The political culture is stifling.
The controversy over the Dalmore memo does not give a full picture of how the
left wing ‘progressive’ perspective is being pushed. There are numerous anti-bias,
diversity, and inclusiveness training sessions. While I don’t think that some
training on fighting bias is completely useless (e.g., for interviewers), the
problem is that the perspective is unabashedly cultural marxist. We have a
lecture series on race that features such noted scholars as Shaun King, Van
Jones, and Linda Sarsour. (They would rather bite their limbs off than let
people like Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams join the conversation). I won’t
even mention all the left wing causes that are constantly pushed in calls to
volunteer, community collaboration opportunities, emails from upper level
managers on the need for diversity & inclusion, etc.
It
is not just conservatives who have to hide their beliefs. Libertarians and
people from different cultures (e.g., Hindu, Muslim) also keep very quiet. For
instance, it would be a faux pas to admit that you don’t believe in
state-sponsored gay marriage because you don’t believe that the state should
have any role in recognizing marriages of any sort (i.e., that it is a purely
cultural or private matter that transcends the state’s mandate). The response
would be that you are denying rights to gay people, and you would probably be
regarded as homophobic. There is no shortage of people willing to take offense,
and they are incentivized to do so.
This
matters for a number of reasons. As Breitbart accurately reports, various
left-leaning managers are maintaining blacklists of individuals who are not
“sufficiently supportive of diversity”. They are so secure in their position
that they proclaim these stances openly on our internal G+. (This is something
out of Maoist China, where not being sufficiently supportive of the Chairman
could get you in trouble, and snitching was encouraged). They encourage each other
to report ‘suspicious’ behaviour, and proudly announce to all and sundry that
they are more than willing to share this information across companies in the
tech sector to create industry-wide blacklists. There is, as Breitbart reported
(and which I was unaware of), a labour relations complaint against the head of
Technical Infrastructure for ‘witch-hunting’ dissenters within his org.
Some
of the most obvious victims of this stifling left-wing culture are probably
religious minorities. I first found out about this accidentally, while chatting
to a psychologist who works for a mental health organization contracted by tech
companies. She told me that a huge portion of her caseload consisted of
minority-member Googlers who were stressed out and angered by the requirement
to conform to Google’s left wing culture (e.g., Muslim employees and the
omnipresent pro-LGBT-etc propaganda).
Ironically,
despite the emails from management telling us that stereotypes are bad, the
official guide to fairness in performance reviews is chock full of stereotypes.
In the opening pages, we are told that white (dominant) culture values binary
thinking, meritocracy, perfection and urgency. In contrast, it “commonly
invisibilizes or devalues” listening, collaboration, sustainability, growth in
quality, self-determination, etc.
The
authors of this document are apparently unaware that it was actually white male
ecologists who researched and developed models of sustainability and resilience
(e.g., C.S. Holling). Models of collaboration and inclusion of different
viewpoints appeared in the urban planning and socio-ecological systems
literature back in the 1970s, again largely championed by white people (e.g.,
Arnstein, Jacobs). You can thank white researchers for complex adaptive systems
theory, chaos theory, participatory planning methods, models of organizational
decision making, etc. On the topic of ‘binary thinking’, white males (e.g.,
Lukasiewicz) were developing axiomatic theories of many-valued logics way back
in the 1930s, while the same demographic developed probability theory,
stochastic processes, fuzzy logic and various other formalisms.
However,
of this can be pointed out. We just have to eat the propaganda.
And lest you think that this is just an
internal company matter, check out who is going to be ‘fighting extremism’ on
YouTube.
