DEI, ESG and Social Justice Word Magic II: the Gleichschaltung of our time

Yes, the professional-managerial class will betray freedom and democracy in the name of moral respectability and social leverage

This is the second part of a two-part piece. The first half is here.

---

In a recent YouTube clip from the Lotus Eaters, an ex-police officer describes exactly how UK police have been nudged, shoved, and inveigled into abandoning crime-fighting and taking up opinion-enforcing. It is a textbook case of how DEI destroys the proper functioning of an organisation, of an institution.

UK police have experienced—under the rubric of DEI—the imposition of an internal snitch culture focused on ideological sins. You snitch on fellow police officers for “misgendering”, thinking (accurately) that DEI is nonsense, for breaking current linguistic taboos. Such snitching becomes the basis for promotion. This is how you get a police that apparently cannot do much about rashes of burglaries—and are reluctant to deal with any crime that has “BAME” perpetrators—but are very keen on trawling through people’s social media posts for evidence of thoughtcrime.

Allison Saeng, Unsplash

The mass expansion of higher education, of bureaucratisation, has given members of the professional-managerial class a role as morally and cognitively superior deciders—based on their alleged expertise—about everything. DEI inserts such politics into every organisation and institution.

The claim to be such morally and cognitively superior knowers and deciders is naturally authoritarian politics. Holding that (1) such expertise is to apply to everyone in all walks of life, and (2) dissent is morally and cognitively illegitimate, makes totalitarianism inevitable.

It becomes easy to prosecute such politics if one has a sense of owning morality, as modern progressivism clearly does. There is, after all, the obvious attraction that for progressives to be morally and cognitively superior deciders means that others are inferior deciders.

This is the politics of stripping ordinary citizens of authority, in speech or action.

Such politics—although they clearly serve the class interest of the professional-managerial class—partly come from framings developed in academe. It also comes from anti-discrimination law facilitating the creation of legal-bureaucratic structures that deem the citizenry to be hovering on the edge of wrong-think and wrong-act. Such laws are the legal-bureaucratic expression of a much broader liberal-humanitarianism that takes any outcome inequality between groups as a sign of morally illegitimate actions or structures.

A further element is a welfare state apparat that colonises social pathology, that benefits from social pathologies: the greater social pathologies become, the more resources and authority accrues to the welfare state apparat. This creates active, systematic dis-incentives to make things work.

It’s not only that institutional dynamics maximise the scale and reach of decision-makers who pay no costs if they are wrong. It’s that it maximises the scale and reach of decision-makers who can actively benefit from decisions that increase social pathology. That’s how the UK and Western Europe can end up importing migrants who make the fiscal problems of their welfare states worse but, in the meantime, generate increased demand for the services of the welfare state apparat.

There is a destructive synchronicity here. Academe is full of folk who bear no cost if their claims about the world are false, provided they appeal successfully to academic status games. The institutional politics of moral narcissism get very little pushback from risk-adverse academics.

Social dominion through moral coordination

The archetype of false but academically influential ideologies is Marxism. It has provided a key template for framing and motivating grand intentions politics, though academics of an activist, social justice ilk have generally moved on from OG Marxism.

The replacements, the updates, reject Marx’s economism. Where Marx theorised as an intellectual parasite on classical economics, the replacements for Marxism are much more diverse in what they parasitise.

The underlying structure—which James Lindsay details for us—persists. In Marx’s original conception, it is to take over all the means of production of man himself, so man can complete himself, so be truly liberated. One identifies the oppressor group, those who aggregate the key form of capital, of property—whether that is private, cultural, racial, gender, whatever property—or capital. One then develops the the oppressed group’s consciousness, so they can abolish that form of property/capital. This template can, and has been, generalised beyond the economism of class.

Use class, bourgeois and capitalist mode of production and you get original Marxism. Insert sex and patriarchy you get radical feminism. Insert race and whiteness, and you get Critical Race Theory. Insert culture, imperialism, settlers and colonisers you get Postcolonial Theory and Settler-colonial ideology and the need to “decolonise” all aspects of the existing culture. Insert normality, sexuality, and heteronormativity and you get Queer theory—and the need to queer everything.

You declare everything and anything bourgeois, capitalist, patriarchal, racist, imperialist, colonialist, heteronormative, transphobic … until you get to control it. In all these formulations, there’s some blessed group whose future triumph will liberate human society from its cursed constraints.¹

The two things to understand about this is (1) it’s all crap. It’s all mountains of bullshit built on molehills of truth. It’s all degraded scholarship, imposing its assumptions on reality and using Theory to grade evidence. And (2), it’s all a moralised status-and-social-leverage power play.²

It all operates to develop the epistemic dominion, the social tyranny, of those who have the correct Theory, the correct Critical Consciousness. Those who have the proper knowledge grant themselves, in true Marcusian style, the authority to deny others the authority to speak. Error has no rights and they have the righteous Theory that allows them to declare what—and who—is in Error. It is the inquisitor’s creed, the creed of the commissar, in a nutshell.

This is an epistemic dominion that has to extend to all aspects of society, to all aspects of the creation of man. Without control of all aspects, the necessary social transformation needed for man to complete himself cannot take place.

This is totalitarian politics—demanding to control, or at least morally police, all aspects of society—and intolerant of dissent, operating from networks rather than some centrally directed Party. There is no basis for its grand claims beyond a shared moral narcissism, a collective moral grandiosity, utterly without foundation in the structure of reality. These people are worshipping the splendour in their own heads.

Due to their rejection of Marx’s economism, more recent practitioners of “anti-oppression” politics and grand intentions generally do not seek to replace markets, private property, or corporations. Rather, these are to be mobilised as instruments of social coordination and control. So, we get the Biden White House pressuring social media companies to censor people and banks to de-bank people.

This is not Old Model Totalitarianism, organised by highly centralised and mass political parties. It operates as networks, using in-group discussion, example and signalling to update what is being promoted. Updates can be made startlingly quickly, all based on a common framing as the superior deciders who own morality and so can determine who is illegitimate. Social media algorithms can reinforce such patterns.

So, the updated oppression-narratives have neither the economic focus of Marx nor the quasi-realist doctrinal coherence of Marxism. Nor do they have the centralised political organisation of Leninism.

How do you prosecute the non-electoral politics of institutional capture in a situation where you are not seeking to replace markets, private property and corporations? You do what the only totalitarian movement to take over an advanced democracy with a parliamentary tradition did. You use language, networking, and activism to move into institutions and to switch them to operating from a common template—one that de-legitimises all dissent as a betrayal of the only legitimate social project.

That is, you do Gleichschaltung: you do networked coordination. Gleich = same, schaltung = switch/circuit. All are to operate off the same social circuitry. This is an evolved operational pattern, a case of convergent evolution derived from attempting to solve the same operational problem within the same pattern of institutions.

Diversity, Inclusion, Equity is promoted in the name of fighting bigotry but in practice as a strategy of social leverage and resource acquisition. Diversity is the excuse to control appointments and to insert commissars and inquisitors (aka diversity officers, bias response teams, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants, etc). Inclusion is the excuse offered up to block or sack dissenters, to control speech, and association. Equity provides cover for resource control. ESG extends that to corporations, offering them moral cover and mechanisms to build and police cartels.

If things get too hot for DEI under that name, you just rebrand it.

There is little or no evidence that Diversity-Equity-Inclusion (DEI) or Equity-Diversity-Inclusion (EDI)—but never Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE)—contributes to human flourishing and considerable evidence it is hostile to it. It divides people by identities with moralised hierarchies: that’s never going to end well.

But DEI has a huge institutional advantage: it hits the bureaucratic jackpot by allowing bureaucracies to hoard authority, police information, spend resources on themselves, frustrate accountability, and shield themselves from the complexities of competence. It embeds activists within bureaucracies.

With all this, the iron law of woke projection is well and truly in operation. Those who shriek loudest about fascists and nazis are the ones who most resemble them in their operational modes of politics. This includes self-aggrandising politics of hatred and contempt towards those who disagree.

From “sex assigned at birth” and the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors as “care” and “compassion”, trans and gender identity theory are performing the same role in contemporary Gleichshaltung as race and race-fitness did in the Nazi version. They provide a set of lies, falsehoods and bullshit that both signal and generate compliance.

If you will accept the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors as being morally cutting edge, what won’t you swallow?

Just as Nazi Gleichschaltung relied on the support, both passive and active, of the respectable middle class, so does the contemporary version. More specifically, it needs the professional-managerial class, those sociologist Musa al-Gharbi calls symbolic capitalists. Instead of the Party-state, we get the activist-network-state.

You have networks of people who are all playing the same—mutually reinforcing—status game providing mutually supporting social leverage. A doctor who revealed that the hospital at which he was an intern was lying when it said it had stopped doing gender-identity medical procedures on children, found himself being investigated and charged. Go against status-and-social-leverage games of the professional-managerial class, and you will be punished. As a discussion of his case tells us:

Haim regards the whole bizarre ordeal as a product of the degree to which activism has infiltrated institutions: activist surgeons, activist hospital administrators, activist FBI agents, activist prosecutors, “young, liberal white women” from prestigious universities — relentlessly politically focused and extremely certain that disagreement with their political premises is a manifestation of evil. He sent video of a senior physician at TCH talking about her important work with “birthing persons.” That’s the workplace environment.

This is the activist-network state in operation. It’s a state that seeks to have institutions conforming to the same message and excluding those who do not go along in the service of the social domination of the professional-managerial class. The activist-network state is engaging in Gleichschaltung.

The replacement of the Party-state with the activist-network state is why the various social control mechanisms of Party-states—commissars/political officers; Zhdanovism (usefully discussed here), Lysenkoism (see, for example), and censorship (originally paraded as “hate speech”, now relabelled as disinformation)—have become pervasive in our societies.

The Pravda model media provides crucial coordination for such networks by promoting approved narratives, the narratives you have to agree with to be of the Smart and Good. This increasingly extends through various journals as well. Hence we see genderwoo Lysenkoism at Scientific American. (Pause now for some clever, and rightfully passionate, rap.)

Activism degrades everything it touches, as it forces on—and confines within—its own assumptions other realms of human action. This includes, for example, rules for professional associations that make professionals untrustworthy. All of this is creating a spreading pattern of moralised conformity that throws away centuries of carefully built-up trust in expertise.

Futurist Samo Burja has a rather nice description of what an institution is:

We can think of Institutions as these sort of automated zones of human coordination. It’s like the individuals participate and replicate a certain pattern of human behavior in them.

The Word Magic politics of Social Justice seeks to make its activism, its control of moral legitimacy, part of that automatic structure. As a friend has noted of both the original—and new networked version—Gleichschaltung:

The [high school] physics part of it is important. All switches are on a single circuit, so they can be turned off or on by throwing the master switch.

All this constitutes a war against freedom of thought and speech. But it’s a war that parades as moral and social concern, that offers its adherents a warm sense of superiority over fellow citizens, that provides shared status games and social leverage. All is dressed up in pseudo-sophisticated intellectualism, and permits the delicious treats of contempt for others and sanctified bad behaviour that Aldous Huxley noticed decades ago.

Of course, the respectable, university-educated professional-managerial class has lapped it up. Their need to act on behalf of those who lack agency—because oppressed—and to to block those who have “bad” agency—because oppressors—elevates their reach, authority and social control.

The bad folk who have to be blocked, to be suppressed, in the name of Social Justice means, in practice, attacking the agency of those not controlled through, well, their Agencies. Hence the use of what tech founder Marc Andreessen nicely characterises as a “wall of regulation” to block market entrants and consolidate industries into small numbers of large firms who can be made compliant to the activist-network State through the threat of endless investigations and potential prosecutions.

The professional-managerial class makes the process the punishment. This explains the surge in inquisitorial tribunals—hello, human rights commissions—and in lawfare. The attempt to knock (now President) Trump off the ballot for something he had never been charged for nor convicted of had to be (unanimously) quashed by the US Supreme Court. (When the highest court in the land makes a nine-zip decision, that is lawyerspeak for “and never darken our doorstep with this question again”.)

When judges do something legally outrageous, that’s usually a sign it is culturally resonant. The four judges of the Colorado Supreme Court who ruled to exclude Trump were all from elite law schools. The three who voted not to exclude him were alumni of the Denver Law School. Enough said.

More generally, the professional-managerial class’s pretensions to be superior deciders are spurious. Their expertise is, at best, narrow: often, very narrow. At worst, such pretensions are nonsense, based on absent expertise. Some of it is a mixture of both: especially when based on Theory not consilient with our underlying biology.

Spurious expertise has been multiplying because the weak reality-tests and absent reality-feedbacks of academe encourages its multiplication. The entire push for gender affirmative care is based on spurious expertise, as the WPATH Files have revealed and the Cass Review exposed.

Such pretensions—a politics where error has no rights—is ultimately incompatible with a free, democratic, technologically dynamic or, increasingly, simply a competent society. Declining state capacity is an observable feature of such politics, as can be seen in progressive cities within the US, in the UK, and more recently in Canada.

But think of the self-satisfaction, the moralised self-indulgence, the social leverage, the career prospects! What’s not to like?

Ask those who have been mutilated and sterilised in the service of genderwang bullshit. Ask the relatives of those who died in the utterly avoidable “Ferguson” and “George Floyd” homicide surges. You can’t ask the victims. They’re dead.

Ask those immiserated by rising rents as (democratically illegitimate) migration interacts with restrictions on the supply of housing. Ask those who see their social connections, their local social capital, degraded by waves of culturally-distant newcomers.

Ask those who notice the fiscal decay of unsustainable welfare states. Ask those who incomes are suppressed by a parasitic professional-managerial class bleeding off resources and suppressing economic activity. Ask those tired of mainstream media full of lies of omission and, increasingly, lies of commission. Ask those on the losing end of intersectional moral caste systems.

Ask those who see beloved entertainment and game franchises debauched and degraded. Ask those who—entirely reasonably—have lost trust in institutions and morally-conformist “experts”.

Ask those who suffered the ill-effects of the misconceived—but bureaucratically convenient—official responses to Covid. Ask those who notice how the schooling of their children has degraded. Ask those who notice how much higher education is making people stupider, and spreading a stupidity of arrogance among Western elites.

But the stupidity of arrogance is endemic to elites across history. Living in very wealthy, highly bureaucratised, societies where so many folk are insulated from consequences of the beliefs that they are so proud of—so are deeply reluctant to interrogate—generates particularly florid examples of the stupidity of arrogance. It is even worse when we have entire organisations and networks who benefit if the level of social pathologies increase.

The level of genuine service provided by the professional-managerial class is inverse to its sense of moral grandeur. This is no accident. Genuine service requires humility in the face of evidence and one’s own limitations; it requires a sense of custodianship; it requires respect for others; it requires commitment to the shared enterprise of culture and society—and its embedded learning—through time; it requires schooling one’s own emotions to what works rather than what feels good or grandly self-important.

Many professional-managerial class activities are straightforwardly parasitic—that is, they transfer resources to the parasites well beyond any benefit to those providing the resources. If you are parasitic, you really need both grand moral projects to disguise and justify your parasitism and narrative control and censorship to protect it.

The grandiose moralism is cover for what is, in effect, social aggression. The censorship and narrative control is pushed because such parasitism is constantly going to run up against the cruel constraints of reality.

Operational politics

An obvious objection to the Nazi example is that the ideology of Critical Social Justice and ostentatiously florid liberal humanitarianism is so very different from Nazi ideology. Yes and no.

First, the ideolog(ies) of “wokery” are manifestations of left-progressivism, while Nazism was a manifestation of right-progressivism. Hitler admired Stalin, and treated Communism as his rival, his competitor, not his enemy, which was liberal, mercantile (“capitalist”) society.

Second, it is the general patterns of progressivism—the elevation of the imagined future; the denigration of what has been built; the use of grand purpose to rid oneself of pesky moral constraints; the elevation as superior deciders through commitment to grand purpose—that are crucial.

Finally, the differences from Nazi ideology are less than one might think. Both agree that Jews are bad—oppressors and (now) genocidal settler-colonialists. They’re both obsessed with race, gender, sexuality and use these to create moral hierarchies. The difference is that “wokery” reverses the hierarchies—people of colour over “white”; female over male; trans and queer over cis-heteronormativity, and so on. Both advocate and practise a form of identity politics that creates a moral caste system.

When it comes to operational politics, the ideological differences matter less than one might think. The key similarity is that Gleichschaltung is how one operationalises totalitarian politics within a liberal democratic parliamentary state. Parliamentary systems are notoriously stable. Violent revolutions within them are unlikely while the external support of an occupying army is historically contingent. Note, too, that the Nazi Party-state was far less murderous than Communist Party-states until it had created the zone of destroyed states within which the Holocaust happened.

The politics of being morally and cognitively superior deciders—of control over the legitimacy of discourse, that de-legitimates dissent and extends superior-decider politics into all aspects of life—is totalitarian politics operating in liberal democratic parliamentary states without violent revolution or the support of an invading army. That is why they are engaging in their own—updated, networked—form of Gleichschaltung. For those with eyes to see, the pattern, the operational convergence, is very clear.

——

References

Donald E. Brown, Hierarchy, History & Human Nature: the Social Origins of Historical Consciousness, University of Arizona Press, 1988.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice, W.W.Norton, 2024.

Ann Krispenz and Alex Bertrams, ‘Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment,’ Current Psychology, 2024, 43, 2714–2730. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369380591_Understanding_left-wing_authoritarianism_Relations_to_the_dark_personality_traits_altruism_and_social_justice_commitment

M. O'Hearn, B.N. Lauren, J.B. Wong, D.D. Kim, & D. Mozaffarian, ‘Trends and Disparities in Cardiometabolic Health Among U.S. Adults, 1999-2018,’ Journal of the American College of Cardiology, (2022), 80(2), 138–151. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10475326/

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

1. The corollary of the idealisation of the humanity of the blessed group is the demonisation and dehumanisation of their cursed, maleficent opposites. It’s why such politics creates myths parading as history, because the designated roles have to be played out. The contingency of human action inherent in actual history has to be mythologised away.

2. As part of this moralised leverage, again and again we see the technique of using your vocabulary but not your dictionary. Words are redefined in service of Theory to generate spurious moral equivalences (e.g. genocide) or given an in-house meaning that can be invoked when convenient (e.g. Diversity, Inclusion, Equity). Thus Adam Kirsch notes: When Wolfe wrote that settler colonialism is based on “the elimination of the native,” the stark-sounding phrase turns out to have an equivocal meaning: it can refer to the physical elimination of a native people by killing, but also to any action inimical to “the native” as a distinctive way of life. In this sense, even policies that aim at equality between settler and native can be responsible for what Wolfe calls “structural genocide.” For him, “romantic stereotyping” about indigenous life, “officially encouraged miscegenation,” and “native citizenship” in the settler colonial state are all part of the “logic of elimination,” no less than “frontier homicide” and “child abduction.” Veracini, as we have seen, attenuates genocide still further by defining it as any attempt to “transfer” a population from its native place, physically, socially, or even imaginatively. This allows him to place mass murder, cultural assimilation, and dressing up in native costume on the same spectrum, as expressions of “the transferist imagination.” (P.94) And: For Wolfe, settler colonialism of the type practiced in Australia and Israel is even worse than Nazism, because “in contrast to the Holocaust . . . settler colonialism is relatively impervious to regime change.” (P.95) If one is struggling against an evil worse than Nazism, one is way more morally heroic than any WWII veteran. Especially if they lacked the profound intellectual understanding of a Patrick Wolfe.