John Carter discusses the ever-more-concerning collapse in basic competence in western societies, which left unchecked will absolutely lead to civilizational collapse due to the vastly complex interconnection of so many systems that we all depend on day and night:

Helen Andrews recently wrote an essay for Compact Magazine, titled The Racial Crossroads, which has been making waves for daring to use the verboten descriptor “race communism” for the acrimonious racial spoils system that has replaced meritocracy throughout the dying West. It’s very good. You should read it.

Personally, I prefer the more descriptive “gay race communism”. The progress pride flag is inseparable from the clenched Marxist fist of Black Lives Matter in regime iconography. Moreover, gay race communism is a deliberate subversion of the left’s own “fully automated luxury gay space communism” meme.

There are zero communists who actually look like this, gay or otherwise.

To be fair, Andrews introduces the concept as “gay race communism”, and even directly acknowledges its coinage by Twitter anon Drukpa Kunley. It wasn’t that long ago that conservative popularizers laundered ideas emerging from the anonosphere without attribution, as a means of hiding their origin and making themselves look more original, and Helen deserves credit for not doing this. Also to be fair, given the focus of Andrews’ piece, adding the “gay” to “race communism” could be seen as an unnecessarily inflammatory complication. It isn’t, but we’ll get to that in due time.

Andrews spends the first half of her essay detailing how the regulatory framework built by the Civil Rights Act created the cultural conditions for the rise of wokeness, affirmative action, and DEI initiatives. The official explanation given for anti-discrimination laws was that they were well-intended correctives to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Affirmative action was to be an explicitly temporary measure to give American blacks a helping hand, with the understanding that – after a decade or at most a generation of assistance – they would no longer need a thumb on the scale. Once racism was defeated, we could all live in utopian colour-blind race-neutral Star Trek liberalism, judging one another by the content of our individual characters and no more concerned by the phenotypic differences of ancestral population groups than we are by sartorial quirks. Kumbayah and such. This isn’t an original argument: the same points have been made by Christopher Caldwell in his 2021 book The Age of Entitlement, and of course most directly by Richard Hanania in his 2023 book The Origins of Woke (whom Andrews doesn’t mention, possibly because everyone hates Hanania now).

The central point of Andrews’ essay is the following:

The old racial bargain is breaking down, due to a combination of changing demographics and a dawning realization that racial outcomes are not going to converge any time soon. One possible path forward is to throw out the old racial bargain and establish a new one based on equality under the law. The other possible path is to accept permanent racial favoritism at every level of society.

As Andrews sees it, the first problem with the Civil Rights regime is that it reifies the abstraction of equality into a legal presumption that there are no salient biological differences between human population groups. This simply isn’t true, but the assumption that it is true leads to the necessary conclusion that all differences in outcome between groups must be a consequence of discrimination based on irrational prejudice, rather than a natural result of inborn distinctions of cognitive capacity or behavioural profile. Biological differences are real and significant, but the make-believe that they are socially constructed and unimportant incentivizes a perpetual inquisition that dismantles society as it persecutes innocent people for ever more tenuous spectres of racism implicitly haunting the privileged depths of their incorrigbly white ids. This places institutions in an impossible quandary, since the only way to avoid being dragged into court in discrimination lawsuits is to preemptively discriminate in favour of protected groups, which is to say, against unprotected groups. Human resources departments have formed as a direct response to the legal sword of Damocles poised over every institution’s neck: their function isn’t actually to hire the best people, or to hire anyone at all, but rather to ensure that the employer won’t get sued for hiring people from the wrong groups, or not hiring the people from the right groups, or for allowing people from the right groups to get offended by things said by people from the wrong groups. A doctrine predicated on denial of reality must go to war with reality to preserve itself, and as the war on noticing grinds on the battlefront presses into ever more intimate corners of people’s lives, their public speech, their private speech, their silent thoughts, their very emotions.

Your emotions are illegal, chud.

The second problem Andrews identifies is demographic mission creep. When race communism first got rolling in the 50s and 60s, the focus was quite specifically on African-Americans, who had an arguable claim to restitution on the basis of their long period of bondage on the cotton plantations.¹ White Americans largely agreed with that, and were trying to do the decent thing, to make up for the abuses and indignities suffered by the disadvantaged blacks.

The mass migration of the third world into the first upsets that balance. America is no longer a 90% white country with a small rump of Africans, but more like a 50% white country, with large and growing minorities from every benighted slum in the Global South … and every single one of those groups gets to classify itself as an oppressed racial minority from the Global Majority, and therefore help itself to the largess spilling forth from the cornucopia of white guilt. In the 70s and 80s affirmative action was largely no more than an annoyance for white Americans, but in the 2020s young American whites find themselves shoved aside in university admissions, in corporate hiring, in the availability of loans and grants for education, in the availability of venture capital, in promotions, and so on, with these opportunities being bestowed instead upon supposedly oppressed minorities who arrived five minutes ago and were never actually oppressed by white Americans.

[…]

Institutional collapse is a near certainty on this track. Our civilization is a staggeringly complex system of systems. Operating and maintaining those systems requires a high degree of competence. Competence has to be learned, but it can’t be learned by anyone. DEI pushes incapable people into key positions, while denying even the opportunity for training to the potentially capable. Eventually, the systems themselves begin to malfunction. Repair becomes impossible, because there’s no one who actually knows how to repair the systems: the ones working in the system are too stupid to understand it, while those who could have learned were locked out and therefore didn’t learn what they needed to know. One system breaks, causing a problem in another system, which leads to a problem in a third system, and soon cascading failures junk the entire machine. DEI – and by extension, Civil Rights – has precipitated a competence crisis, and Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.

This complex systems collapse is already happening. Andrews uses the example of failures in airplane manufacturing, pilot training, and air traffic control that have made air travel that much more hazardous, and which seem to trace directly to DEI-motivated recruitment policies, although naturally it is difficult to verify this as the regime does everything it can to obscure such a connection. The general enshittification of the Internet is probably at least partly a result of less talented and less scrupulous Indians replacing white software engineers. Entertainment media has become ludicrously bad in direct proportion to the replacement of white male directors, showrunners, screenwriters, animators, artists, and programmers by women of pronouns. Academia is in the midst of a credibility collapse for exactly the same reason.

It is not hard to extrapolate this degenerative process out a generation or two. Instead of building cities on Mars, we will be bouncing over potholes on dirt roads. Tap water will have to be boiled, assuming water even comes from taps. Electricity will only be available a few days a week, and that in the good neighbourhoods. What did South Africans use for light before they had candles? Light bulbs. There are still liberals in South Africa, by the way.

Forestalling collapse is simple. All we need do is reinstate meritocracy within institutions.

Simple does not mean easy. Reinstating meritocracy is in fact ideologically impossible for the regime.

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1. The merits of that case can certainly be debated: white Americans have spilled rivers of their blood and mountains of treasure to end and make up for slavery, and when is enough enough?; the crime and dysfunction blacks have brought to American cities must surely be included against them in the accounting; the standard of living of the most low-down American hood rat is orders of magnitude better than that of his distant cousins in the shantytowns of Lagos, suggesting that if anything blacks should be grateful for free transport to the New World. Putting all of that aside, the fact remains that American blacks have a long history in America, and therefore have some claim to consideration.