He pointed out that when it comes to the actual value of diversity, the diversities that matter are those of belief and behavior. For every practical intent and purpose white and black and brown people, gay and straight and confused people, male and female and other people, who believe the same things, are homogeneous. They add nothing the complexity, and thus overall robustness of the system.
This is why the beliefs and values of all people must both be respected and promoted. Promoting ACTUAL diversity of thought is the first and best protection against idiocy, and curtailing actual diversity is a surefire way into the hellfire of sustained mediocrity and eventual generalized failure.
He had a good quote from Eric Hoffer, which goes roughly: “When people are free to behave as they choose, most of them choose to imitate each other.”
This got me looking up Hoffer quotes, and many of them are really very good:
This one jumped out at me:
The superficiality of the American is the result of his hustling. It needs leisure to think things out; it needs leisure to mature. People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
What better way to ensure generalized failures of thought than to make it both harder to earn a living, and to raise expectations? Jacques Ellul pointed out in the early 1960’s that Americans have succumbed to a propaganda of work. We view it as intrinsically virtuous. Indolence is certainly a vice, but so too is what we have come to call workaholism.
A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
and:
It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
and:
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
If you do not see the parallels here with the stuff I’ve been blogging about the past few weeks, I doubt I can explain it to you.
Here are some more good ones:
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Amen brother. And I say this with the understanding he was a leftist, although I clearly need to learn more about him.
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.