Indeed, the tranquilizing of citizens is the most distinctive feature of the modern therapeutic state. It is the hallmark of our medicalized humanity. From birth to death, from school, work, prison, and play, we can expect to be drugged in order to preserve the dream of secularized happiness in a world unable to deliver its reality. (John O’Neill, Five Bodies. The Human Shape of Modern Society, 1985).
Much is made of diversity. It is the supposed happy future where there are no nations, no borders, no cultures, no families, no men, no women, and certainly no races. There will be just an amalgam of beings and machines, intent on consuming products and tending to mechanized libido.
The great motto of this Elysium can be readily contrived: “You can have whatever you want, as long as it’s what we want to give you.” The “we” is the operative pronoun.
Why do people so readily fall into political camps, or get herded into groups so they can behave as they ought, namely, as participants in mass hysteria?
Who benefits from all this? Individuals certainly do not. What is there to gain by spouting ready-made phrases and talking-points seamlessly disseminated by the slick machinery of “culture” and “news?”
Perhaps some steam may be let off – but what comes afterwards? Emptiness and depravity – both perfectly embodied in the current religion of choice in the West, namely, “Diversity.”
“Diversity” is a rather meaningless phrase, perhaps purposely contrived (by the “we”) to mean nothing at all. Consider the following. “Diversity” can be seen as a cat-o-nine-tails phrase with which the West is to be flogged into better virtue. But whose virtue?
The word itself descends through French from the Latin, diversus (“turned away in another direction”), and is related to the English “weird,” which once meant, “fate.”
In the early years of its life, “diverse” carried a negative connotation, and meant “to be perverse,” or “to be a contrarian.”
It was only in the late eighteenth-century that the idea of “difference” became prevalent, at which time “diversity” became part of political jargon. But here it specifically meant economic diversity, in that people belonging to different trades and economic strata could work together for the benefit of the state.
The idea of “diversity” as specifically meaning race and gender plurality is recent, taking wing in the 1990s, with the work of people like R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., Liang Ho, Deborah Tannen, B.D. Tatum, and many others.
Through their effort, “diversity” is full-fledged cant of secular religiosity, and it is social engineering by our “betters,” the “we,” the ineluctable elite who are wiser than us, and therefore know what kind of future shall be good for us, and they will build it for us.
All we have to is spout acceptance (which they feed us through the culture-media machine). The State ueber alles! Long live the New World Order!
This Elysium will only be established in the West by the destruction of any and all of its cultural homogeneity. If anyone dares to point this out, he is deemed a regressive, and all are free to attach any and all labels that will enforce ostracisation.
It is always easier to silence, or even kill a man, when you can label him as anything other than a man.
But here lies the first great contradiction of our time. Racial and gender diversity demanded as “normal” in society can only be achieved by destroying diversity of thought, the diversity of ideas.
The greater “agenda” of diversity is really the curtailment of the majority. But only in the West. Non-western nations and cultures can be as monolithic as they want.
Those that call for “diversity” as morally right are putting forward a truth-claim which itself demands immorality. How? In three ways.
- First, diversity destroys trust among people, so there is only the group that can validate life. People become habituated to regarding those outside the group with mistrust and even hatred.
- Second, diversity dissolves individuality and replaces it with compliance, because it is far safer, and therefore better, to do the will of the group than to strike out on your own. Even when there is individualized action, that action can only further the aims and purposes of the group, so that the individual becomes an agent of the group in the world.
- Third, diversity is immoral because it demands the denial of humanity of those outside the group. Here the culture-media machine plays its crucial role of playing one group against another, so that distrust, or anger keeps simmering, and people never really feel at home with those outside the group.
Never in human history has there been such intense ghettoization of humanity. What parameters of discussion are possibly left when the only vocabulary used pertains to genes and DNA?
We have now become a culture that vaunts and demands silent obedience and the ceaseless repetition of state-manufactured dogma.
This is not merely the establishment of institutionalized oppression, for that has already happened. Rather, we have now “progressed” to the minutiae of tyranny, in that the will of the state now passes for tolerance.
In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, “Production only fills a void that it has itself created.”
Thus, “diversity” is the true alienation of all humanity, for people only have meaning when they belong to a group. Outside the group an individual is atomized, lonely, and incomplete – and all this only sends him scurrying back into the comforting folds of the group.
There is no individuality. There is only group participation, because only the group can bestow meaning.
Herein lies the second contradiction of our age. Western society which, deems itself progressive and hyper-modern, now honors and promotes the most primitive system of human interaction – one based solely on racial identity (which is a twentieth-century invention).
The teaching of this system is the bread-and-butter of universities, and its promotion is in the hands of the culture-media industry.
The West loves itself so much that it now engages in self-cannibalism that it might demonstrate to itself that it has indeed reached the gold-standard of selfless love.
When the world is stripped of all meaning, when only consumerism defines the public sphere, when nihilism has emptied the heart of all hope, what is there left to do but eat yourself, by all metaphors possible.
Grim is life when the world is inhabited by groups who consume as a herd, produce as a herd, hate as a herd, and kill as a herd. Civilization is deftly trodden under-hoof.
Why must this be so? Perhaps civilization also undergoes entropy, whereby energy dissipates over time – hot things cool down, vapor disappears, movement becomes stillness, and civilization falls apart into chaos.
It was Plato who first pointed out this pattern in his explanation of human beings and society.
For him, the highest “type” of man is kingly or aristocratic (not a blueblood, but one whose life is governed by reason), whose soul is guided by the Good, which is infinite truth, a truth which cannot be measured by finite standards.
The greatest fruit of the Good is justice, which is the disciplined ordering of the self and the soul, just as a government is only just when it knows that it is ruled by the Good.
Cicero summarized this in the now-famous phrase, Summum autem bonum si ignoratur, vivendi rationem ignorari necesse est (“If one is ignorant of one’s own Highest Good, one is by necessity ignorant of living by way of reason”).
When a kingly man falls apart, he does so in stages, and devolves into the timocratic man, who loses sight of the Good and begins to concern himself with ambition.
This results in the Good being driven out from the soul and being replaced by the thirst for power and honor, both of which are far lesser virtues than the Good.
Likewise, in government, kingship degenerates into timocracy, where politicians are driven by the pursuit of power rather than the pursuit of the Good.
In time, ambition is displaced by the desire for wealth, since both honor and power can be bought. In other words, ambition leads to greed, and money is made king.
In politics, timocracy gives way to oligarchy, since only rich men can afford to get into office. As Plato points out when wealth and virtue are placed in the scale, it is always virtue that sinks down as wealth rises.
The oligarchic man loves only money and commerce and chooses politicians that are wealthy; the poor have no voice in the system.
Thus begins the terrible tragedy of history – people begin to live in two worlds, one for the rich and one for the poor, both inhabiting the same earth, and both forever conspiring against each other.
At this stage of mutual distrust and hatred, oligarchy leads to democracy, where each man can do what he thinks is right. Plato describes democracy as a bazaar, where anyone can go and pick and choose what he likes and live accordingly.
Democracy by necessity is filled with variety and diversity and it hands out equality to both the equal and the unequal (as Plato wisely points out).
How can the unequal become equal in democracy? That is the great paradox of the West, and the very logic of all the calls for “diversity,” for the unequal are those ho have no interest in the Good; they only want privilege and power. How can democracy possibly tend to the diversity of the Good-less human soul?
The democratic man is a hedonist, who does what his pleasures demand. All pleasures are equal in his sight. One day he is a glutton, another day he is trying to get thin, another day he is pursuing some business venture, then he is off becoming a musician. Democracy also cannot manage the diversity of pleasures.
Such is freedom and happiness for the democratic man. Or, as Plato observes, there is liberty, equality and fraternity enough in him.
Because the democratic man knows nothing about law and order, which is discipline, and he is driven only by his appetites, it is not long before he descends into the last stage of human degradation – he becomes a tyrant.
Correspondingly, democracy becomes tyranny, because in the bazaar of freedoms you can pick-and-choose whatever suits your fancy. But the problem with appetite is that it always comes back.
The freedom to satisfy a ceaseless array of appetites is the most vicious form of slavery, because life has no meaning outside the satisfaction of appetites. In this way, tyranny begins.
Such drive for satisfaction creates the professional politician, who derives his livelihood from the government. Such men are like drones, who have learned to live off the labor of others.
Then, there is another class of men, the rich businessmen, who make it their purpose to feed the political drones that their wealth may increase at every level.
There is a third class of men in a democracy, who are not wealthy and who are not politicians. They wield a lot of power, since they are the majority, but they remain powerless, because they must go and earn a living. Such men look for a leader who shall speak on their behalf and whom they then put into power.
This leader is the tyrant, who knows how to wield power effectively – by taking money from the rich and using it to buy support and followers. He knows how to lie well, flatter sweetly, and make good-sounding but empty promises. The tyrant has no interest in the community, just in his own aggrandisement by way of wealth.
Likewise, the tyrannical man is enslaved to his bestial qualities; all those passions and lusts dominate his life. Therefore, this man is the most miserable because he is the most driven.
“Diversity” is the product of tyranny because it appeals to the bestial, instinctive aspects of human beings, namely, their tribal identity. There is no interest in building the goodness of the soul, or solidifying the foundations of reason, let alone advancing civilization.
Instead, diversity can only function when it succeeds in stirring up passions and lusts – and the most effective method is through the primitive “us-against-them” paradigm, where neither reason nor the Good are needed.
If life is nothing more than satisfying the need to belong, the world itself must fall apart. And the result is recorded in the words of H.G. Wells:
“He saw it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, and became steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and uncleanness….he saw life as…desolate, full of rubbish….And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the darkness and prayed aloud to the silences, ‘Oh, God! Give me back my visions! Give me back my visions!'”