Excluded generation to entitled bureaucrats: You broke it, you fix it. By John Carter, who recently lost his university job and couldn’t find another.
Now, there’s a degree to which I was my own worst enemy here. … I decided early on that I would not lower myself to write a diversity statement, because I refuse to make a ritual declaration of ideological faith to a faith that I do abhor. …
On top of that, in the shadow of COVID mass formation, a fair number of institutions had mRNA transfection mandates, or resided in countries with such mandates; I refused to apply to these, too. In total perhaps two thirds of the advertised positions were ruled out by these factors. Of the remainder, I got interviews at a couple, but offers from none. …
The main issue is the DIEing academy, in which individuals such as myself, with unfashionable skin colour and unfashionable genitalia with which my preference is to do unfashionable things, are placed at the bottom of an inverted hierarchy in which competence, ability, and accomplishment are all deprecated in favour of elevating representatives of ‘equity-seeking groups’. …
I could no longer afford to remain in my absurdly expensive one-bedroom apartment — which has become even more outrageously dear thanks to the money printer going Brrrrr and all those excess Federal Reserve Notes flowing into real estate assets. Unwilling to watch my savings get bled away given that I’ll be living on them for an indeterminate time, I gave away all my furniture, spent several hundred dollars shipping what I couldn’t carry, threw my remaining belongings into overstuffed luggage, and fled the Disunited States like a refugee for the Post-Great Post-White North to claim asylum at my mother’s place.
Yes, dear readers — your humble author has become the archetypal middle-aged man literally living in his mother’s basement.
If you detect a note of bitterness in the above, you’re not wrong. I’ve invested over a decade of my life into this career, and to realize that all of it counts as nothing for the simple fact that I’m from a disfavoured group tastes like nuclear ash. …
I can tell you that I’ve been told by senior professors, off the record, that if I had a vagina I’d certainly have been offered a job, and probably more than one … and I can also point to the numerous examples of universities explicitly excluding white guys from applying. The examples of universities implicitly excluding white guys are far more common. I once applied for a position that I was later told I probably wouldn’t get, as they really wanted to hire a woman; sure enough, the short list was all grrl power. In that case there was no indication in the job ad that it was a waste of my time to apply. It’s impossible to say how often that happens, but the safe money in this political climate is on ‘all the time’. …
Not like past discrimination, which admitted merit:
On the other hand, you can say: well maybe you just aren’t good enough, sure there’s discrimination, but other groups have dealt with that in the past and overcome it. This brings to mind the apocryphal black woman scientist beloved of Hollywood screenplays, who had to be better than all the men in order to bust through the glass ceiling and beat the old boy’s club at their own game. You know, the Hidden Figures plotline. This is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of woke discrimination, however.
The ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ discrimination of yore was founded primarily in the idea that other groups couldn’t do things, because they lacked the ability; when an individual from one of those ‘oppressed’ groups demonstrated that ability, they were given seats at the big boys table. The wokeites make no such claim: they don’t say that white guys lack the ability to do things, but rather that in order to correct ‘historical inequities’, they should be prevented regardless of ability … indeed that the very notion of ‘merit’ is merely a synonym for patriarchal white supremacy.
There’s no amount of hard work that can bust through such a barrier. The only way around it is to wear a wig and cut your dick off, or discover (or invent) an ancestor belonging to some lost tribe of American Indians2. I feel like something of a fool for not figuring this out earlier. As recently as a few years ago I maintained precisely the illusion described above: that all I had to do was work so hard, be so good at what I do, that the merits of my curriculum vitae would drown out the shrieking of the banshees in HR. …
Sign of the times:
The day after I arrived here, my brother called to catch up. He commiserated with me about my situation, and described similar goings on with his former employer — a municipal police force. It seems the female chief wanted an inspector’s position filled by another strong independent woman, who naturally enough and in sharp and glaring distinction to her male competitors lacked the necessary qualifications.
The lady chief therefore simply rewrote the regulations, and hired the woman … who has since, in my brother’s words, demonstrated herself to be an absolute airhead who fucks up everything she touches.
Turning socialist, our civilization is going down the tubes. With no motivation, we just don’t try as hard.
This kind of thing is everywhere.
And it’s corrosive at a level that I don’t think people have fully realized.
It isn’t just that placing incompetent people in positions of responsibility gradually erodes the ability of institutions to perform their core functions. Civilization depends to a large degree on the willingness of men to go above and beyond, to compete with one another in various arenas in order to win prestige, wealth, and ultimately women.
The urge to excel is the engine that drives everything, whether scientific discovery, technological innovation, athletic performance, or economic development. The need to prove oneself, and to gather the rewards that come with it, is what motivates young men to put in long hours, to work hard, to push themselves to their very limits and beyond. We don’t grind because we can’t not grind: we grind because there are incentives that make grinding worthwhile.
The system of diversity spoils, in which rewards are allocated on the basis of group membership, hits that urge like a JDAM.
If it does not matter how hard you work, how many hours you put in, how much you achieve … then it all becomes entirely pointless. Eventually, you stop straining against the immovable object, and go grab a beer and sit on your ass in the shade.
I think that’s happening all over right now. There’s been a lot written about the Great Resignation, how people have been just walking away from their jobs over the last couple years, and how employers increasingly can’t find anyone to fill open positions. There’s also been a noticeable drop-off in productivity amongst those who have stayed in their positions; we’ve all felt that, I think. People are just phoning it in en masse. Sure, a certain element of that is the combination of ennui and a lack of accountability that comes with remote work.
But there’s also an entire generation of young men that have been relentlessly trained into the realization that they’re at the bottom of the progressive stack no matter what they do … after a while, why would they continue bothering to even pretend to try?
In my case, I’ve gotten very lazy over the last several months, from a professional standpoint. As it became clear that I was very unlikely to get a job offer, my desire to do anything beyond the absolute bare minimum professionally simply evaporated. …
So f**k you, unfair society:
This is the other form of subtle corrosion eating through our social fabric. Western civilization depends on the widespread perception that there are rules, that those rules are fair, and that if we all play by them we can all have a decent life. Diversity, equity, and inclusion has put that perception to the sword. When it’s gone, there’s no longer a cohesive social order in which we all work together for personal and collective benefit. There’s just a carcass from which you’d best strip what meat you can before it rots. …
Most of the young guys I know, the ones who understand the full dimensions of the antijustice that’s been foisted on us, have exactly zero loyalty to the system and are dead set on extracting whatever benefits they can from it, with no intention of doing anything more than they absolutely have to to feed back into it. This generally takes the form of finding ways to get whatever monetary benefits they can from the social welfare state.
There’s a stark contrast with the ethic of previous generations, for whom reliance on the welfare system was shameful, and who therefore wanted to avoid even the appearance of freeloading. It’s not that the younger guys don’t understand that a system weighed down with parasitism must ultimately collapse. They understand that very well. That’s the point. They don’t see that system as their system: it’s a system controlled by their sworn enemies, who have repeatedly and publicly declared their intention to marginalize and displace them.
The choice they have is between being hardworking taxpayers, whose taxes get diverted to supporting the burgeoning families of their replacements while their hard work is ignored in favour of promoting said replacements … or instead, maximizing whatever benefits they can extract from the system while it still lasts.
The system we’ve created is rapidly destroying our society. Low-IQ mediocrities are elevated to positions beyond their abilities, where they blunder about like apes in the control room of a nuclear reactor. Men of ability are frozen out, and either stop trying and lose themselves in drugs, alcohol and video games … or begin actively working to destroy the system.
Dark ages here we come.
Capitalism always beats communism, because communists try to implement the parasite’s code: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This is unfair, kills motivation, and few bother to strive. Under natural justice, people who produce more get more.
Now diversity mandates — a la cultural Marxism — is having the same effect.
There’s a lot of underemployed talent accumulating on the sidelines.
