The Authoritarian Moment

The subtitle is How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent and the author is Ben Shapiro (2021).

The story is one that I have dwelled on before – the lunatic left, while a minority in numbers, has somehow managed to hijack and coopt the message and views of corporate boardrooms, universities, the media, and the Democratic party.  And, in doing so, has used that position to silence its opposition in ways that are authoritarian and draconian, all with a view to gain leverage and power.  Theirs is a message that decries individualism and meritocracy, and harbors on disparate outcomes as if they are at all times and in all places the result of something evil, leading to policy and ideas that are bereft of logic and which fail to serve the greater good.

To wit, the pandemic offers an example of what I mean.  When it came to the vaccine roll-out, with the explicit understanding that the elderly were always the most at-risk, CDC officials pushed for a plan where essential workers were treated first, acknowledging that it would likely lead to more deaths by up to 6.5%, because “racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among adults over 65”.  This view was endorsed by other public health officials, including an expert from Penn who actually said: “Older populations are whiter.  Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer.  Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”  Because we live in a world where systemic racism allegedly is the biggest problem going, these are the ideas that get oxygen.

The foregoing anecdote represents the corruption of science to serve a political end, but the impact of the Authoritarian Left is felt across industry.  I have seen it in my professional life where diversity training, which is effectively racism by another name, is mandated.  Institutions of higher learning largely have no faculty members these days who represent anything other than the Leftist view.  And there are only too many stories of corporations and media companies who fire corporate leaders and others for suggesting that America is not just some systemically racist place.

I don’t have any clever rhetorical flourish or deep takeaway to close today.  I will simply say the book is an eye-opener (if you need one) and worth the read.

Quote of the day

 Courtesy of Tyler Cowen:

"One thing the contemporary world definitely has not come to terms with is how much a highly feminised culture will be (rather strongly) enforcing new forms of discrimination, albeit cloaked under different and rhetorically emancipatory principles."

An Interesting Aside...

In writing this blog, I clearly made the decision to remain anonymous.  So, when I relate stories from my real life, my sharing will be always be limited by the first sentence.

With that said, I will soon be forced to participate in racial sensitivity training sessions.  Not because of anything I've done, but because of a professional association with a company that has totally bought in on the idea of systemic racism.  No doubt, I know to keep my thoughts to myself on this topic.  The interesting factoid is that we were provided with some reading materials to review in advance.  And my main takeaway is the following...

There is plenty of evidence if one looks at this country's history of grave injustices and governmental action that is clearly reprehensible.  Those periods in time, those laws, those court cases, those policies, need no further explanation to see what they are and the motivations behind them.  But, there is also plenty of history of our country recognizing these wrongs and then doing something to correct them, such that it is much better to be a minority, women, etc. today than at any other point in time.

But, what the advance readings seem to be doing, one and all, is referencing these histories, and then offering a data point about today, as if one is clearly caused by the other, but not doing any of the work to show you how.  These works clearly choose to ignore the possibility that something else may be going on (h/t Thomas Sowell).  For example, there was slavery in this country and the founding fathers owned slaves.  You know what else, today black families have lower median incomes than white families.  Two facts, not sure that they are necessarily related.

Over and over, the practice seems to be, here's the belief and conclusion that we want to draw, here's some data that could be interpreted in any number of ways, we offer no additional context other than what happened 150/100/50 years ago, go draw some conclusions.  I guess that I would expect more from a theory that seems to be taking hold of our government, corporate boardrooms, and every single school and university.

But maybe I am asking too much.

Discrimination and Disparities

The author is Thomas Sowell (2019).

I like folks who formulate their views of the world based on facts rather than groupthink and emotion – and, better yet, understand that there is commonly more than one reason for why something has happened.  Sowell fits that bill.  And this book makes that point.

It is very much written to be a retort to the politics and prevailing views of today.  His premise: “…we should not expect success to be evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations in endeavors with multiple prerequisites – which is to say, most meaningful endeavors.”  In other words, we should not ever expect equality of outcomes, and always trying to explain such reality in the form of an -ism or malevolent action is incredibly naïve.

He does a good job of explaining, so I plan to quote generously:

“People from different social backgrounds may also have different goals and priorities – a possibility paid little or no attention in many studies that measure how much opportunity there is by how much upward movement takes place, as if everyone is equally striving to move up, and only society’s barriers produce different outcomes.”

And:

“Social mobility is the extent to which a society permits upward and downward movement.  How much movement actually takes place depends also on the extent to which individuals and families avail themselves of the opportunities.  Measuring social mobility by how much movement takes place proceeds as if nothing depends on how individuals and families behave.  That certainly avoids complications for those promoting the prevailing social vision.  But it also avoids empirically testing that vision.”

To wit:

“Deliberate, biased suppressions of other people’s opportunities are just one of the various other impediments to equal outcomes.  But those things which offend our moral sense do not automatically have more causal weight than morally neutral factors such as demography, geography or language differences.”

His book reminds me of what Douglas Murray had to say – the utopia against which our racist and sexist society is compared simply has never existed.  We have never seen equal outcome, distributions, or proportional representation.  And complaining in advocacy of something which is unrealistic strikes me as a waste of time and resources.

Loserthink

The subtitle is How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America and the author is Scott Adams (2019).

This is the second book by the author that I have digested.  Loserthink represents the mental traps that we fall into, whether it be cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, or believing that we can read other people’s minds, which can lead to confidence in bad ideas.  Adams is focused on achieving clarity of thought and self-awareness and avoiding the mental mistakes that can hinder both.  He just seems to get it.  Recommended.

Quote of the Day

In the Douglas Murray book that I just read, this quote gets to the heart of the matter:

"But most often the question 'Compared to what?' will elicit only the fact that the utopia with which our society is being compared has not yet come about.  If this is the case, and the monstrous claims about our societies are being made in comparison to a society which has not yet been created, then a certain amount of humility and a great deal of further questioning might be needed.  Those who claim that our society is typified by bigotry but believe that they know how to fix any and all societal ills better make sure that their route maps are well plotted.  If they are not then there is reason for everyone else to be suspicious about a project whose earliest stages are being presented as rigorous science when they more closely resemble an advocacy of magic."

The Madness of Crowds

The subtitle is Gender, Race and Identity and the author is Douglas Murray (2019).

“After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights.  He needs his dragons.  Eventually, after tiring himself out in the pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons.”

Regardless of your politics, I think the author does a remarkable job of making sense of where we are.  The identity politics of today are not about equality, as MLK fought for in his time, but about a redistribution of power.  And when you recognize that, you realize just how disingenuous the loudest voices are.

To summarize it, I relate a dictum of Daniel Patrick Moynihan – claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country.  If this country really is as fascist, racist, homophobic and sexist as those waiving their fingers allege, the luxury of being so foolish so often and so loud would not exist.