Amerika

Robert Putnam demonstrated with Bowling Alone that modern civilization had become lonely; equality meant a lack of social order, which meant no way to meet people other than jobs, in a society where jobs move us around constantly and we have no real connection to any single piece of land.

He followed it up with research on diversity that showed how in societies with even a small amount of diversity — this means more than one ethnic group in the same nation-state — people tended to hunker down and stop interacting.

We see a pattern repeating here. The more equal we get, the more powerful the individual becomes relative to orders larger than the individual like nature, culture, and the divine; this also leads to more atomization, or breaking out of a social order and its rhythms and rituals. This increases loneliness.

Even more importantly, it decreases psychological safety:

Our studies indicate that when a team member expresses humility to a co-worker, it leads their partner to feel greater “psychological safety” — more comfortable sharing candid opinions and concerns without worrying about backlash or negative consequences. This, in turn, helps improve performance in the team.

When people exist in an ethno-national population, also called a mono-ethnic or homogenous one, they have a sense of psychological safety because they know what behaviors are discouraged, more importantly which are rewarded, and also importantly, they do not fear saying the “wrong” thing to a group whose rules they do not understand.

People can barely memorize and operate one culture, let alone two or dozens as we now have in the multicultural West. They exist in a permanent state of alienation from a world they have to treat as hostile, and therefore they mostly recede into themselves.

Diversity made the “bowling alone” future become true everywhere. The risk of interacting is high; the streets look alien; the diversity itself often wants to kill you. Commute between your apartment and your job, order everything you need from Costco and Amazon, and live online through entertainment and social media.

Psychological safety occurs when people do not worry “about backlash or negative consequences.” In diversity, what is positive in your culture will offend another culture, either inherently or simply because it is your culture and having it makes you stronger which makes them weaker.

Just a generation ago, Americans had psychological safety because our society still had a culture and an ethos about how to live:

The Gen X childhood was built around a simple premise: The US wasn’t a perfect country, but living here beat the pants off life behind the Iron Curtain. Whatever else is wrong with America, people don’t lose their jobs because of their political views.

Obviously, that is no longer true; if you criticize diversity, or worse invalidate equality by pointing out that Darwinism is real and genetics determines IQ which mostly determines wealth, you lose your job, friends, spouse, and Costco membership, at which point life is practically over.

Diversity removed psychological safety. Generation X never believed in it; we knew that if you said some things, every adult in the vicinity panicked and you got sent off to Spring Shadows Glen for mental health care and drug rehab. In the old days, that was the solution in our town for dealing with problem children.

You could say, in guarded company, that you disliked living in diversity. But if the wrong person heard, there would be an intervention. You could say in coded language that you wished diversity would go away. This meant that people spent a lot of their mental effort avoiding dangerous thoughts, which abolished psychological safety.

In a simpler way, diversity itself abolished psychological safety. When you are surrounded by people like you, you know how to act so that you will please others and still come out with enough for yourself. When diversity hits, that culture goes away, and everything because a negotiation fraught with pitfalls.

Diversity gives rise to political correctness. You cannot say certain things to avoid hurting the feelings of others. Consequently, you remove those from any definitions or language that you use, leaving you with a kind of generic pidgin language that expresses nothing other than vague affirmation for the status quo.

There is no longer a predictable culture or rewards structure. There is only safety in abstractions like bureaucracy, education, job titles, and dogma. Government takes over for culture. Ideology takes over for faith. Popular opinion replaces the soul and consciousness of the individual.

From this mentality comes political correctness and later, “woke,” a kind of tikkun olam designed at bringing Communism and diversity to the world. These emerged from the 1950s enforcement of the 14A which made any discrimination illegal and weaponized government to enforce that.

In other words, American WW2 propaganda, itself weaponizing 1860s conflicts which reflected the tensions of the years after the French Revolution and Irish immigration in America, set us on an inertial trajectory which guaranteed that we would end up at something like “woke” which will drive us straight into Communism.

Any person in the midst of this crisis feels no psychological safety. They know only uncertainty and as a result, they become individualists, or people unconcerned with the world since their only goal is their own safety, comfort, and power. Scarred people scar others.

In this way, diversity destabilizing its host nation and weaponized its population against it. With diversity, there can be no unity, which is the point because then the bureaucracy can take over and the mentally addled population might not even notice.

Tags: Culture, diversity, psychological safety, robert putnam