Suppose group A and group B differ in mean and distribution in some desirable or undesirable quality. Chances are that there is a lot of overlap in the middle, but when you select the very best, perhaps for some prestigious and well paid job, and the very worst, perhaps to lock them up and get them off the streets, the bell curve, the normal distribution, implies not much overlap. Because not much overlap, if the state enforces affirmative action there will be very little overlap between those who earned the prestigious job, and those affirmative actioned into the prestigious job. Most of the affirmative action job holders, on casual inspection seemingly all of them, will be incapable of fulfilling the normal requirements of the job. (For a notorious recent example, female firefighters during the 9/11 fire.)
Often, to everyone’s great relief, they will just stop showing up at work, while remaining on the payroll, turning affirmative action into welfare, yet another tax that businesses must pay, which welfare has the usual destructive effects on the recipients.
Hence the outrage at the bell curve: The mathematics of the normal distribution shows that affirmative action is always going to be a disaster.
The same thing applies for affirmative action enforcement of criminal and honor codes, for selection of the worst rather than the best. Authority is going to refrain from expelling, firing, or imprisoning people who quite obviously would have been imprisoned or fired had they been white, making the differences between the two groups glaringly obvious, even though if you look at people in the middle, there is a great deal of overlap.
Thus affirmative action results in very conspicuous group privilege and very conspicuous group differences – that people of the favored group rarely perform their jobs, and regularly get away with stuff a normal man would not be allowed to get away with, as if members of the favored group were wild animals in a zoo. If you select a black at random and a white at random, you cannot reliably predict which one will be better. If you select a black and white prestigious job holder at random, the white is almost certainly going to be substantially better than the black. Just about every white prestigious job holder will be better than just about every black prestigious job holder. (Unless of course, it is basketball, where affirmative action works the other way around, and every black on the team is better than any white on the team.) That is not racism, that is the mathematics of the normal distribution. Every fireman is better than every “firefighter”.
Professor Lionel McIntyre of the highly prestigious Columbia university had a discussion about white privilege with a female employee at that university, in which he sucker punched her in the face. Another employee remonstrated, whereupon Professor Lionel McIntyre punched him in the face.
As soon as I said “sucker punched her in the face”, you knew he was black. You cannot conclude from the fact that so and so punched a woman in the face that so and so is black. You can, however, thanks to affirmative action, conclude from the fact that so and so holds a prestigious job, and yet he punched a woman in the face, that so and so is black. Thanks to affirmative action, you can prejudge individual cases, as if blacks were a different species, whereas formerly you could not.
The bouncers did not throw Professor Lionel McIntyre into the street, which would have happened if he was white.
Professor Lionel McIntyre did not lose his job, which would have happened if he was white.
Professor Lionel McIntyre was charged, but failed to appear in court. The court, instead of convicting him in absentia and issuing an arrest warrant, set another date. And another. And another. Eventually he deigned to show up, and was given three days community service.
The intent of affirmative action was to make it easier for everyone to politely ignore group differences, but the actual consequence has been to make the differences dramatically obvious, and most obvious to members of the elite, though members of the elite can least afford to speak the truth.
The pious lie relies on there being lots of overlap, enough overlap to obfuscate the ugly and hurtful truth. Affirmative action drastically reduces the overlap, near enough eliminates it, leaving the ugly truth bare ass naked.
Long ago, the elite could piously believe whatever they wanted to believe about supposedly oppressed groups, and piously denounce those unfortunate enough to have actual contact with those groups as “racist”
Affirmative action has the unintended effect that the elite now know better than anyone that group differences are disturbingly large and ugly, the opposite of what it was intended to do, while enforcement of political correctness forces them to hypocritically lie more than anyone on this topic.
Yes, very generally speaking, people pretty much do what they can get away with, depending on how much they have to lose. For example, the British aristocracy continued dueling deep into the 19th century, because they were not really punished for it, whereas a dockworker who killed another dockworker in a fight was hung.This reinforces Moldbug’s point that affirmative action has created a weird, bass-ackwards aristocracy in the U.S.
forces them to hypocritically lie more than anyone on this topic.
Feature not bug. Leftism requires an evil elite, for obvious reasons. Instituting a test requiring elite members to tell great, whopping, absurd lies day after day helps a lot to get the elite the left needs. See also, communism.
The intended/unintended thing is not really germane here, either. Nobody planned it. It’s an emergent feature of a leftist elite. If it wasn’t multiculti lies, it would have been some other kind of lies.
Good insight.
I am pretty sure that the difference in average IQ is largely genetic.
Criminality levels, on the other hand, are extremely sensitive to environment. Fatherless boys have much higher levels of criminality. Criminality is also sensitive to weak law enforcement and penalties. Observe the very low levels of crime in countries with harsh penalties and firm enforcement.
Blacks do not face the same penalties for their crimes as whites, in large part because they mostly commit crimes against blacks, and crimes against blacks tend to go unpunished. Also states and localities with large black populations tend to have more lenient crime policies.
I am inclined to believe that blacks genetically have a substantially weaker future orientation, which contributes to criminality, but the effect of environment on criminality is so great that no conclusions on this are reliable.
In the case of Professor Lionel McIntyre he demonstrably can get away with this stuff, which makes it more likely he will do this stuff than a white professor regardless of any innate propensity.
The average difference in IQ is probably genetic – I agree. But assortive mating and paying dumb people to have children doesn’t help. In fact, the effect probably adds up rather quickly considering the fact that welfare recipients tend to have more children younger.
I doubt that the group differences would even be very large at this late hour if it weren’t for decades upon decades of whites trying to “help,” which only exacerbated the problems created by group differences and probably made them larger thanks to the least intelligent and conscientious getting most of the welfare money.
Blacks who are treated like everyone else – black, white, red, pink – and who come from stable families are some of the nicest people you can meet. Those who are products of a welfare state or affirmative action are quite awful.
If you want someone to hate you, give them your charity.
When liberal whites argue that the white man did all of these awful things to blacks to cause them to have all of these group social pathologies, they were right, but not in the way they mean.