One reason the USSR had so much trouble subduing tiny Finland during the Winter War (1939-’40), and took staggering casualties, was that the Soviets had elevated officers based not on ability but on ideological priorities. The lesson is that anytime merit is subordinated to anything, the casualties are quality and competence.
Fast-forward 84 years and we still haven’t learned this lesson. An affirmative-action mentality reigns today, with its latest and most aggressive incarnation being “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). And, warns billionaire industrialist and visionary Elon Musk, “People will die due to DEI.”
While DEI infects most everything, Musk was addressing air travel in particular. The issue currently? It’s not the dumbing down of the air-traffic-controller corps; that already happened under the Obama administration. Nor is it United Airlines’ plan to ensure that 50 percent of the 5,000 pilots they train in the next decade will be women or people of color (I guess those people of no color can’t be seen in the cockpit); that was announced already in 2021.
(By the way, will this end as well as it did for Atlas Air Flight 3591, which was crashed in 2019, possibly by an affirmative-action pilot?)
Rather, the latest shoe to drop (from 30,000 feet?) is that the Boeing Company’s “corporate filings with the SEC reveal that in beginning [sic] 2022, the annual bonus plan to reward CEO and executives for increasing profit for shareholders and prioritizing safety was changed to reward them if they hit DEI targets,” relates cultural critic and author James Lindsay in a Wednesday tweet. This was later retweeted (below) by Musk, who prefaced the information with his own rhetorical question.
This blowing of the door off Boeing’s DEI lie is especially relevant because, just last week, a door came off one of the company’s 737 Max 9 airliners mid-flight. This led to speculation, on the Valuetainment podcast, for instance, that “DEI is to blame” for the mishap. In fact, said one of the hosts, whistleblowers have claimed “that Boeing no longer does the same quality control that they used to.”
Whether or not DEI, per se, is responsible for the door debacle, for sure is that Boeing boasts of their woke credentials. At its company site, it lists its “Global Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Strategic Pillars & Goals,” among which are “Achieve diverse representation at every level of the organization” and the honing of their “cultural DNA.”
Boeing also touts its accomplishments, such as being a “2020 Top 50 Workplace for Indigenous STEM Professionals,” a “2021 Top 50 Company for Diversity,” among the “2021 Best Places to Work for Disability Inclusion,” and a “2019 Top 50 Employer: Woman Engineer.” Whew! This knowledge will make you feel much better when one of Boeing’s spontaneously flying doors lands on your head.
Speaking of heads, and confused ones, this problem goes all the way to the top. For example, Joe Biden “selected Pete Buttigieg [DEI style] to be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in U.S. history, and as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Buttigieg now oversees the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA),” relates the National Center for Public Policy Research, reporting on the aviation asininity.
This said and to reiterate, DEI might have been irrelevant to Boeing’s door issues. Inc.com, for example, presents a number of other quite plausible explanations for them. Yet this isn’t really the point. It is, rather, this: mentality.
A story: Last year I gave a young man I’m close to a family heirloom of his, a pair of old binoculars, that I’d salvaged from a dilapidated home. I’d done a bit of research and learned that the instrument was manufactured in early 20th-century Germany, and it did reflect that famed “fine German craftsmanship.” But what is responsible for this “German craftsmanship”?
Anyone who has spent time with an old-line German (as I have!) knows that they’re often the embodiment of meticulousness, of perfectionism; things must be “Just so!” (or “Just zo!”). The quality is not the result of any policy, but mentality.
Of course, while Germans might’ve once epitomized this, they didn’t have a monopoly on it. It was not uncommon to find craftsmen many years ago who took real pride in their work. It wasn’t just about making money (though that was a motivation), but was a point of honor and duty.
Our time, however, is more epitomized by laxity, a slacker attitude. And the “Ah, it’s good enough” or even “Who cares?” mentality may be manifested in getting a cold hamburger, sub-par medical care, or any other good or service delivered incompetently. There is no substitute for conscientiousness.
Now, do you think that maybe, just perhaps, there could be some connection between indifference to whether a good or service has “merit” and indifference to whether a person does? It all reflects a low-virtue mentality.
So whether or not a given problem is directly connected to DEI is irrelevant. The bottom line is that someone prioritizing diversity is, by definition, not taking pride in and prioritizing getting and doing the best. This will and does have negative outcomes.
If anyone still finds it unfathomable that DEI would be applied deleteriously in life-or-death situations such as medicine or air travel, think again about the Winter War and mental ideological straitjackets. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was a psychopathic, megalomaniacal expansionist to whom military power was imperative. Yet he was still so in thrall to ideology that he degraded his military in its name, sacrificed battlefield effectiveness, and got more of his soldiers killed.
So Elon Musk is right: People will die because of DEI. In fact, people surely already have.
