Business Insider pushes major misdirection on DEI

February 27, 2024

By Tim Worstall

Business Insider tells us that DEI is still really important – no, no, don’t look at the guy behind the curtain! – really, DEI is really important.

The problem with this is that we have all looked behind the curtain and seen the guy trying to pull the levers of society. We’re all, also, as disappointed as Dorothy was at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, and rightly so.

For what we’re being told by Business Insider is the good part about DEI – diversity, equity, inclusion – isn’t what DEI is at all. The claim, that this is something good that society should be doing, is false simply because we already have another name for that thing that is being claimed to be good – meritocracy.

The insistence is that all that nonsense we’re seeing now isn’t what DEI really is:

Today’s most prominent critics of DEI — and its forefather, affirmative action — often cite their loyalty to meritocracy, where people are judged solely on their skills and ability. But this argument conveniently ignores DEI’s roots. 

But we’re not ignoring roots at all. DEI is an encapsulation of a specific – and wrong – political ideal. The entirety of society is so biased that we must ignore meritocracy and so equalize across groups. That’s the claim behind DEI. Those of us who support the meritocracy idea are not ignoring the DEI root, we’re disagreeing with it.

Each individual person should be treated as that individual person, to be carried as high as their skills and talents will take them or not. That’s it. And only when that is true are we all those equal Americans that the Constitution insists we are.

Really, the claim in this piece is that “there’s nothing to see here”. Sure, DEI has turned out to be an obsession with recasting America upon racial lines. A method of insisting that race, ethnicity, must be included in every decision – exactly the opposite of the non-racist society we all desire and strive for. But if we ignore all that and do some more DEI, it’ll be great!

That the piece is written by a DEI consultant who might have an eye on future contracts, well, aren’t we just cynics for pointing that out?