The Dying Dream of DEI
What Happens When Progress isn’t Progressive?
This is an essay about the horrible missteps of DEI/social justice as its bullies have attempted to impose their value system upon a culture which increasingly regards them as bitter weirdos.
There once was a dream: a small and fractious and ludicrously abstract group of college professors looked around at American society-at beach rentals and auto-body shops and the UFC and firemen and Girl Scouts-and were displeased. ‘This is not our dream society!’ They said to one another. Their dream society was in their heads and they felt sure it was superior to all the busyness and family-making and ambition they saw around them. It had to be!
They had a plan: they would use the universities and the schools as a petri dish for their utopian bacillus. They would teach the students of the rich to loathe the world, as they did, and they would give them the tools (words and concepts, naturally… for did anything else really matter?) to make the dream substantial. They would use the friction and dissatisfactions and imperfections of the real world to generate sufficient heat, until it was all aflame. The dream (an image no one had really grasped, but oh it would be glorious!) would naturally follow. One might almost suspect that their hatred of Western society exceeded their passion for the dream.
There were some assumptions behind their plan though. They assumed that the youth would be natural allies-even after their ideas began to gain power. They assumed that institutions would remain stable and that gate-keeping would be indefinitely possible (ironic for a band of anti-hierarchical utopians, but there it was). Perhaps their gravest error was to assume that American society could be overcome by the dream-that their ideas could overtake and absorb the grandest industrial / technological / cultural / commercial machine ever assembled by man. Maybe they assumed that more people were like them: bitter, perverse, and transfixed by mirages of power.
Can anyone clock the issue with this photo? That’s correct. There’s a white man there. Diversity necessarily involves minimizing the representation and authority of certain historically advantaged groups, until they’ve disappeared altogether presumably.
Critical Theory… Social Justice… Identity Politics… DEI… All of these obliquely refer to post modern political ideas which prioritize language and ideas and state their goal as the erosion of existing hierarchies and norms and the elevation of certain candidates and ideas and stories based upon their adjacency to identity categories and victim status. They probably reached their apogee in 2020 or shortly thereafter. The landscape looks rather different now.
The View From 2024
Like many young(-ish) men I have encountered their dream… and been repulsed.
I spend a lot of time on YouTube-watching criticisms and mockeries of shows and films I will never see (Black Panther 2, Peter Pan & Wendy, The Rings of Power, She-Hulk, Velma, ad infinitum). I will never watch them because they’re trash; terribly written with laughable and flat characters and a total lack of romance, heroism, narrative, or moral. But God is it entertaining to see them mocked. There are tens of millions of men like me now. Gaming is a particular stronghold (a reality first indicated by the ludicrous ‘Gamergate’ affair, an early preview of the media strategies of defamation and straw-manning which would continue to have some juice-for another 6 or 7 years anyway). Sci-fi and fantasy fandoms now belong to people like me: that is, normal folks who love good stories and have favorite franchises and don’t see every facet of human existence as an opportunity to proselytize for some totalizing political philosophy. The movie-going audience is thoroughly sick of ‘girlboss’ characters and ‘Mary Sues’ and lame ‘remakes’ and cynical deconstructions. Stand up comedy is still infected by the dream.. in the British Isles anyway (where the scene is more political and publicly subsidized-and so therefore more corrupt). In the United States the hottest comics-Theo Vonn and Andrew Schultz and Sam Hyde-are all openly contemptuous of what has become known as an abstract perversion most notable in young folks with personality disorders and too much free time.
Everyone lives in their own bubble these days. Information silos are vast and custom-built. The missionaries of the dream have-in most cases-not yet fully realized that their movement has already become lame and passé. It is a delicious irony: an anti-capitalist philosophy ultimately undermined… because it lost corporations money.
I suspect that a similar reaction is quietly being executed in the halls of business and technology. Men and women who work with their hands or the working class or systems or infrastructure have absolutely no time for this nonsense. They had heard enough by 2020 and their homes and neighborhoods and workplaces are now effectively inoculated.
The dream still limps on-prominent among mentally ill adolescents and shrill graduate students and even many professionals (doctors, lawyers, researchers). It seems that wherever there is a large and unresponsive bureaucracy, or some government teat upon which to suckle, or a disconnected group of richer kids (private schools, TikTok, urban coffee shops) the dream persists. But it’s no longer cool, and so it’s no longer ascendant. Who would have imagined that the sensibilities of adolescent boys would point us towards decency and back to solid ground?
2024 will be known as the year that the ball crested the cultural hill and truly began to roll downhill, picking up speed. BILLIONS of dollars have been lost by studios and tech companies and streaming services. Keep in mind, these are but a few of the most prominent of hundreds of cases I could list!
Star Wars - The Acolyte: was a show released earlier this year. I mentioned it here. Directed by Harvey Weinstein’s former personal assistant, it tried to take the Star Wars universe into the neighborhood of Queer Theory (“the gayest Star Wars ever”). I never thought I would hear a leading Star Wars actress call the franchise ‘patriarchal’ but here we are. The show cost ~$200 million (which is truly astounding when you see its quality-I truly believe this might have been a money-laudering scheme) and BOMBED, like “18% on Rotten Tomatoes and universal derision” bombed. We might owe it a bit of gratitude, though. It might have kept the new ‘Rey’ film from being produced…
Amazon’s Rings of Power (which will warrant its own invective-filled rant soon enough… believe that!): Amazon studios bought the rights to some of Tolkien’s more obscure appendices and set out to make a ‘Game of Thrones’-style mega-hit. They spent over $1 billion (!!!) and committed to 5 seasons, of 10 episodes each. Long before the release of Season 1 they began to run into problems: cutting ties with a Tolkien expert, platforming graduate students writing about the implicit white supremacy of Tolkien’s orcs… and putting out real promotional bangers like this. That’s the kind of stuff that really gets Tolkien fans going… into a state of rage. The show absolutely sucks, no one is watching it, and even the legacy media shills (‘entertainment journalists’) have left the phalanx and admitted that it’s no good: lame, boring, flat, with dumb and disrespectful tie-ins to the real world of Tolkien. Which this certainly is not. The most expensive show of all time is a DEI disaster.
Concord: I’m no gamer but I can conceptualize $400 million (barely), so imagine Sony’s dismay when their flagship game failed after nearly a decade of development and $400 million (some report more) worth of costs! The awesome body-positive, trans-inclusive, gaming journalist-hyped single player shooter game barely attracted any players and had to be pulled and refunded after a few weeks. This has never happened in gaming. It’s literally the equivalent of a billion dollar film making $10 million in theaters and going straight to streaming. The most expensive game of all time couldn’t attract any players-it was a DEI disaster.
The rest of the gaming world!: gaming is facing massive upheavals. Studios (constrained by DEI consultants and staffed by activists who are not themselves gamers) are failing. Their reliable shills in the ‘legacy media’ (a smattering of increasingly irrelevant games website) are being absolutely trounced by a bunch of young, multiracial guys on YouTube. It couldn’t be more dramatic. In a few years most of the existing companies will probably be gone.
Comics!: Like every other institution staffed by college graduates, comics studios were swamped by a wave of social justice-inflamed morons. Independent comics are destroying them. The major studios are caught between their shrill and less-than-outstanding employees… and a market which doesn’t want what they’re selling. It’s glorious to watch.
Disney!: Disney committed itself to acquiring a glut of IP’s… and staffed iyself with enough Critical Theory-enthused artists and managers and consultants that they veered far away from the values and tastes of their market. They’ve lost billions of dollars in the last year alone (when films and parks are combined). Can they shed the social justice nonsense and get back on track? Does anyone really care anymore?
Ray Gun: this absolute clown completed a graduate degree in gender studies and performativity and break-dancing and stuff like that. She embarrassed herself, Australia, and the entire sport of break-dancing with her Olympic performance. You’re telling me in the age of equity this goofy white chick is better than EVERY black or brown dancer in Australia?! Watch it for yourself…
(YouTube has been aggressively suppressing wild-fire mockery of this tragic spectacle)
Snow White (2025): well, damn… you’ll see…
The problem with DEI (one of many) is that it destroys whatever institution it infects as long as that institution relies on attracting or selling products to the public (which includes most of them). People who believe in this stuff are activists before all else, and have dedicated themselves to the eventual dissolution of merit, free expression, standards, narrative, and tradition. This typically doesn’t make them very good writers or very good workers or (frankly) very good people.
We can now see the worldview clearly for what it is: a symptom of institutional corruption and personal pathology. It is an artifact constructed by people too disconnected from reality to understand people and too arrogant to engage in real dialogue. It had a kind of feverish appeal for certain kinds of people (educated young women, especially) but if you’re not willing to sell your ideas in the marketplace then eventually your worldview will begin to atrophy. You can get pretty far through shaming and bullying and enforcement of conformity… but not far enough.
Good riddance.
All your links were wonderful and gave me my first laughs of the day. Great writing!
Why haven’t more people read this? I just reread and it deserves greater dissemination!