Some time ago, Whole Foods, a supermarket company owned by Amazon, experienced a leak of internal documents.
It was revealed that Whole Foods was making use of what it called a “heat map:” a visualization tool displaying unionization across the company’s many locations. Together with monitoring worker organizing, the map recorded the prevalence of other factors in order to correlate union formation with its possible causes.
Apparently, one of the principal predictors for a local Whole Foods workforce forming a union was its ethno-linguistic composition. High diversity correlated with low unionization, and vice versa:
The heat map is powered by an elaborate scoring system, which assigns a rating to each of Whole Foods’ 510 stores based on the likelihood that their employees might form or join a union. The stores’ individual risk scores are calculated from more than two dozen metrics. … Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a “diversity index” that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity and lower employee compensation, as well as higher total store sales and higher rates of workers’ compensation claims, according to the documents.
If we extrapolate this principle beyond unions and into civic action in general, we may begin to understand why powerful business moguls and political classes are so committed to diversifying societies through migration policy (as well as through gender and sexuality related indoctrination).
Diversity reduces communication and (probably, consequently) positive effect, such that a social body engages in less self-organizing—less political articulation outside official government structures—becoming passive with respect to external systems of control (namely corporations, states and international institutions).
Of course, over time, and assuming a necessary slowdown in migration flows (as well as the advance of global, media-driven culturally homogenizing trends), new cultural affinities are likely to form (what is described as a “melting pot”).
However, these will occur in a particular political climate, one that conditions them and renders them controllable: that is, a mainly urban, socially atomized, context; a society addicted to Internet-enabled, rapid-fire novelty; a cultural paradigm defined by HR-speak, political correctness and the radical break with historic human norms; contemporary discourses around sexuality and gender, and new realities of surrogate motherhood and mass abortion mills.
A context that presents older social forms and cultural codes as obsolete, as unable to interface with new material realities.
A context that encourages the adoption of new terms and behaviors.
We may understand this in terms of Hannah Arendt’s account of totalitarian state power as resulting from a breakdown of the horizontal (familial, cultural) ties between individuals. “Diversity” creates a need to interact on the basis of contemporary cultural codes conditioned by mass media and global platforms (from CNN to Netflix to YouTube).
This, then, is where critiques of “tribalism” of the sort one might hear from Jordan Peterson fall short: Woke-sponsored tribalism (mainly based on ethnicity, gender and sexuality) in western societies is not an end in itself. It unfolds in what we may describe as a market of consumable identities and in the framework of individualistic, social atomization, albeit one that retains the white, heterosexual male as its rhetorical fall guy. This is a mere aid to the breakdown of preexisting, established identities and the configuration of a homogenized, mass society.
The process is one of entropy: it does not stop at articulating a clear identity, differentiated from others, but proceeds to break down all identities (moving from “gay rights” to “sexuality is a spectrum and gender a social construct,” for example). The identities it celebrates are magnetized against traditional ones, and so can be expected to dissolve once tradition is dissolved.
Yes, such a project requires a scapegoat, most often identified with the previously dominant identity that is being dismantled, and it mobilizes support for itself by generating an ethos of victimhood and grievance culture across an array of social cleavages, but its aim is to congeal into a monoculture.
In mainstream discourse the idea of legitimate group identity, the celebration of inherited cultural forms and institutions, of honoring one’s ancestors and upholding their legacy, is magnified mainly to the degree that it can be instrumentalized against those identities being scapegoated. The principle here is the same as that according to which female “strength” is most often portrayed as opposing “the patriarchy.” I’ve written about this elsewhere.
If communities of Muslim migrants appear to receive protected status as victims of historic and present western chauvinism, for example, this is only because western cultural forms are still being deconstructed, and there is a reasonable expectation that, given a few generations, a controllable pseudo-morph of Pakistani culture in London, or of Moroccan culture in Paris, assimilable in every particular to western postmodernity, can be produced. Occasionally, however, the political class wavers in this expectation, and there is now some real weariness concerning the rate of migration.
In any case, for now, dominant discourse continues to stigmatize any sign of distress at mass migration as “racist,” absurdly insisting that awareness of the above processes and their ends can only stem from a belief in the biologically-determined superiority of one group over others, or some such. This climate of stigmatization more or less continues to succeed in blocking receptivity to intellectual critiques of demographic engineering, disempowering potential political reactions. Hysteria over the “great replacement theory” and extravagant claims concerning the conspiratorial and ideologically extreme background of dissident ideas should be understood in this key.
(Of course, ahistoric—or highly-selective pseudo-historic—accounts seeking to establish the superiority of one racial group with respect to others do exist, as do, for example, group-level IQ studies that massage the data in a certain direction. Such are easily refuted, however, even if few people take the time to do so, given their limited reach.)
In closing, then, we should
1) understand that apparent pluralism and the present social fragmentation with which many countries are faced is a means towards uniformity, homogenization and control, and
2) oppose this not in terms of a different brand (really a prior phase) of social atomization, namely the faux conservatism of individualist economic liberalism, but in terms of civic organization, political action and a defense of the legitimacy of healthy group identity and the beauty of differentiated cultural forms.
Diversify and Conquer: From Diversity to Disintegration to Domination
Some time ago, Whole Foods, a supermarket company owned by Amazon, experienced a leak of internal documents.
It was revealed that Whole Foods was making use of what it called a “heat map:” a visualization tool displaying unionization across the company’s many locations. Together with monitoring worker organizing, the map recorded the prevalence of other factors in order to correlate union formation with its possible causes.
Apparently, one of the principal predictors for a local Whole Foods workforce forming a union was its ethno-linguistic composition. High diversity correlated with low unionization, and vice versa:
If we extrapolate this principle beyond unions and into civic action in general, we may begin to understand why powerful business moguls and political classes are so committed to diversifying societies through migration policy (as well as through gender and sexuality related indoctrination).
Diversity reduces communication and (probably, consequently) positive effect, such that a social body engages in less self-organizing—less political articulation outside official government structures—becoming passive with respect to external systems of control (namely corporations, states and international institutions).
Of course, over time, and assuming a necessary slowdown in migration flows (as well as the advance of global, media-driven culturally homogenizing trends), new cultural affinities are likely to form (what is described as a “melting pot”).
However, these will occur in a particular political climate, one that conditions them and renders them controllable: that is, a mainly urban, socially atomized, context; a society addicted to Internet-enabled, rapid-fire novelty; a cultural paradigm defined by HR-speak, political correctness and the radical break with historic human norms; contemporary discourses around sexuality and gender, and new realities of surrogate motherhood and mass abortion mills.
A context that presents older social forms and cultural codes as obsolete, as unable to interface with new material realities.
A context that encourages the adoption of new terms and behaviors.
We may understand this in terms of Hannah Arendt’s account of totalitarian state power as resulting from a breakdown of the horizontal (familial, cultural) ties between individuals. “Diversity” creates a need to interact on the basis of contemporary cultural codes conditioned by mass media and global platforms (from CNN to Netflix to YouTube).
This, then, is where critiques of “tribalism” of the sort one might hear from Jordan Peterson fall short: Woke-sponsored tribalism (mainly based on ethnicity, gender and sexuality) in western societies is not an end in itself. It unfolds in what we may describe as a market of consumable identities and in the framework of individualistic, social atomization, albeit one that retains the white, heterosexual male as its rhetorical fall guy. This is a mere aid to the breakdown of preexisting, established identities and the configuration of a homogenized, mass society.
The process is one of entropy: it does not stop at articulating a clear identity, differentiated from others, but proceeds to break down all identities (moving from “gay rights” to “sexuality is a spectrum and gender a social construct,” for example). The identities it celebrates are magnetized against traditional ones, and so can be expected to dissolve once tradition is dissolved.
Yes, such a project requires a scapegoat, most often identified with the previously dominant identity that is being dismantled, and it mobilizes support for itself by generating an ethos of victimhood and grievance culture across an array of social cleavages, but its aim is to congeal into a monoculture.
In mainstream discourse the idea of legitimate group identity, the celebration of inherited cultural forms and institutions, of honoring one’s ancestors and upholding their legacy, is magnified mainly to the degree that it can be instrumentalized against those identities being scapegoated. The principle here is the same as that according to which female “strength” is most often portrayed as opposing “the patriarchy.” I’ve written about this elsewhere.
If communities of Muslim migrants appear to receive protected status as victims of historic and present western chauvinism, for example, this is only because western cultural forms are still being deconstructed, and there is a reasonable expectation that, given a few generations, a controllable pseudo-morph of Pakistani culture in London, or of Moroccan culture in Paris, assimilable in every particular to western postmodernity, can be produced. Occasionally, however, the political class wavers in this expectation, and there is now some real weariness concerning the rate of migration.
In any case, for now, dominant discourse continues to stigmatize any sign of distress at mass migration as “racist,” absurdly insisting that awareness of the above processes and their ends can only stem from a belief in the biologically-determined superiority of one group over others, or some such. This climate of stigmatization more or less continues to succeed in blocking receptivity to intellectual critiques of demographic engineering, disempowering potential political reactions. Hysteria over the “great replacement theory” and extravagant claims concerning the conspiratorial and ideologically extreme background of dissident ideas should be understood in this key.
(Of course, ahistoric—or highly-selective pseudo-historic—accounts seeking to establish the superiority of one racial group with respect to others do exist, as do, for example, group-level IQ studies that massage the data in a certain direction. Such are easily refuted, however, even if few people take the time to do so, given their limited reach.)
In closing, then, we should
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