Commentary
America’s cultural elites have a pathological obsession with equal representation (meaning equal outcomes) in many areas of our society. Countless schools, universities, and corporations now have some sort of diversity and inclusion director, which is just a fancy title for an overpaid activist who helps shape outcomes based on the idea that when equality doesn’t exist, some sort of systemic injustice is to blame.
This type of worldview might suggest, for instance, that if women comprise 50.8 percent of the population but only 15 percent of a particular workforce, sexism must be to blame for the disparity. Nevermind the simple—and repeatedly proven—fact that women simply choose different career paths than men.
Ultimately, the concept of “diversity and inclusion” is based on the flawed notion that equal representation (again, equal outcomes), as its own end, is virtuous.
People are born with different aptitudes. We have different proclivities, so we pursue different interests and, as a result, amass different skill sets and different talent stacks. People come from different socio-economic backgrounds, with varying family makeups, having been raised by parents who may have had more or less time to spend with their children than parents in other households.
The inconvenient truth for the equality and equity cult is that individuals make different decisions, and you can’t control what they do and force the outcome you prefer without, at best, impeding or manipulating their own free will, or, at worst, forcefully wielding the iron fist of government.
Sometimes, those choices actually fall along group lines, because of biological realities. At this point, I’m reminded of posts I saw of parents lamenting the fact that daughters they were trying to raise as gender-neutral kept choosing toys that were pink. They were dumbfounded and disappointed, because they can’t bring themselves to accept that boys and girls, men and women, are simply different.
We can continue to balkanize society on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic demography, but if that’s the path we chart for ourselves, we do so at our own peril. If we continue to redress our nation’s problems by normalizing and institutionalizing all of society’s members having the exact same outcomes, the light at the end of the tunnel will be the speeding train of communism slamming into us.
There’s no nobility in peeling away individualism to bring about a collectivist society that makes people less free, less independent, with less liberty, all to appease the warped sensibilities of a self-selected cultural monarchy, presiding over an autocratic state they unilaterally imposed on the rest of us.
Using social engineering to artificially shape our world effectively grants social engineers, the true authoritarians, power to put their thumb on the scale and become the masters of our destiny—a role that solely belongs to each individual.
Our individual rights come from God and are merely protected by our government and our constitution. The State has no more legitimate role in mandating a particular outcome for an individual than it does in telling individuals where to shop, what home to buy, or when to eat.
Equality of outcome means stripping away the agency of the individual. Not only are human beings born with different capacities, if left alone with maximum freedom, we all make different decisions. Some choose to attend college, while others choose a trade school or opt-out of higher education altogether. Some choose careers focused on people, while others choose careers focused on things. Some choose to work overtime, while others choose to maximize the vacation days they take.
Those dissimilar choices inevitably produce dissimilar outcomes. And differing outcomes (circumstances where there’s inequality) don’t automatically suggest the presence of injustice or inequity.
Without external intervention into our personal lives, individuals exercising free will, making individual choices, will always end up being unequal—which is exactly why “equal” is unfair.
Adrian Norman is a writer, political commentator, and author of the book “The Art of the Steal: Exposing Fraud & Vulnerabilities in America’s Elections.”
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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