[cormacrelf]

You are thinking very, very shallowly about this. Diversity has become a goal in many organisations because primarily (1) too much cohesion entails out-groups and that often means racism or other illegal and immoral attitudes and practices thrive, and that is a huge problem both for legal reasons and generally; and secondarily (2) too much cohesion means you aren’t exposed to enough different opinions.

You have apparently only considered reason (2). Your comment then runs the gauntlet of extreme reactions to the idea of diversity. It seems to be because you don’t understand that both cohesion and diversity sit somewhere in the middle of a priority order for most organisations. The only people who agree with where you appear to have placed cohesion in the priority order are the architects of 1930s fascism. The reason saying “diversity is bad” and all the other things you said (“Diversity is disunity. Chaos”) is wrong is because you sound like a fascist. I am not exaggerating. You absolutely do sound like one. That is a prime example of “bad systemic effects” as the comment above said; if you say stuff like this, your organisation will no longer be conducive to anything except violent political movements. You should, in swift order, reconsider how important cohesion is to you and any organisations you’re a part of.

Addendum: you did say you didn’t know how to ask this without sounding hateful. Fair. Pointing out the connection to hateful groups is still appropriate and necessary because the devotion to absolute cohesion was a huge part of what made fascism successful. Saying stuff like you did is a bad way for society to go, good people recognise it and rightly reject it vehemently. So your ideas about cohesion being always preferable to diversity are always going to get this reaction from most, and eventually your organisations will be filled with the remaining people who do agree with your comments, and those people are amenable to hate even if you were originally just trying to get some team spirit going. It is a bad path. So is making your university staff swear allegiance to ideology. The only way forward is a balance of cohesion and diversity.

[registeredcorn]

Thank you very much for the response, and for not being too harsh in your critique. :)

[cormacrelf]

I’m not sure it’s a smiley face moment for all of us, more just another day on the internet, but thinking about this on your own is good.

One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble.

It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language.

[brnaftr361]

It does not follow. Race itself (since you're using 20th century fascism, read: Nazi) is a singular aspect of diversity. Organization is a poor selection of term, too. Institution is better suited.

It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective".

Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world.

The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things:

The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate

Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this...

Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option.

Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever.

It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions.

The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game.

I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income.

Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.

[cormacrelf]

I think you have failed spectacularly at understanding fascism. It was not only racial purity that they went for. That wasn’t even a thing in Italian fascism, it simply did conformity and allegiance to the state and took that to an extreme. Nazism used racial purity to exclude people from its cohesive in-group and enhance the cohesion that in-group had. It built an extremely cohesive structure that worked at every level to enforce itself. No aspect of life was not subject to this enforcement. You had to demonstrate cohesion everywhere you went. The power to control this was necessarily centralised; there had to be some figure outside the cohesive mass who was not subject to the cohesion enforcement regime, who could interpret the rest of the world and then direct the mass to respond etc. The same can be said of Stalin, and these ideas are all laid out explicitly in the communist “vanguard” doctrine too. The results are not only bad because of the racism, they are also bad because of the day-to-day experience of living under such a regime, the weakness that comes from relying on a single fallible leader to direct the cohesive mass, the waste in rejecting independent minds, the brain drain from smart people leaving, the brutality required to hold all of this together, and finally the destruction it enabled. All of that is true of organisations and “institutions” (a term that excludes companies, by the way!) but with all of the sliders scaled down and the potential harms a little lower because companies don’t have armies.

So yeah, mate, I am very aware that there are groups who would murder me for expressing the views I have on cohesion and diversity. Was that meant to be a threat or just an appeal to tribalism as a natural thing? Everything else you said is… You seem to be grappling with the idea that there are a lot of people in the world. I don’t really see a point emerging from it.

[brnaftr361]

Fascism has been a catch all for "other" forever. Orwell, an expert wordsmith who was present at the time actually described this phenomena not only in terms of the fascist movements but also the Communist movements, crucially, if you read An Homage to Catalonia this actually caused a considerable deal of internal manipulation which was coordinated in such a way that foreign press promulgated [by Orwell's account] false stories.

It was really an economic classification wherein business was subordinated to an authoritarian government. And again to my point, hierarchy, institutions, power, and scale are what lead to the immense destructive forces witnessed in the early 20th century.

And by that logic I don't see a whole lot of distinction between the Axis and Allies - there was a difference in values but hardly one in architecture at the time. There was also the point of aggressors and aggressed which paints moral connotations.

And companies do have armies, really it's private property, but... Companies own all of the property that's valuable. Corporations in particular, which mind you do have a history of directly or indirectly leveraging government power, in some cases military or "intelligence". You don't need an army when you can threaten someone with global sanctions for attempting something like a sovereign default or violation of international IP law. There is no distinction between starving someone out and killing them in war, in fact, that's what war used to consist of. Siege the city and hold the walls, wait and watch as they starve to death and wallow in their own filth as disease creeps in.

Your last point is grasping at straws. You know as well as I do I wasn't specifying you, or your particular values. Stop parading legitimate diversity around as tribalism and painting it, self-righteously, as some inexorably evil idea. I can do the same with your naive globalist cosmopolitanism: whatever intrinsic real diversity does emerge, it's amalgamated into a uniform homogeneity because the elements within are pigeonholed, and expected to behave in a narrow band of "cosmopolitan acceptability". Isn't that what you don't want? One totally uniform population and a flat earth? Politically, nationally, racially, philosophicallt identical, because to me that is the logical conclusion.

Schismogenesis is a self-limiting principal and had ought to be embraced. It would be hard for a continuously dividing society to accrete enough power to do what the West did to the Americas, or colonialism or Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler or the Russian revolution... The scale is the important factor. And those dividing lines that we create in these nuanced differences in value are important by that nature. Some will fail, some will succeed. It's hardly any different than mitosis. Forbidding that from occuring is holding back evolution, isn't it? That was the whole proposition democracy was suppose to solve in the US - it was a laboratory for experimenting with... Everything, and yet the accretion, centralization, scale, and institutionalization has all but defeated that.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...

[cormacrelf]

I think it would help if you visited a museum instead of reading Orwell dissecting wartime hysteria. That was written in 1944. All people had to go on was propaganda and tiny snippets of reporting on atrocities, of course people in the survey had no idea what the word meant. It serves as nothing more than a caution about words losing their power through overuse, not evidence that the word fascism is actually meaningless. There is actual content in the word and you can use it to refer to its particular brand of totalitarianism and set of methods for imposing and sustaining it. It is worth doing that in order to avoid it happening again because it is a successful formula and there is a danger of that. Maybe it bewilders you, but it seems everything bewilders you. Everything would be easier for you if we all lived in communities of no more than 150 people. You’re free to go and do that up in the hills and leave the rest of us down here.

[brnaftr361]

Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he had a direct view of the interior workings of the politics of these ferments because of that. He was also apprised of the disparate reporting by foreign journals as he made it a point to read them, this is something he writes at length about in Homage.

I would expect that very few people of today would be able to define it accurately. And because of that, yes, it remains a catch-all for "enemy" and lacks meaning aside. Nobody else abides by your methods, just as every "Classical Liberal" fails to label themselves strictly as a "Liberal" as prescribed by Mises (or was it Hayek?). Thus there is a stunning failure to identify internal mechanisms as, at an elementary level, fascistic in both organizations and institutions. It's a pretty considerable failure.

It's a wildly successful formula because we're all doing it and we're ignorant of it because it's a word without meaning and that makes it a contagion of stupidity.

But of course I'm bewildered. Watching people naively building cities housing tens of millions of people, driving millions of cars, rampantly reproducing so that millions more people and millions more cars might grace the congested arteries. Then being so audacious as to complain about pollution and urban sprawl in the same breath as they have their prepared tangerines in light syrup canned in a plastic cup shipped from some developing nation 4000 miles away, but damn that smog! And it's all enabled by what had ought only be described as a fascistic imperialist regime.

Nobody is free to do that, by the way. It's a forced participation scheme. Pay taxes or it's taken, if it's not given violence is deployed. To pay taxes you need money, to get money you must work and make yourself culpable. These are the things that Ghandi railed against and pointed to as agents of moral decay, and likewise Tolstoy - perfect heteronomy by which we can lease all our deference to the state and institutions that make up "civilization" - another ill defined word.