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Michael Huemer's avatar

I was expecting more comments about this.

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José Duarte's avatar

Hi Mike. I think it's extremely important and fruitful to refer to the actual content of DEI indoctrination programs, lessons, slideshows, etc. You're talking about it exogenously, tracking the logic of the dictionary meaning of words like "diversity", but I think it's the substantive content that really exposes what this is.

Most people probably imagine a vanilla sense of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that the implementation or instantiation of these concepts in the mandatory workplace indoctrination sessions is some sort of vanilla thing, maybe based on universal values around not being racist, benevolence, etc. If you linger on each word in the triplet, you'd probably know why "equity" and "inclusion" cannot even theoretically have vanilla implementations. It might be possible to know this if you didn't know about leftists and their ideology – I'm not sure. Equity isn't a word English-speakers used before in a core values or justice sense, but it carries the broad default momentum of goodness that equality/equal carry. Inclusion is oddly specific, structurally action-oriented, that we need to do something to "include" someone or some group, which wouldn't normally occur to us, and isn't something any other school would likely land on as a value. That's more of a childhood playground concept for most humans.

A lot of the content is Orwellian word use dictates. I expect it's extremely awkward for anyone well educated or maybe philosophically minded/independent. Like the recent Air Force Academy slides telling cadets to use alternatives to "mom and dad" (it's unclear if they mean in referring to one's own mom and dad, or if it's about other people's parents – the slides are junky in various generic pedagogy and intellectual clarity dimensions). On the same slide they say not to say things like "I'm colorblind" or "I don't see color" and "We're all just people". (I don't remember which of the first two it had, or if it was both – I'm sure of the third.)

Those phrases are just things that annoy leftists, say from past conversations. They literally add arguments or sentiments or self-descriptors that annoy them to the list of things you shouldn't say. They might try to back it by saying something about "science says" that you can't be colorblind, maybe because of implicit association tests where college kids tapping on a keyboard in response to word pairs flashing on the screen imply a valenced association attached to a race (due to millisecond scale variance in the key press responses). Obviously that's not going to tell us anything about a human being's ability to be colorblind, or to accurately say they're colorblind in their behavior or what have you. Nor does an IAT finding debunk a implicit point in a claim about us all being people, much less support indoctrination telling people never to say such things. (That the IAT findings are contested on their own terms, and may not replicate, is a separate epistemic issue – leftists don't seem to know that most social psychology findings/claims are false, which just the replication attempts show. It's actually worse than that, but they don't engage with science or reality with the baseline rigor you'd need to explain the validity issues to them, even ignoring that they don't trust outsiders and won't actually believe anything we say anyway. I don't think leftists trust themselves to think independently, so it has to come from their leaders or media intermediaries.)

The last thing on that slide was "Model humility when you get it wrong". You'll find that they always include these injunctions of supplication. It's the creepiest cult... They're saying that if you "get it" "wrong" by saying some word they've told you not to say (or those phrases), or don't use someone's bizarre pronoun, or assume that someone's parents are the usual human male/female parents, or really anything that a black person, trans person, leftist at large type person rebukes you for, you should never argue, never question, but just accept that you "got it" "wrong", and "model humility". The Navy thing on pronouns was phrased something like "assume the error is yours and learn from it", don't question, etc. That's common in all the indoctrination materials, the supplication if you get it "wrong". And that is where humans really need to be able to recognize a cult and say no.

The Pentagon diversity lady who was in the news recently would proclaim to her captive audiences things like "I can't be racist – I don't have power" (because she's black). That's standard, not controversial to leftists. We see that recitation everywhere. Their abstractions and assertions are really distinctive, and we totally failed to characterize them and call this out as arbitrary junk a long time ago. They're implying that reality is the kind of place where a human being either has or does not have "power" depending on their race and other identities. It's ironically binary both in having power and in being able to be racist. Any thinking human could just situate themselves in a typical human life and consider the values, options, constraints that a person faces at various stages, the nature of a human life course, variance in contexts, and maybe what sorts of "power" a person might have at various stages, and how much (actual quantity now, not binary). Such a thinker would have no use for the leftist abstraction of "power" at any point, this wouldn't be a simple debunking of their ideology – it would be highlighting that we just don't care about arbitrary abstractions like that, and would need some sort of explanation and body of evidence to even begin to think about this "power" they speak of.

All that doesn't even touch on what it means to be racist, a psychological and moral model of a human being, the human mind, an account of moral responsibility for different sorts of behaviors in various contexts, what humans owe or don't owe to each other, or the downstream consequences of the leftist ideology here vs. alternatives. All that is just ignored by an ideology that has these binary and unclear abstractions and makes sweeping descriptive claims about the world and humans based on those abstractions. I think the best default answer to leftist ideology is to point out the arbitrary, sweeping assertions using proprietary abstractions, without evidence, and say "Let us know when you have something." As in, something we can even work with or evaluate, because this is just arbitrary junk.

It's also worth noting that you'd have to get people when they're young to get them to embrace this, and uneducated. How in the world would someone who had read the Stoics, Aristotle, random history books of all sorts, Kant, economics, psychology, etc. embrace these abstractions, and an ideology that doesn't realize how arbitrary its starting points and structure are? If we just waited until people were 25 to fill them in modern ideologies, which is mostly the left, I think few would embrace it (conservatives don't have much, mostly default human intuitions and patriotism, and a religion that releases them of ultimate responsibility for worldly outcomes, tempering their activism; Nazism isn't much to look at in terms of an ideology or scope). There's more to it than that, since leftist ideology is generally indoctrinated, not taught as part of an intellectual landscape. For example, when they "teach kids about racism" using CRT, they're asserting motives of long dead founders, the existence of "lingering effects of slavery", and using loaded leftist abstractions like "oppression" and "systemic racism" as *descriptive* terms describing the world, which is incredibly awkward. Leftists really don't differentiate between descriptive reality and their ideology, or betray any cognizance of the nature of normative philosophy and claims. It's almost like they're no longer aware of the existence of philosophy as a field.

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