Walking Corpse

Diversity killed the West.

The diversity problem became evident to me before anyone else because back in the 1990s when the O’Clinton era had everyone talking about how “diversity is our strength,” my family, schooling, and career had already taken me to high-diversity areas.

Growing up in an oilfield town, all of us kids were familiar with foreigners, just as we were with Amerinds (“Native Americans”), African-Americans, and Hispanics. We did not have gypsies beyond an occasional rare sighting; they tend not to survive well in Texas. But we also had families from Indonesia, Iran, India, South America, Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, and a whole lot of “Spaniards” who turned out to be wealthy Mexicans or Argentinians.

We also had our own divisions. The redneck kids had their place, so did the suburban middle class, plus the urban wealthy, and the real rural kids, who were sort of a wildcard. We all got along because we accepted each other for what we were.

Read that again: the acceptance worked only because it included the group in the individual.

When you accept someone as being from a group, you stop expecting him to act like you, think like you, and want the same trajectory out of life. Oilfield kids wanted a different world than middle-class suburbanites or the urban ring elites. It was the same with foreigners too.

Because we were exposed to many groups, we achieved Schrodinger’s Bigotry: we were not, generally, bigoted in any way; we accepted people as who they were. But as part of that, we accepted group behaviors too and recognized that they differed, so for example when our Dutch classmates all got heavy into HAM radio during junior year, we just shrugged it off as a pecularity of the Dutch.

The same was true of minority kids. Mexican kids lived in a world of giant extended families that got together to eat, drink Modelo Especial or Tecate in large amounts, dance, sing, and carry on. This was not the world of us outer-ring suburban kids whose parents had ridiculous cocktail parties with casseroles and edgy urban jazz from the 1960s.

We also knew ethnicity. For example, the Italian kids knew they were Italians, the Irish kids started drinking at seven, and us WASP kids, we knew we were the sons and daughters of the pioneers who came over from Western Europe — English, Scots, northern German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, northern French, occasional Belgians — who shared a Nordic-Germanic ancestry and tendencies. This was not even taboo to say back then because it was true: we looked different and acted different, through the relativity lens of the perception of others.

While we were not bigoted, we were also not blind to the differences between not just races but ethnic groups and classes. In my mind, the three cannot be separated. The Black ghetto shocks the Black middle class as much as it shocks the White middle class, mainly because anyone who makes it to the middle class is at least twenty IQ points separated from the 90 average IQ people in the ghetto.

When our Black acquaintances went home to their neighborhoods, we knew it was different whether middle class or not. People acted differently, valued different things, had different attitudes, and it was wired into their DNA just as surely as our WASP behavior was wired into ours.

We did not judge our friends for being different. It was just what you did if you were from a specific race, class, and ethnic group. There was no shame in it; we accepted relativity. We were not the same, but we got along OK.

There were actual “racists” and “bigots” too. These were a known type to kids, like pedophiles, alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, and crazy church ladies. These were people who always had to talk about how some other group was bad and stupid but also ruled the world.

To us kids it was no mystery. In school if you got in a fight, the teacher blamed whoever he saw throwing the punch, no matter who threw the first punch. Justice was blind and favored the victim, which meant that most victims were usually actually victimizers.

Our government protected “minority” groups in order to avoid having the crazy bigots beat them up not because government has a heart, mind, and soul (no) but because it looks bad when you have drunk bitter alienated rednecky guys stringing up Black kids on the beech tree just outside city lines.

At the same time, all of us liked going home to our own neighborhoods. There we knew what the rules were. We knew what was rewarded that would get us ahead. We knew how to be polite, how to look good, how to meet girls. So at the end of the day, the WASP kids toddled back to their spacious, sprawling, and somewhat chaotic suburbs, and every other group went to their own.

The neighborhoods looked different too. Black neighborhoods were based on having private castles on the inside that were shabby and covered with burglar bars outside. Asian neighborhoods showed benign neglect, as if the peeling paint, rotting boards, and failing pipes were simply not visible to those who lived there. Hispanic neighborhoods were like that too but with brighter colors and more patch jobs. Russian neighborhoods were like that but with gardens and people who watched you from behind lacey window shades with suspicious and skeptical eyes.

We knew we never wanted to be like the “racists” and “bigots.” Most of them were embittered because life had not gone their way, and so they talked about race all the time because it was all they had. This is not to say that they blamed their problems on other races, generally; they blamed them on government, which thanks to Affirmative Action would always hire a non-White over a White or even someone who looked whitish like an Italian, Jew, Russian, Lebanese, Spaniard, or Irish.

If you were whitish or whiter than that during this time, you inevitably got approached by some guy with a crossover of Confederate, Christian, and Nazi imagery who wanted to talk to you about saving the White race. White race? This term made no sense; we were European groups, and as different from each other as we were from Orientals, Blacks, Hispanics, Iranians, and Jews. These guys found each other and made bitter groups with increasingly deranged rhetoric. We stayed away.

But we existed in a duality of accepting racial, ethnic, religious, and class stereotypes — Catholic girls are easy and some of them “do anal” to avoid making God mad — and also accepting the people within these groups as inseparable from the group.

As a result when coke-addled Bill O’Clinton stood there and repeated what Dan Quayle had said, that “diversity was our strength,” we did not really agree or disagree. It was what it was, we thought. You could get along, no problem, but only if everyone had their own neighborhood.

When the groups crossed over, clashes occurred. We literally saw the world differently; things that seemed garish or decayed to WASPs were okay with the Russians, Indians, or Chinese. To those groups, WASP neighborhoods seemed very boring and disorganized, since people basically did whatever they wanted and counted on common sense rules of fair play to sort everything out.

The first O’Clinton term brought great prosperity. He switched us straight to demand-side economics, hit the economy with a stimulus, and yanked out the restraints. He farmed out tons of manufacturing to the third world, making clothing and household items suddenly inexpensive. By 1996 that momentum had failed, as it always does with idealistic things because realism reflects the full arc of time and not just the happy moments, and within a couple years we were living in grim paranoid times as Y2K approached.

His biggest push was diversity itself. Suddenly American media focused on the long-neglected Blacks (we were told to use the term “African-American,” which still seems more honest to me because they are not actually of a black color). We were glad to see our friends get their share of the pie. We did not think about it more than that.

However, diversity mixed the neighborhoods and that obliterated the standards held in common there. In the era of Bowling Alone, America became a paranoid and lonely place because no one knew any longer what the rules were, what was rewarded, what was considered polite, how to look good, and how to meet girls. Luckily the internet, which was “nerd shit” up until about 2005 or so, came in at the same time 50” televisions became affordable, so we just holed up in our apartments or homes and shut out the world.

This effected a mentality like that of the Communist states shortly before the fall: no one believed in the future.

We did not have a culture in common. What we were told was “culture” turned out to be a mix of patriotism, liberalism, organized middle eastern religions, our laws, and commerce. We had nothing else in common, so despite the promises of “multiculturalism” (what we were told to call diversity back then), people drifted farther apart instead of getting closer.

Out the door went the attitude of doing things well so that society benefited. Society was trying to destroy us, as we saw daily when White people got deplatformed and ended up impoverished in a van down by the river and when Black people got shot by the police for just doing things that were normal in Black neighborhoods.

Resentment proliferated. Affirmative Action prioritized minority hiring and populated workplaces with ghetto Blacks in place of middle class Blacks. Every White and whitish person during this time experienced Black retribution and revenge through poor service, surliness, and deliberate provocation. O’Clinton made more “racists” overnight than the Klan and Hitler could have done together with a Soros and Gates budget.

Of course, results were not good. Cops kept shooting Black kids who refused to listen to instructions and raised a cell phone when they should have frozen and waited out the police drama. After all, many if not most police calls began with an African-American suspect on the run, and most White cops could not tell the difference between Blacks. They call it “racial face blindness” and I think it means a lack of recognized phenotypic landmarks that allow us to understand a face, like saying a dark-haired English guy with a big chin.

And so, the diversity machine ground on. Our teachers taught us the doctrine of WW2 and the Civil War, which is that everyone was equal and could be anything they wanted to be, so we just had to defeat “racism” and everything would be Utopian. This made no sense to those of us who existed in the duality of race awareness and race acceptance, and much less sense when these quasi-socialist people wanted to deny class and ethnicity as well. WASPs looked different than other Europeans, and middle class kids had different faces and voices than the working class kids.

People talk a lot about 1980s kids and how we grew up outside, which was true. We were familiar with the birds and the bees, but also the different species of snakes and dogs. We knew each type of critter, even within the same species, behaved differently and wanted different things. We knew that apex predators would rarely bother you and the squirrels from opulent areas were less bratty and bitey than the city squirrels.

To us, race and ethnicity as well as social class were natural divisions and, like in nature, you respected that those creatures were genetically different and had different behaviors. What passed for normal behavior in a WASP neighborhood might get you shot in another type of subdivision.

The diversity push had already left reality behind, and this ground our society into ashes.

The “racists” always talked about Black crime, but the bigger problem was a lack of cohesion. Diverse teams at work always had their stats adjusted upward, but there was a lot less teamwork, mostly because there was a lack of shared understanding of behaviors and goals. These things are as genetic as eye color and intelligence, so the mission of any team was replaced with the substitute goal of making diversity work.

Costs shot upward. Every business had to hire women, minorities, and the disabled. At that time, homosexuality was not fully protected, but it was considered fair play to aim for the “United Colors of Benetton” approach and have at least some guys who liked interior decorating on staff. Most of these people hired for their group category were not very competent, and so other staff were hired to double and triple up to get things done. All those costs get passed directly on to the consumer.

Those nice 1990s prices started to recede in the rearview. Tshirts were cheap for example up through the 2010s, but then suddenly you could no longer get the $5 shirt that you would want to wear. You got a $15 shirt so that it would last more than a few months and often they seemed designed for another racial group and fit you badly, like clothes in the Soviet Union famously did.

Every interaction became an exercise in avoiding being called a “racist” or “sexist.” Somewhere in here people discovered homosexuals and Islam, so added “Islamophobia” and “homophobia” to the mix. You could not be “sexist” or “classist.” To be seen as one of these things, especially if it was not true, meant that you would be fired, ostracized, and possibly tossed in jail. We had reached Communist and Fascist levels of enforcement, just more gently, and the crowd always cheered when a wrongthinker got taken down.

This leads us to the present day. We have no culture, behaviors, or goals. The quest to make diversity appear that it is working has replaced all of that. The abuses of the BLM race riots and Rotherham grooming gangs capped off any good faith that not just Whites but other groups had toward diversity. We now see that power is a zero-sum game and dividing it among ethnic groups simply makes them go to war with each other, using government as a weapon.

Diversity is a walking corpse. It keeps going but it is doomed. The price of keeping the illusion of diversity alive has been the death of our civilization, which was already troubled but now actively wants to die. No one believes in the future. No one thinks we are good, or that we can fix our problems. Everything is bleak. This is the high cost of diversity, and the problem is not “racists” or “minorities,” but diversity itself. When you have more than one racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural group in the same neighborhood or society, you condemn yourself to forever war — against yourselves.