Equity: The Mind Virus of the West
Equality
Anywhere and everywhere, I keep running into the word, “Equity.” Whether it be in the news, in commercials, advertisements, publications, curricula, or from our world and national leaders and elected officials, the word keeps being used and promulgated. The context of which usually pertains to making policies, institutions, and society as a whole more “Equitable.” The implied use of the word is equal rights for everyone in everything. Who would object to that? Of course, that should not only be desired but we live in the first country in the history of the civilized world where it is stated in law that everyone is equal, it should be demanded and upheld by law. However, the actual meaning of the word in the context that it is used has nothing to do with that concept, instead, it has to do with creating equal outcomes, not equal access. Equality of opportunity compared to equality of outcomes are completely different from one another, one is desired, and one should be thrown out wherever it is seen.
Equality of Outcome
Equality of opportunity, defined by Britannica is, “The idea that people ought to be able to compete on equal terms or on a level playing field, for advantaged offices and positions.” Equality of outcome is defined by, “A political concept which is central to some political ideologies and is used in some political discourse, often in contrast to the term equality of opportunity.” It describes a state in which all people have approximately the same material wealth and income, or in which the general economic conditions of everyone’s lives are alike. The foundational beliefs within equality of outcome are that 1) Group identity (Race, Sex, Class, etc.), rather than the individual is how we should evaluate every one. A person’s group identity tells the full story of an individual, everyone is the same as everyone in which they share the same external identity features that they possess (White, Black, hetero-sexual, homo-sexual, etc.) 2) There are no innate qualities within human beings, we are blank slates and everyone is equal in intelligence, talent, work-ethic, physical attributes, etc. 3) Outcomes that are not equal across identity groups are evidence of existing discrimination 4) Merit-based systems such as capitalism are put in place to maintain a system of discrimination and oppression. 5) Implementation of quotas and mandates enforcing diversity of external identity features assures to make everyone prospers, equally. The problem with this system and the foundational beliefs within are many, but the inherent contradiction is that you cannot have freedom and equality of outcomes, they are mutually exclusive, to implement a system of equity is to have to enforce group discrimination and infringe on people’s right to choose. To quote the intellectual Thomas Sowell, “A society that puts equality- in the sense of equality of outcome- ahead of freedom will end up with neither quality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.” If you leave people to their own device, the choices they make will not end up equal in outcome.
Color Blind
Dr. Martin Luther King taught this country the most important lesson of the 1960s, the way to evaluate and judge a person is by the contents of their character and the merit that they possess, not by a person’s exterior features of identity. For whites to look at an entire race of people and have a blanket belief system built on racial prejudice is wrong, rather, all people should look at all people and not think of one another in terms of white or black or Hispanic or Asian, but instead look at everyone as individuals, judging someone by their actions rather than their appearance. The idea that it is morally wrong to look at someone and think that you know everything about them based on a feature that absolutely no one has control over, the features that they were born into. This was the idea that forever changed our country and the broader world as a result. What we are implementing with systems of equity is the exact inversing of this idea. Equity is about implementing systems of quotas and segregation based entirely on the idea that a person’s external features of identity tell the entire story about them, simply by looking at someone you can lump them in with the entire group of people that share the same identity features. While the popular words of our day are “Diversity” and “Inclusion” these words are only applied in reference to a person’s exterior features of identity. While diversity is an idea of enacting policies that promote diversity in appearance, it is only about enacting policies that promote monolithic thought and the ideology only of “The One-True Orthodoxy.” If you dare stray from the socially approved ideology then you become rid of your ethnic or sexual minority status. To take a few examples from author Douglas Murray in his book “The Madness of Crowds,” when venture capitalist Peter Theil came out as a conservative, publications came out saying he is no longer allowed to consider himself gay. Clarence Thomas, a politically conservative man born into extreme poverty and homelessness in the segregated south who worked his ass off to graduate from Yale and be named to the highest court in the land who also formed protest organizations centered around black equality is no longer considered black in liberal circles. When J.K. Rowling, a self-professed feminist strayed from the socially approved definition of a woman, she was stricken of her identity as a prominent woman. Currently, right now there is a lawsuit against Harvard University put forth by an Asian coalition for discrimination-based practices. Because Asian-Americans outperform every race demographic in the country, Harvard, in the name of diversity denied Asians on the basis of their ethnic identity to bring in other ethnic groups, including Caucasian legacy admissions. How is this not the exact thing that the civil rights movement fought to rid our landscape of, the judging and discriminating on the basis of race? Although at the surface level “Diversity” and Inclusion” appear to be desired, fundamentally they are about uniformity and exclusion based on the idea that a person’s group identity is the only thing that matters about a person, not the contents of their character and the merit they possess. Thought diversity, not appearance diversity, is the idea that catapulted the United States to be the premier world power. We decided that someone’s physical appearance is the least important thing about them, rather, a person’s character and the merit they carry is how we should judge one another. During World War Two, the allies and axis powers were in a race to invent the hydrogen bomb, the first side to reach this milestone was going to win the war and reshape the global order. While the axis powers, specifically Germany, desired uniformity in Aryan appearance, the west was purely focused on working together to accomplish the shared goal, freedom. The United States brought over several Jewish-German physicists as refugees who were more talented than what our physics-talent comprised of. These physicists, such as Albert Einstein worked tirelessly and through their intellect and talent, produced the invention that would end the war and allow freedom to prevail in the western world. Germany, in their obsession with exterior identity, lost the war because it evaluated people on the basis of race. The United States and the allies won the war because we did not look at these physicists as either Jewish nor German, rather, we evaluated based on the merit of their talent, they brought what we were lacking, diversity of thought. To highlight how far removed “Equity” is from this idea, to draw a quote from equity author Robin DiAngelo in her book, White Fragility, “There are special forces that prevent us from attaining the racial knowledge we need to engage more productively and they function to hold the racial hierarchy in place. These forces includes the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy.” The implication of this passage is that ethnic minorities cannot succeed in a system of meritocracy, therefor we must dismantle the system in place. How is this not actual racism? The belief that a group of people are incapable of competing against another group of people because of their race, implying that they are “Less than” is a complete inverse of all that we learned from the 1960s and in the purest sense, racist.
Disparate Outcomes
In addition to the equity belief that a person’s group identity tells the full story about someone is the thought that unequal outcomes are evidence of group-based discrimination. I am currently watching the NCAA basketball championship as I type this, currently, on the floor, there are 8 black players and 2 white players. This 8-2 ratio is in despite the fact that white people account for 58% of the American population while black people account for only 12%. When I worked in the hospital, I was often the only male on a unit despite males accounting for 49% of the population. When I worked strenuous physical labor there were no laborers who were female despite females accounting for 51% of the population. In Silicon Valley and specifically at Facebook, more Asians are working in tech than whites despite Asians only accounting for 6% of the U.S. population. Are these unequal racial or sexual demographic representations evidence of discriminatory practices within all of these fields? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that when you allow for freedom of choice within a given population, people will choose to organize themselves into patterns that are inherently unequal based on various innate and environmental factors. To use the example of men and women, women on average are more interested in people while men are on average more interested in things. This is why disproportionately women choose to enter people-centered fields such as education and health while men disproportionately choose science, technology, engineering, and math-based or physical labor fields. This is not to say that there is anything wrong at all with men or women choosing fields that are not aligned with the on-average sex-based choices, that is the benefit of a sovereign and merit-based society, features of identity are irrelevant. It just so happens that when we’re left to choose, we on average organize ourselves in unequal patterns of distribution. This is why if you choose to go in the direction of implementing quotas based on group identity features so that job fields or schools are equal in demographic populations you will inherently violate people’s freedom of choice, we choose to organize ourselves in unequal patterns naturally. Additionally, you would be forced to discriminate against people by denying access on the basis of race. For those that advocate for equity is also the belief that whites keep merit-based systems such as capitalism in place so that they can maintain oppressing power over ethnic minorities, but there is an inherent flaw with this belief, Asians have a household median income of $94,903 while whites are at $74,912 and have out-earned whites for decades despite only accounting for 6% of the population. When you break this down further by ethnic group, White Americans are 9th of all groups in median household income. In a supposed inherently oppressing structure such as capitalism, how is it that whites can be out-earned at this rate? It is because the familial structure, which is linked to better education, not race or income, is the single biggest determining factor in the next generation’s success. To quote Barack Obama, “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit a crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.” So, while rates of divorce and fatherlessness are increasing across all ethnic demographics, Asians have avoided this trend the most and it is the biggest reason why they are having disproportionately more success compared to other races, including and especially the greatest in numbers, the whites.
Pawn
Oddly enough, when you read the literature or listen to the messages put forth by identity-based activist groups, intellectuals, and authors (LGBTQ+, Feminist, Racial, etc.) they all share a common thread, the goal of “Dismantling the oppressive patriarchal cis-normative capitalist structure.” This is identity politics, the use of people’s external or internal features as a tool to usher in a political agenda. Capitalism can either be a greed-centered system that seeks to exploit and commercialize talent at any cost or it is a discrimination-based system of oppression to hold people down, but it cannot be both because these are contradictory thoughts. Capitalism is imperfect and flawed, however, we’ve discovered that the best possible system with the least number of negative trade-offs and the most widespread wealth is a system that is not based on features of identity but rather a system that is built on our inherent flaw of self-interest. Self-interested in profit and prosperity, seeking to utilize talent in whatever shape, size, color, or sex, that it’s in. This is not to say that there are not instances past, present, and future that are discriminatory, it would be foolish to claim otherwise, of course, there is, was, and will be. However, to say that the very foundation of the capitalist system is one of oppression would be a gross exaggeration and misrepresentation of facts. While equity-pushers claim that our systems are inherently oppressive they always conveniently look past one point, why does everyone in the world want to come here? This is an inherent contradiction in their ideology, they omit the fact that people of all ethnic backgrounds dream of coming to this supposed systemically oppressing country and do all they, can legally or illegally, to come here. While laws do and should exist that outlaw discrimination, you will never be able to legislate the ignorance of racist or sexist thoughts. Prejudice itself is an evolutionary trait that we all developed as humans to avoid disease. Before our ancestors immigrated across the globe, ethnic groups were localized, and with that came the gaining of the same immunities to area-specific pathogens and diseases. When outsiders of different locations and of different appearing groups arrived, they introduced foreign antigens and disease to the native group and with it brought death. This is what happened to Native Americans when the white European settlers arrived, the foreign antigens that the Indians were not immune to killed them in droves. Evolutionary biologists believe that this is the formation of a natural prejudicial trait that resides within everyone, prejudging those that look different in appearance from us is associated with survival traits that come pre-programmed within all of us. What capitalism represents is the implementation of a system that offsets this innate trait that is within all of us, it seeks to set up a system built on self-interest, also an innate trait within us. If there is a system that centers around profit-chasing for survival then a person can simply not afford to be discriminatory by excluding talent and merit otherwise they risk not being able to successfully operate a business therefore provide for their families and themselves. Again, I’m watching the NCAA basketball tournament right now so it’s the example that’s right in front of my face. In 1965 Texas-Western was the first university to have a black line-up, in this very first season of desegregation they won the NCAA championship. Despite the fact that college basketball was filled with racist coaches, they were forced to integrate races otherwise they would be voluntarily conceding ever winning another championship, therefore generating revenue. The same scenario in baseball was when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, being allowed to play in the major leagues where he went on to dominate, forcing other white owners to desegregate their teams in order to compete. These are sports analogies but sport is the perfect metaphor because sports are nothing but a system set up on merit and competition, a microcosm of our capitalist economic system. When the free market of competition forces people to adapt or die, even ignorant bigots value money and survival over their racism or sexism, they are forced to bring in talent regardless of external identity features if for no other reason than pure self-interest. Because we are imperfect beings with innate negative tendencies, we cannot implement a system that relies on compassion and empathy, rather, we must implement systems that not only accommodate our self-interest but are built upon it, relying on the forces of the market to curb negative and discriminatory behaviors by penalizing where it hurts the most, the wallet.
Pareto
“Equity” is not a new idea, something that we as a society just discovered and thought, “Let’s try this instead.” Rather, this is the same repackaged radical left ideology that has been transformed to match the current times. Karl Marx’s equity doctrine was based on the idea of class-based discrimination, the idea that free-market and merit-based systems involving private property and industry was a system of oppression created by the bourgeoise class to subjugate the proletariat working class. What this new transformation of the same collectivist utopian vision presents is the change from an emphasis on class oppression to identity oppression, telling people that they are victims of oppression based on their race, sex, sexual preference, etc. Having read Marx’s Communist Manifesto, his critiques of capitalism and the flaws cited within it are mostly correct, it is most definitely the imperfect system that he describes. However, it is Marx’s proposed solution, equality of outcomes or equity, that when implemented creates unintended consequences that are far worse than that of the imperfect capitalist system. While equity seeks to eliminate disparities, it actually ends up doing the exact opposite, creating a much wider disparity in income and prosperity between the haves and the have-nots. To quote the late E.O Wilson, the great American biologist and Harvard professor, “Communist Socialism: Great idea, wrong species.” Every single time the equity system has been implemented, whether it be in world powers, impoverished countries, or natural resource-rich countries, it has led to inevitable starvation and slave labor. A system that is built upon the idea that there are no innate aspects to human beings and relies on human beings to act in the best interest of the collective rather than the self is going to fail miserably every time because it defies our nature. It is a false belief that the Scandinavian model is socialist, rather, its economy is built-upon free market principles. Human beings can be very generous with one another when we have the social structures of our civilized and prosperous society but the system always inevitably runs out of wealth and other people’s money because it looks at wealth as if it is something that drops out of the sky and not something that is created. Inevitably when the social structures falter, the fight or flight will kick in and we will only act in the interest of self, not the collective. In both the Soviet Union and China when the communists took over, they killed or imprisoned the “Evil and greedy landowning farmers, business owners, and landlords” and relied upon the collective to step in and produce the agriculture and products. What happened was inevitable, mass starvation. They killed or jailed all of the highly-productive members of society by labeling them greedy and oppressive and it turns out that when you remove the self-interest of the profit motive, people do not want to work long hours in fields to produce food for other people for low or no wages. It also turns out that there are natural differences between people, the difference between a neurosurgeon and a ditch digger is not always a matter of environment. No matter how many hours of practice I put in, I will never be a professional football, basketball, or baseball player. As Sowell put it, “No one is equal to anybody, even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.” The fact of the matter is nowhere in nature do you see an equal distribution of anything, including within us. There is not an equal distribution of mountains, water, rivers, rainforests, and deserts. The population isn’t equally distributed, 80% of the population lives in 20% of the states and within each state, 80% of the population lives within 20% of the cities. Income follows this same pattern, in the U.S. roughly 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people. 20% of people pay 80% of the taxes. 20% of the world’s farmers produce 80% of the world’s total agriculture. 20% of the world’s mines produce 80% of the minerals. In baseball, W.A.R. is an advanced metric stat identifying wins that finds 20% of the players are responsible for 80% of the wins. In football, 20% of the plays are called 80% of the time. In business, 20% of the staff is responsible for 80% of the production. We wear 20% of the total clothes we own, 80% of the time. In language, we use 20% of the words, 80% of the time. Not every single thing breaks down neatly at 80/20, you’ll see varying from 70/30 to 90/10 but this is the Pareto Principle, a universal law that states 20% of the cause is responsible for 80% of the outcome. This is frightening when you consider it only takes 20% of the population promulgating bad ideas to re-normalize the remaining 80% of the population, not a 51% majority. This law is meant to show us that nowhere in humans and nowhere in nature do you find equal outcomes. To want to artificially enforce equal outcomes what you will do is destabilize the environment. When you change the environment, our innate aspects hyper-activate. When you seek to alter our innate aspects, the environment becomes radically unstable. This is why in every single attempt at “Equity” comes to the point where equality of outcomes must be enacted by force, turning the government against the people. This quote Thomas Sowell, “Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Trojan Horse
If the equity doctrine was a harmless idea that threatened to hurt no one and was genuine in its goal to bring prosperity to everyone then I would actively support it. To take it a step further, I would love to live in a world of equitable outcomes where everyone prospered and no one went without need or want. However, when there are past precedents that provide us with mountains of evidence that there are unintended consequences that will make life much worse off for everyone except for a fortunate few at the top, I feel we need to pay attention to what is right in front of our faces. In every country, ever, when the population starts to focus on their differences whether it be ideological or more significantly, in physical appearance, then what happens is a complete segregation of one another, hyper-polarization that has only ever ended in violence and oppression. I worry that the purveyed narratives of affluent whites who with either their white or class guilt have obtained white savior, infantilization of minorities perspective profess to speak on behalf of the “oppressed minorities” is going to create unintended negative consequences that are going to harm those they supposedly advocate for. We’ve seen this already with “Defund the Police,” a political stance that was primarily advocated for by affluent suburban whites that harmed the urban communities they supposedly champion for in the form of an increase in violent crimes. This is despite all polling data indicating that the actual people within the urban communities not only do not want fewer police but they actually want more police on the streets to deter the much more serious threat to their livelihood than police brutality and violent crime. In terms of economic systems, we’d voluntarily choose to throw out the system that has provided more opportunity and wealth than this world has ever seen. When economist Thomas Sowell evaluated individual tax records from 1975 to 1991 he found that of the bottom 20% of earners in 1975, more than two-thirds ended up in the top 40% of income earners by 1991. Furthermore, of this initial bottom 20% of earners in 1975, 29% of them rose to the top 20% of earners by 1991. It is no mystery to realize that when you’re young, you don’t have money but as we progress in age, we progress in income. If you get married, your household income skyrockets in proportionality. Newton’s third law states, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” which means we are going to keep this cultural ping pong match going as we lob bad ideas and unintended consequences over the net back and forth until we all lose. If this great melting pot experiment is going to work, we cannot hyper-focus on ways in which we are different, we cannot look at one another in terms of race and sex, we have to look at one another as human beings who happen to be of different physical appearance. While I recognize that purveyors of this rhetoric are only wanting to do good and make the world better for everyone, my true frustration lies with those in power that know better, who that know by focusing on identity they are seizing power and control through divide and conquer. We need to take a step back and examine the mountains of evidence that point to the direction this cultural momentum will go and redirect the course of action. While we should do all that we can to try and make opportunity as widely available to all people as much as possible, understand that “Equity” represents a recycled far-left political and economic ideology. Under the guise of Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity people are being fooled into championing for a trojan horse that when brought inside the gates, collapses an empire.