(posted with the author's permission, the title was added by me, S.B.)
James Damore is the author of the now-famous internal critique of Google's oppressive leftist culture for which he was summarily dismissed. This, despite his thoroughly impressive resume and education. The eternal war against wrongdoers, loudmouths, and idiots can often overshadow the fact that our society is (still) mostly populated by good, upstanding, well-meaning people. Some are especially impressive in terms of achievement, as in the case of Mr Damore. In the minds of cultural Marxists, however, such glaring inequity simply cannot be.
The obviousness that we are all different, each with our own unique advantages and disadvantages, worse pointing it out, and worse still pointing out the idiocy in denying it, is what piqued the wrath and scorn of the legion of brainwashed malcontents that infest places like Silicon Valley and companies like Google. To them, he committed a thought crime: He spoke his mind on diversity, the tactics used to further it, and the pathological egalitarianism at its core. These, as it so happens, are among their most treasured ideologies.
The tech industry, by the nature of the work, is stacked with left-brain, analytical thinkers. Certainly, society desperately needs such people, and we have benefitted greatly from their contributions. As individuals, they do very well in academics, as information sponges and in linear problem-solving. Intelligence to this type of individual is measured by how much and how well they acquire, retain, and execute provided information (e.g., from academia, media). The other side of the coin, however, is that questions as to the veracity of said information seldom occur or have little priority. This type of mind exhibits a blindness for big-picture considerations, and often fails to grasp the broad consequences of its decisions and actions. Not surprisingly, these individuals also tend to be highly susceptible to indoctrination. These are our Ph.D's, our so-called experts. It's no surprise that Google and other tech companies are majority leftist, where most of its employees readily buy into the idealistic, googly-eyed (pun intended!) notions they were taught to buy into, no matter how bereft of supporting reason, evidence, good sense, and wisdom.
The tech industry certainly comes up with interesting and impressive gizmos and stuff. Their wares are products of pure intellect, but I question the wisdom of elevating its people to positions of social and cultural influence. A healthy society cannot have as its thought-leaders those who are pathologically unaware of and cut off from the higher facets of life and of being. The character of thought bound by the physical and the formative (intellectual) is entirety analytical, linear, and morose. As complete beings, as conscious monads, we are more than this, but sadly most people at this time in history are not even aware of the higher aspects of the self, the creative and the archetypal. These higher aspects yield an almost forgotten treasure, synthesis in thought. This entirely different character of thought yields a breadth of awareness in the individual--knowing without learning. We need doers as the engine of society, but seers must sit in driver seat.
Diversity of thought, diversity of perspective: These make for a strong social order, at any scale. This is the essence of the free market of ideas, which has the lovely property of tending to act as a thought optimality engine. Emphasis on ethnic or gender diversity, on the other hand, displaces the mental for the physical, and misunderstands that one of these facets of being is the dog while the other is the tail. This is not to mention that a potentially happy consequence of a culture favouring a diversity of thought also finds that it guarantees a (real) diversity of people.
We actually need a 'left' in a politically healthy society, as a counterbalance against a supposed 'right'. This may be a false political paradigm, but its true basis is in the concept of the divine feminine and the divine masculine, which are aspects of being found in everything and in every one of us. However, today's leftists, judging from most of their positions, are engaged in nothing less than a war on reality. It has to be reformed from the inside out. But at present, the left finds itself in a dreamland of its own making.
Derek Coulter
