, and if they get it wrong, you cover it up and shower them with superlatives instead. That is what happened to Claudine Gay.

For any of you who have suffered through American or European academia, you will recall that minority candidates always had to pass a much lower series of obstacles simply because, for ideological reasons, the system needed shining non-White faces with a list of big accomplishments.

That let White people feel superior, because they were the ones inflating the grades, co-writing papers without credit, nursing students through exams, and ignoring blatant errors and odd behavior on a regular basis. I witnessed all of this back in the day, and it has only gotten much worse since that time.

It also allows the industry to avoid the hammer of government. If peasants are proclaimed equal to kings, you know what to do when a peasant and a king walk through the door together: hire the peasant, and fire the king. That way, the optics are good and you will not be called a “racist,” classist, etc.

Claudine Gay is an example of this. Her work was poor, but she had people to patch it up for her and write glowing recommendations. Harvard needed an affirmative action candidate, preferably a “twofer,” or someone from two categories like Black and Women. She was hired to be a public image exercise, not a functional candidate.

Equality-based systems always go this way because they have a goal other than reality. They must prove their theory by showing it in practice, and any information which contradicts that must be scapegoated and the speakers of it destroyed, much like in the Soviet Union.

Theory is fine and good (“some of my best friends are theories”). It is not “racist” to point out that affirmative action and indeed all egalitarian programs are forgeries. The problem is that you cannot have a single functional institution this way, and Harvard just sacrificed itself at the altar so that we might all learn this lesson yet again.

Tags: affirmative action, claudine gay, diversity, equality, harvard, plagiarism