The Crisis of Competence
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On Jan. 5, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 took off from Portland, Oregon, bound for California. Six minutes into the flight, just as everyone was beginning to settle in to their seats, the door plug blew out, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane at 16,000 feet.
The fallout from that harrowing event uncovered a system that has infected every level of US industry. From government and regulators to executives and corporate staff, this system uses the values of fairness and equality that Americans share as a skin suit hiding an organized complex that by intent, detracts from the purpose of the organization and refocuses all efforts (on pain of job loss and character assassination) on leftist identity politics.
In recent years, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have become deeply embedded in both government and private sectors. These policies, while claiming to promote inclusivity, have created some of the most destructive effects on American industry and ability, ever.
This incident was far from the first incident for Boeing. Quality control issues with their 737 Max series aircraft were far from an uncommon occurrence, including two crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.
But it was a whistleblower who spoke out after the Alaskan Airlines event that pulled open the kimono to reveal the aforementioned systems that he believed were behind these failures.
The whistleblower claimed the company was obsessed with DEI. He made very clear that these policies are a political stunt and are "anti-excellence." "The DEI narrative," he said, "is a very real thing, and, at Boeing, DEI got tied to the status game. It is the thing you embrace if you want to get ahead. It became a means to power."
The "status game" within Boeing is a serious concern. The leadership being preoccupied with playing games around identity politics, instead of delivering on engineering and safety priorities, shows the dangers that such policies pose to the American people, who are used to being able to trust the pursuit of excellence that is a key portion of a high trust society. This should be concerning for every American, and exceptionally concerning for anyone charged with the preservation of National Security.
However, these policies are far from unique to Boeing. Every single company is required by law and by institutional investors to focus on these policies.
FORCED DEI AND THE SHIFT AWAY FROM EXCELLENCE
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14035 into law. The executive order mandated DEI for federal agencies, contractors and subcontractors; and required the establishment of Chief Diversity Officers, as well as the collection of data to monitor DEI progress.
Notably, those who created this policy built in a behavioral modification aspect. The order emphasizes the integration of DEI into performance reviews, training programs, and leadership development within the federal workforce. this means that how much an executive or manager pushed DEI would be directly related to their ability to retain their employment, much less any chance at promotion.
This order built upon prior executive actions, notably Executive Order 13583 from President Obama in 2011, which established a government-wide initiative for diversity and inclusion.
The issue with such laws (aside from the obvious violation of the First Amendment's freedom of association clause) is that they create a highly expensive and entirely useless – if not obstructive and even destructive – managerial bureaucracy that must be appeased in the same way a spoiled child would be.
In the best case, across every industry, millions of dollars must be redirected from the pursuit of company goals to ensure DEI compliance; and hire DEI managers, whose only purpose is to make powerpoints on how one group of employees is oppressed while another are oppressors, and ensure more people of their preferred in group are hired whether or not they can get the job done.
Even worse, while useless in the practical matters of achieving organizational goals, these bureaucracies are powerful. They have the ultimate power over character assassination by buzzword. No one – particularly not persons in positions of authority – want to face the humiliation of being called one of the range of career-ending buzzwords.
Talented leaders, engineers, soldiers, and even HR managers have been fired or forced to resign with cause due to opposing these kinds of policies. James Damore is a great example of this after he was fired from Google for questioning its DEI policies.
DEI legislation also creates a new tool through which government can interfere with individuals and businesses, making life just a little more difficult than it already is. Elon Musk's Space X was recently hit with a lawsuit from the Department of Justice (DOJ) over its "discrimination against asylees and refugees in hiring." According to the suit, Space X only hired US citizens and lawful permanent residents, and the new DEI-focused DOJ considers that kind of behavior unacceptable. For a man who dreams about the exploration of outer space, a man whose entire life has been an almost eccentric focus on excellence, this kind of tedious pedantry must be immensely frustrating. If anything, it probably just made him long for outer space even more.
But he is not alone. A growing body of criticism argues that DEI initiatives pose significant threats to national security by shifting the focus of the military and other critical institutions away from competence and operational effectiveness.
The Heritage Foundation highlights how DEI programs distract military leadership from their primary focus – national defense – by allocating time and resources to non-operational initiatives. Newsweek adds that DEI ideology compromises US intelligence and defense institutions by fast-tracking individuals into critical roles based on identity, rather than qualifications, potentially creating vulnerabilities that foreign adversaries could exploit.
Academica Press further critiques DEI as incompatible with meritocracy, warning that it erodes trust in national institutions by prioritizing demographic metrics over performance. In each of these cases, it is the distraction from the primary focus and the embedding of questionable characters in critical positions that cause the greatest reason for concern.
You see, for any organization, whether a small business, an international corporation, or a national government, cultural alignment and a shared desire to achieve organizational goals matter even more than meritocracy. The entire idea of DEI undermines that critical aspect of organizational success.
In addition, the aptitude of the people responsible for crucial aspects of operations in critical organizations should be enough to show the danger of DEI. When a bridge designer or chief engineer fails, people could die. When FEMA responds to an emergency, but is required to hire based on racial, sexual or gender quotas, people could die. When a doctor is allowed to pass numerous hurdles, not because they are competent, but because of their chromosomes or skin color, people could die.
This isn't to say that people of differing races and sexes are not capable of excellence in critical positions. But the lowering of standards to ensure an arbitrary number of such people is reached is most certainly an issue.
In pursuit of this arbitrary goal, standards across industries have been lowered. As a result, the threats to the safety of the American public, along with the continuity of the nation, are in jeopardy.
It is the door of an airplane today, or a bridge, or a substandard sales year. But tomorrow, it could easily be unsafe drinking water, a doctor who is prescribing treatments for you who is only in their position because they could never be failed or fired due to their race or gender, or a nation that increasingly struggles to maintain the technology and complex systems built for them by previous generations.
This is a self-imposed problem, and it is an incredibly easy problem to solve. However, due to extreme sensitivities to issues of race and gender, founded on decades of Marxist pseudo-science and propaganda, it is a politically difficult one.
Across the West, this issue and the others addressed in this series, need to be given top priority. As conveyed in the "For Want of a Nail" poem, small issues can have huge consequences. While to some this may seem like a small issue, it could very quickly be the reason the entire "kingdom" is lost.
Arthur is a former editor and consultant. Born in India to missionary parents, he spent his early career working in development for NGOs in Asia, Central America, and Africa.
Arthur has an educational background in history and psychology, with certifications from the University of Oxford and Leiden in the economics, politics, and ethics of mass migration and comparative theories in terrorism and counterterrorism. He is currently launching CivWest, a company focused on building capital to fund restorative projects and create resilient systems across the Western world.
And the final "win" for the DEI Leftist commies is that all on board a crashed airplane are equally dead. Diabolical brilliance.