What’s it all for? The tremendous effort currently being expended to impose wokeness upon the world – what’s the endgame? What do the woke want?
This is not a trick question. In more and more of the West’s institutions, D&I departments – that’s “Diversity & Inclusion” for the uninitiated – are being set up and generously staffed. The unlovely child of Human Resources, D&I is there to make sure that everybody in the organisation is singing from the same ideological song-sheet.
How do they do that? By “encouraging” (ie compelling) employees to attend day-long meetings every few months during which the current D&I orthodoxy is drummed into their skulls. Organisers encourage participants to be “brave” at these events, and to speak-up and speak-out fearlessly.
This is not a good idea.
As anyone who has ever watched the movie The Killing Fields knows, the real reason the people running these events encourage participants to be brave is so they will betray themselves as “enemies of the people” – ie racists, sexists and/or transphobes. So identified, they will then be required to enrol in further “diversity education” classes. (In Pol Pot’s Kampuchea plastic bags were pulled over their heads.)
D&I’s message to the offenders’ colleagues and workmates could not be clearer: Failure to toe the line is likely to prove injurious to your career prospects. Should one of these offenders be too brave, and speak out too forcefully, then re-education may be rejected in favour of outright dismissal. As the Chinese say: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.”
It is pointless for the victims of this process to complain to their trade union. Most likely it will be a public sector union and, almost certainly, it will have a D&I department of its own. Any thought of complaining to the Human Rights Commission should also be dismissed. Who do you think provides the ideological inspiration for the nation’s D&I departments?
If all this sounds alarmingly reminiscent of the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China then – Congratulations! – you have sound historical instincts. Ninety years ago, however, the people we call D&I managers were called “commissars”.
As well as the Party’s mouthpiece, the commissar was also its eyes and ears. Every organisation had at least one. They sat on the committee of the collective farm or commune. They sat alongside the local Police commander and newspaper editor. They were in the staffroom of every school and the common rooms of every university. Every regiment of the Red Army had its own commissar – ever alert to the slightest hint of Napoleonic tendencies among the officer-class.
The existence of this vast network of commissars was deemed necessary by the leading party officials because the ordinary people simply could not be trusted to arrive at the ‘correct’ political conclusions by themselves. The Party had far too many competitors for the masses’ attention. There was the Church, the Mosque, and the Temple. There were the deeply-entrenched cultural traditions passed down from parent to child. Most of all, there were the sins common to all human-beings: pride, anger, greed, laziness, envy, lust – every one of them capable of luring weak individuals away from their collective responsibilities. The commissar’s job was to make damn sure everyone trod the correct communist path.
Ultimately, of course, the commissar was expected to become redundant. Ultimately, the thinking of the masses would cease to be influenced by the reactionary ideas the commissars had been placed among them to root out and destroy. Of one mind, the people would then have no need for the commissar’s guidance, or the party’s, or even the state’s. Ultimately, communism would create an entirely new human being – homo Sovieticus.
The big difference between the communist commissar and the wokesters in charge of today’s D&I departments is that the former were Marxists and the latter are not. For Marxists, the locomotive of history is class-struggle, and the locomotive’s destination is a classless society. Abolish class and you abolish conflict. Society then operates on the principle of: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.
For the woke, however, the political dynamic is very different. The world they envisage is not one characterised by the unity born of human need, but by the diversity of human identity. The Marxists argued that through the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange the world could become one. That unity is not, however, available to a society divided by ethnicity, gender and culture. Indeed, such a society would find unity next-to-impossible to achieve. In the end, unity and diversity are opposites.
The besetting evil of communism was its fatal determination to speed up history by speeding up the elimination of classes. If feudal aristocrats, capitalists, kulaks, middle-class professionals and managers stood in the way of socialist progress, then surely the smart move was to sweep them into History’s dustbin?
Remember in The Killing Fields how the hero told the Khmer Rouge that he had been a taxi driver? Why? Because, being a middle-class professional, he had soft hands, always a reliable marker of class identity. Peasants don’t have soft hands. Those who lacked the presence of mind to explain away their soft hands were marked down for elimination. Pol Pot wasn’t prepared to wait for his classless society to evolve – not while the Khmer Rouge had a more-or-less endless supply of plastic bags.
What will be the besetting evil of a world dominated by the woke? Freed from all constraints, what would they do? It is hard to shake off the idea that they would begin by getting rid of the human beings deemed responsible for most of society’s ills: Cis White Males. But where would they stop? What would become of Cis White Females? What would become of Cis, full stop?
Way back in 1969 the pop group Blue Mink released a chart-topping single called “Melting Pot”:
What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough to take the world and all its got
Keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee coloured people by the score
Unity, peace and inclusion, that was the dream, but it was only achievable at the expense of diversity. And right there is the problem with the woke dream. You can have a world in which everybody is included. Or, you can have a world in which diversity is mandated.
But you can’t have both.