I think it might be time to tackle the elephant in residence in the room, or at least try to make it feel a little uncomfortable. This particular elephant is rapidly approaching morbid obesity and assuming ever larger chunks of attention for itself; it is the metaphorical administrative-management tail wagging the administered-staff dog; it is a micro industry gorging itself and becoming a macro-monopoly on the guilt engendered by activists with very loud voices, very sharp axes to grind, revenge against humanity on their minds, and being given massive tipper-truckloads of cash to advance politically correct agendas by executive boards terrified of backlash from the minority Twitterati screechers – who most rational people ignore utterly anyway.
Welcome to the world of D&I – Distraction and Irrelevancy.
I mean, of course, “Diversity” and “Inclusion”.
The expression is already in trouble before we start. The original aims may indeed have been laudable, but necessary now? With effective anti-discrimination legislation in place, and apparently a continuously growing acceptance and tolerance in the population at large what is the purpose of this monolithic bureaucracy?
“Diversity” as a political concept appears to exist, George Orwell-like, solely to achieve the precise opposite: the end-result required is perfect ubiquity, homogeneity of political and intellectual thought, of submission, the suppression of the individual.
“Haven’t we done well,” HR’s D&I Officers crow, patting themselves on the back, “we have achieved precisely 13.84279% of our workforce as non-white, differently-able, non-binary-cis-normative people exactly in line with population census figures for the nation as a whole”. Never mind that in the headlong rush to acquire staff by quota alone, no consideration at all has been given to whether or not any of these hires can actually do a good job. Perhaps they can: the point though is that quota-hire has replaced talent as an employment characteristic. Just look at the BBC, over quota on all ethnic and sexual “minorities” and racing to the bottom of the market by haemorrhaging audience share without even the time or skills to rearrange the deckchairs.
D&I has mushroomed, grown like a cancer, so that we now have diversity “champions”, LGBTQalphabettispaghetti “allies” and the like. A serious question burrows around in my head at all this: what difference does it make if Alice in Accounts is a lesbian? Who cares? Isn’t it embarrassing for her that she is defined by her sexual preferences, not her mathematical aptitude or competency, or even the amiability of her character? Does it mean she needs additional support to add up the monthly sales figures? Does she need protection from bigoted bank statements? Or is she so hopeless at her job that she needs an anti-discrimination shield to avoid a P45?
What the D&I monolith has failed to take any account of is this: most people don’t give a flying trans-sexual banana-skin-wrapped pig about what their colleagues do in the privacy of their own homes, on their own time; what they want to know more than anything else is “can they actually do the job they were hired for”? “Will that Keith bloke (you know, the guy who wears women’s panties) cover for me when I go to Torremolinos on my hols, or will I come back to an in-tray of complaints like what happened with Julian last summer before he was promoted sideways out of the door?”
In other words the vast majority of people look beyond the physical and/or sexual personal characteristics of their colleagues. They have zero interest. They have neither the time nor the energy to worry about that sort of thing, they are too busy trying not to be sacked. When it comes to dressing up in bondage gear on a Friday night they just. Don’t. Care.
But they certainly do care about having overpaid and unproductive box-tickers enforcing “unconscious bias” training on them; they have better things to do than sit in a classroom being scolded and lectured on how evil and bigoted they are just because they happen to be cis-gendered and not-brown and have a full complement of functioning digits, and without any kind of enquiries being made first to establish whether they even have the slightest bigoted tendencies.
I do wish we could at least tone down this stuff. Let’s all try to get on with our own lives, and not upset anybody unnecessarily. As far as I know we are all in this ship together, there are no escape vessels available, so we owe it to ourselves to avoid friction wherever possible.
Politics, Shmolitics 