GOOGLE, How Do You PREPARE A Country For TOTALITARIANISM?To be ready for dictatorship, people have to embrace its habits and practices voluntarily, or at least show little resistance. Google is doing its part. To the extent we bother to think about it, we accept that Google gathers our data and eavesdrops on our homes, because we assume that they only want to use this technology to sell us things. If the cost of free access to a really great search algorithm is that we have to see a few banner ads, that seems like a very small price to pay. After all, what could possibly go wrong? Well, now we know. Google could decide that its mission is not to provide us with access to information but to police our views to make sure they are politically correct. The warning shot is the way Google recently fired one of its high-level engineers, James Damore, for posting on an internal discussion board an anonymous memo making a measured argument against the company’s approach to “diversity.” The big irony? He began the memo by warning that “Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety. This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed. The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.” Everything that happened subsequently at Google, on Twitter, and in the technology media has validated this warning a thousand times over. For those who point out that Google is a private company that can hire or fire anyone it wants—and for all those “liberals” who have suddenly embraced big corporations’ power to dictate terms to their employees—this is absolutely correct. It is also beside the point. A country does not have a dictator pop up spontaneously, out of nowhere, and suddenly push the bonds of repression down on everyone. The people have to be ready for dictatorship. They have to learn to embrace its habits and practices voluntarily, or at least to show little resistance. In that regard, what is more important than Damore’s firing was the reaction to it, which show us how many people are willing to cheer on and participate in the ruthless suppression of dissent against the prevailing orthodoxy. We are being given a preview of all the steps necessary to prepare a country for totalitarianism. 1. Create an Ideological Dogma Immune to Factual or Logical CriticismI don’t agree with everything in Damore’s Google memo—a somewhat rambling piece that strikes me as pretty typical writing for a 28-year-old engineer, a mixture of sensible notions with unexamined assumptions. But I don’t have to agree with all of it to think the issues are worth discussing and that Damore shouldn’t be fired for bringing them up.The central argument he makes, and for which he has been attacked, is eminently reasonable: that there are differences between men and women that cause them, in aggregate, not to enter the same fields at the same rates. And if that’s the case, then the attempt to achieve full 50/50 equality in hiring, particularly in very narrow technological specialties, is misguided. Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are ‘just.’ I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
That such natural psychological differences exist seems to be uncontroversial among scientists who study sex differences. Moreover, the current politically correct dogma on sex differences lacks basic internal consistency. Why is it so important to encourage “diversity” in employment? Because, we’re told, women have different experiences and priorities that would be missed in the “bro culture” of a male-dominated workplace. So therefore, in order to achieve this “diversity,” we have to pretend that there is no difference between men and women in their experiences and priorities.
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