The Diversity Paradox.

It's about dignity, efficiency, and things like that.

I have had several approaches from people asking me if they can reprint (as opposed to just link to) these essays. The answer is yes, provided obviously that you attribute them, and provide a link to this site. I’ve also had some requests for interviews, which I’m in principle happy to do.

Meanwhile, these essays will always be free, but you can support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing essays on to others, and to other sites that you frequent. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️

And finally, thanks to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here. And now …

Over the almost two years of these essays, I have returned again and again to the question of the declining political and organisational capability of the West, and what its consequences might be. I talked about the decline of concepts such as “duty” to society, without which it was hard to see how society as an entity could continue. I discussed the inability of our political class and Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) to think more than five minutes into the future, and deal seriously with anything. I’ve argued that the present political class, in addition to its other failings, just isn’t actually very good at politics, and that our countries are run by self-defined “elites” who are still stuck in adolescence.  I’ve suggested that the extractive model of the economy has infected other areas of life as well, and that as a result, the West was on its way to eating itself. Recently, I  tried to look at the consequences of some these problems for the fantasies of rearmament and confrontation with Russia now being hawked around. And there’s a lot more, but that’s enough reflexive self-publicity for one paragraph.

This essay is an attempt to step back a bit and put all of these elements, into some kind of coherent relationship with each other. But I also want to go a bit further, because I think we can see other manifestations of the same set of problems elsewhere, and often in areas you wouldn’t expect. For example, crises in education at all levels, the inability of the West to make reliable military equipment, bits falling off Boeing aircraft, but also the endless pressures for “diversity” in organisations, and even loneliness and the apparent difficulties of forming and maintaining stable relationships.

We can sum up the problem in one phrase: the Diversity Paradox. By “diversity” here, I don’t mean just the arithmetical handwaving sort, but something more fundamental. Consider: compared with fifty years ago, organisations of all kinds have access to a much wider theoretical talent pool than ever before, notably in terms of gender and ethnicity. They can source talent and technologies from all over the world, raise finance anywhere, sub-contract anywhere. They have access now to generations of exciting management theory, and examples from all over the world to follow. Educational institutions have gained a whole class of highly-qualified administrators to help them with their work, and, like other organisations, have all the benefits of a wide choice of technologies to make their jobs easier. Social life has gained enormously in diversity and variety thanks to the Internet and social media, and everything you could possibly want to know about relationships or child-rearing is available in a single click. Compared with the insular, reactionary,  under-qualified, socially-static, tradition-bound world of the 1970s, we have access today to an almost infinite variety and diversity of possibilities.

And yet nothing works. At every level, from personal social interactions to organisations to national politics, the system is falling apart. It’s tempting to see this as a causative process: for example, never have western governments been more “diverse” in the current jargon, and yet never have they been more ineffective, incapable and corrupt. Yet there’s obviously more to the Diversity Paradox than that. It would be truer to say, perhaps, that governments, just like organisations and individuals, now have access to a variety and diversity of inputs unprecedented  in human history, yet there is no visible evidence that any of them are doing any good: rather the opposite.

One way of approaching this paradox is through the investigation of individual  words and concepts. For example, what does “work” mean in this context? What is “effective?” What is “capable?” What, indeed are the announced purposes for which organisations and governments exist? I will take a couple of distinctions and concepts that seem to me to be useful as a basis for further discussion.

In his book The English Constitution (1867)  Walter Bagehot introduced his famous distinction between the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of that (unwritten) Constitution. The”dignified” parts existed to “impress the many,” whilst the efficient ones existed to “govern the many.” Bagehot was a journalist rather than a political theorist, and based his ideas on observation: notably of the difference between what a political system appeared to be, and what it actually was, between the formal aspects and the actual use of power.

Bagehot himself accepted that it was not possible to make a complete distinction between the two, and of course in politics the symbolic and formal has always had an important role: never more so than today. But the distinction is useful nonetheless, if we take it as applying in principle to all political situations and institutions, and even to the way that we present ourselves to the world and each other. Bagehot (who was typical of the anti-democratic Liberal tendency of the nineteenth century ) thought that the “dignified” elements were helpful in procuring obedience from the ignorant masses, but that what was really important was that the “efficient” part should be, well, efficient. In fact, any political system has ultimately to be “efficient,” in the sense of “effective” or it will disappear. One way in which this actually happens (and there are historical examples) is where the “dignified” part, consisting of ceremonial, procedure, what we would now describe as “public relations,” visible quarrels over power, precedence and influence, and the rest, comes to dominate and to take up too much of the available time and effort.

I think it’s reasonable to suggest that this is what is happening in politics today. In most countries, “politics” is about character assassination, the personal lives of the main actors, ideological squabbles over points of detail, and whether someone's opinions are sufficiently far along the spectrum in one sense or another. We may think of the intrigues and scandals of the French court before 1789, or the unreality of the last decades of Byzantium. We’ve got to a point that Bagehot could scarcely have imagined, where image is not only more important than substance: image is all there is. Thus, when political systems are confronted with brutal reality, they find they cannot cope, and come apart.

But I think the argument can be extended to other areas. Private companies, for example, have to market themselves and tell people about their products, as a complement to actually making goods and providing services that people are prepared to pay for. For some time now, western private companies have increasingly relied on advertising to make up for deficiencies in what they actually have to offer. These days, it often seems as though image—including associating themselves with the latest Goodthink slogans—is all there really is, and people are being asked to buy the image, even as there is nothing “efficient” behind it. Why and how this has happened, I’ll get into in a minute. Similarly, the financialisation of the economy means that most of the effort now goes into manipulating results and share-prices to impress journalists and shareholders (the equivalent of Bagehot’s ignorant masses)

And finally, of course, it even applies to personal and professional relations. In the end, any relationship that lasts more than five minutes has to take into account the “efficient” dimension: ie, who and what you really are. Having a professional photographer take your picture for a dating site, carefully presenting yourself, falsely, as the ideal candidate your prospective employer wants to see, or cynically creating a “personal project” complete with life goals and volunteer charity work to secure a place at university, may achieve a temporary effect akin to that which Bagehot thought Royalty could achieve on the ignorant masses, but by definition, because it isn’t the real you, it can’t last. And then people wonder why they are unhappy in jobs and relationships, and why they can’t cope with the degree course they have wormed their way into.

So I think that’s part of the answer: systems and people have become focused on image to the exclusion of all else, on the need to impress with surface glitter, at the expense of actually being able to do things: the “efficient” side of which Bagehot wrote. And because this is so, images of what “success” means are fed back to a new generation, which selects its professional future on the basis of the images that it has been taught are most positive and powerful. Almost always, this involves money, status and power, and adopting an expected image in order to enter a world, and then succeed in it. In the circumstances, it’s not surprising that vocation and ability play a smaller and smaller part in who goes into, say, politics or the pubic service, and who succeeds there.

Consider, for example, a state or nationalised electrical generation company in the 1970s. It was probably a public monopoly, and it recruited engineers and technical specialists, offering salaries typical of the public sector. Its officials were scarcely known to the public outside the very top level. By definition, then, those interested primarily in money and self-aggrandisement would look elsewhere for a job. The senior management would be selected from those who were good engineers and managers, perhaps with a leavening of political appointees at the top. There was little requirement to impress the public and the taxpayer with image and publicity: what counted was Bagehot’s “efficiency:” ie supplying power.

These days such utilities have mostly been completely or partly privatised, or at the very least turned into simulacra of private companies. In many cases, they are obliged to compete with each other, which they do through marketing campaigns and a blizzard of indecipherable and often mendacious special offers. It’s often impossible to know exactly who really owns your service provider, and indeed (given that few people can manage to live without electricity) the “efficient” part of the organisation’s work scarcely matters to those in charge. Customers can, in theory, change their provider (who in many countries is just a re-seller anyway) but without any guarantees  of better service. Effort is thus focused on Bagehot’s “dignified” component, through impressing financial journalists and the stock market, and attracting and subsequently racketing customers. Given that real competition is electricity generation in the same area is effectively impossible, competition thus becomes entirely virtual, where massaging financial results is the main activity of most of the companies.

The above, I suspect, would not be controversial, but it’s worth considering some of the consequences for people who work in such organisations, and might be attracted by them. First, the priorities are financial, rather than real, which means that inevitably those who rise to the top are those best at massaging figures. (This has been the case observably with Boeing.) It also means that technical experts will be under-appreciated and often marginalised, with a corresponding decrease in the capability of the organisation to do what it’s supposed to do (I’ll come back to that point.) So good people will often leave, and many of those who stay will try to get out of engineering and into management, for career reasons. Thus, it appears, for example,  that Boeing has simply lost the technical capability to make safe and reliable aeroplanes, and for that matter the western defence industry can no longer produce reliable equipment. .

In turn, of course, the messaging of such an organisation disproportionately attracts the wrong type of individuals: those who associate success with money, power and status. It’s accepted now that the higher ranks of much of the private sector are filled by sociopaths, driven primarily by ego-gratification, and so essentially using the organisation they work for, and the people who work for them, as devices for satisfaction of their own desires. Such organisations necessarily attract large numbers of these people, interested in what they can loot, but without any particular management or strategic skills to make up for their lack of technical knowledge. Indeed, they would probably not consider such skills important. But what they do have, is what Bagehot would have described as “dignified” credentials: frequently MBAs. Rather like a Communist Party card, these are a badge of entry to an organisation, and an aid to promotion, but they say nothing about the actual capabilities of the person carrying the card (or certificate) to do the job properly.

But does this also explain the disastrous reduction in capability in the public sector and in politics? To a degree, yes. The transformation of politics into a purely technocratic activity—the de-politicisation of politics, as I call it—has left politicians with no proper ideological base on which to construct a political position, still less a party. So politics has become marketing, and individuals and groups try to promote themselves to market segments, in the same way that private companies try to sell to them. When a political programme consists only of currying favour by doing things that appeal to your most fervent supporters, there isn’t very much scope for anything else except personal conflict and rampant sociopathic ambition. Now of course politicians have always been ambitious, and one shouldn’t idealise the past, but it is true that in many countries politicians could, and did, spend years in their Parliaments representing their constituency (often where they were born), and trying to promote its interests, without necessarily seeking high office. Only the oldest generation of politicians in most western countries are like that now. In most countries, a spell in politics is anyway just a preparation for a move into the private sector to make lots of money.

To illustrate with a real example, let me tell you a story about recent events in France. Early in the New Year, the teenage Gabriel Attal was appointed Prime Minister, replacing the charisma-free Elisabeth Borne. This surprised a lot of people, because he had only been in his first ministerial job—Education—for a few months, and that Ministry is a high-profile one, given its historic role in inculcating Republican values, and a controversial one, since in the past teachers were the backbone of the Socialist Party (RIP.) Attal was chosen, and I am not making this up, because he was young, handsome, and would be the public face of Macron’s coalition against the young, handsome, Jordan Bardella, the No2 to Le Pen, in the forthcoming European, local and regional elections that are expected to hammer Macron’s coalition into the ground. I can see  Bagehot nodding from here.

But that left a vacancy in Education. This was filled by the splendidly-named Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, friend of Macron since they were at the elite École nationale d’administration together, former tennis champion and Minister for Sport and Youth, as well as responsible for the 2024 Olympics. And in a truly bizarre coda, it was agreed that she would keep all these responsibilities as well as taking on Education in her spare time. Even some in the media thought this was a bit odd, because, after all, there was a lot for her to do, and the few weeks in which she held the job were marked by furious media polemics. If you know something about the French education system, you might guess that these were related to things like catastrophically declining standards of literacy and numeracy, massive problems recruiting and retaining teachers, especially in the poorer areas, inability to find qualified teachers at all in science and mathematics, employers unable to recruit people who can read and write, and violence and intimidation against teachers from Islamists and others. But no, it was all about her sending her three children to a highly selective and extremely socially conservative Catholic school in Paris, which her own Ministry was investigating, and then lying about why she had done so. After a month of bitter polemic, in which not a single substantive issue of policy was mentioned by anybody, she was summarily kicked out,  (It’s worth noting that both she and Attal were technocrats who had never been elected to anything, as indeed was Macron before 2017.) For those of us who have worked in government it was like watching a slow-motion car-crash: how, you wonder, could any politician be so amateurish as not even be able to lie convincingly, as well as to tell lies that would quickly be discovered? But, live by the “dignified” logic, die by it as well.

This helps to explain, I think, the terrifying shambles of the western reaction to Ukraine. Western politicians have come to believe not only that narrative control is essential, but also that it is all that is necessary. This worked, more or less, in Afghanistan. But in Ukraine, with western-trained troops being slaughtered and western equipment blown to bits, elites have suddenly realised what Bagehot could have told them: that while narrative control can “impress the many,” you still need instruments of coercion to actually get things done, and the West, of course, now has none.

Finally, of course, public administration takes its prompts at least partly from the political leadership. Ministers with programmes, and the intention to implement them, will be popular with their staff. But Ministers only interested in image and publicity, unwilling to make decisions for fear of offending someone, clearly visiting political life on the way to more money, and obsessed with power and status, drive good people away. The more that such people surround themselves with careerist “advisers,” whose future is tied to that of their boss, the more demotivated the permanent staff become. And when the main job of permanent officials is to make the Minister look good, the kind of person who gets to the top is almost certainly not the most competent.

Let’s leave Bagehot to one side for a moment, because I want to make use of a couple of concepts discussed  by someone who thought about these issues several thousand years before Bagehot. That person is Aristotle, but don’t worry, it’s quite harmless and non-threatening. I want to use two of the concepts mentioned in his work as points of departure for the rest of the essay. Both of these concepts have attracted libraries of commentary: here, I just want to use them as an inspiration.

The first is the concept of aretḗ, generally translated as “excellence,” or the quality of being good, or even outstanding at something. It seems often to have been used in the sense of “fulfilling your potential,” (It is also translated as “virtue” in some contexts, but in the old sense of the Latin virtus meaning “powerful.”) So the classic example is Achilles, who demonstrates to perfection the aretḗ of the warrior: bravery, martial prowess and a heroic death. Inanimate things can have aretḗ (the classic example is a knife that cuts well), but human beings, unlike knives, do not have this virtue inherently. They must strive to cultivate it, whether they are a ruler or a shopkeeper, a poet or a farmer.

Now let’s consider a practical example. How would you define an “excellent” doctor? And is excellence the same as success? Most people would say no. They would say that an excellent doctor deserves to be successful, but that it can’t be assumed that a successful doctor (let us say one who is highly paid and enjoys great social and professional prestige) is necessarily excellent. Yet in fact our society does encourage exactly this view. Thus, for example, the scientist who appears on TV, writes a best-selling book, exploits his or her research staff and manages to get their name on papers they have not contributed to, is not only a “success” in our terms; that person is then regarded as a source of knowledge and wisdom, even as those more,”excellent” scientists (wiser and more knowledgeable) are disregarded.

But it gets worse. Linked to the word aretḗ in Greek is the word aristos, usually translated as “the best.” In theory, at least, the Greeks were part of that very wide historical consensus that believed that “the best people” (aristoi)  should rule, because, like many others, they saw ruling wisely as a competence which required character development as well as what we would now describe as political skills. Whatever we may think of that idea, it’s clear that our modern society has completely inverted it. The wealthy, powerful and successful today cannot accept that greed, ambition and sheer luck should have played a major role in their success, and they attribute to themselves qualities of wisdom and insight that they do not possess. A sycophantic media and political system hangs on their every word as though they had something of value to say. And of course the belief that they have risen to the top on merit sends a message about what success is, and what excellence is, and what people should value in their lives, as Michael Sandel has noticed. The great institutional reforms of the nineteenth century ushered in a period where western governments (and even the private sector) sought to make excellence the principal criterion for recruitment and advancement, replacing the personalised, aristocratic system where people were appointed because of who they were, who they knew, and most of all what aristocratic credentials they had. We are heading back that way now, it seems, with today’s credentialed, allegedly “meritocratic” PMC becoming a new aristocratic class, with all the pretensions of the old one, but none of the culture.

This is, I think, one of the major reasons for the Diversity Paradox. Whilst in theory the pool of potential recruits has been much widened, in practice the messages sent out by “successful” people today amount to a subliminal incitement to a new generation of would-be sociopaths, focused on narcissistic ego-gratification and the satisfaction of a lust for power and money, They also discourage many “excellent” people from joining organisation or going into politics, because they judge, quite understandably, that they would not like to work in such an environment, nor are they interested in fighting political battles for more status and even more money. And this applies across the board, irrespective of skin pigmentation, genital arrangements or anything else. Sociopaths are sociopaths, and in general sociopaths are bad managers and bad at their jobs. The only skills they have are those related to personal success. Thus, organisations and political systems fail.

The dominance of the belief that success should be measured through the attainment of power, money and formal status, explains a number of puzzling features about western politics and society. Such a view is not, in practice, anything like universal, but is largely a rationalisation by the kind of sociopaths described above, who, whatever their worldly “success,” are failures as human beings. These objectives, and the aggression and ambition that go with them, tend to be coded by our society as “masculine,” although in practice most men do not share them, and only a small proportion, even in our brainwashed society, are prepared to work aggressively for wealth and power alone. It’s curious, then, that feminists have defined “success”by uncritically taking over such male-denominated goals as their objective, as well as imitating all of the worst caricatures of male-denominated behaviour. A woman who does well as a politician or a hedge-fund manager is considered a “success” in the sense that an outstanding headmistress or family doctor is not, which certainly indicates a peculiar sense of priorities.

But there is also a great deal of confusion about what even power and influence actually is, and how it works. Following the American Political Science tradition, power is seen as a purely formal, objective, quantitative  phenomenon, measured by the size of your office and your salary, the number of people who work for you, your seniority in the organisation, how often you get your way, and how loudly you shout at meetings. But anyone who has worked in organisations of any size knows that power, in the sense of getting the outcome you want, very seldom works like that. I must have attended hundreds of meetings with powerful people in my time, and I often got what I wanted, without having to shout. But because Liberalism is obsessed exclusively with formal and quantitative descriptions of power, our system encourages the pursuit of those baubles, rather than actual influence and the ability to get things done. It doesn’t matter how diverse an organisation is: if its top people spend all their time shouting at each other and playing silly status games, nothing will be achieved. This is true at all levels: everybody knows that those in any political system with the highest formal status and the most formal power are not necessarily the most influential. But our culture continues to be obsessed with the facade of formal power, because it is quantitative, and easy to understand and measure. But the more that it is pursued as an objective in any structure, the worse that structure will function overall.

Finally, I want to invoke another word used by Aristotle: “telos” usually translated as “purpose” or “end,” and from which we get “teleological”, ie directed towards an end. In Greek writing on ethics, telos is the final objective to which life should be directed, often happiness (eudaemonia), and in Aristotle’s biology it refers to the purpose of an organ or capacity in the whole: the telos of an eye is seeing, for example. Here, I want to use it to ask two questions: what is the purpose of an organisation or structure, and what should be the ends to which the lives of those in it should be directed?

We have to accept of course that, in a complex society, organisations and structures have to serve different purposes at the same time. These purposes may not be wholly compatible with each other, but at least they should not be in direct opposition. This is easier to understand in the public sector, so let’s start there. An Army, for example, has  the primary purpose of providing force or the threat of force in support of government policy (analogous to Bagehot’s “efficient” role.) It has the second purpose of being a visible part of the state. This includes ceremonial and representative duties, obeying the law (including the law of armed conflict) and acting as an instrument of foreign and domestic policy (closer to what Bagehot would describe as “dignified” functions.) And finally, the Army is an illustration of overall government policy for the public sector and society through, for example, inclusion of minorities and methods of recruitment, and providing career opportunities for its members. But it is important to realise that this is a hierarchy: the telos of an Army is to be able to conduct military operations. If it can’t do this, then none of the rest really matters, except for tourism and conferences on human rights. Yet it’s fairly clear that most western militaries cannot, in fact, perform this task effectively, because not enough attention has been paid to what their telos is. The situation is similar with a health service: no matter how many modern management practices it has introduced, how much computer technology it has, how highly qualified and well paid its senior managers are, or how widely it recruits staff, it will fail if it can’t provide medical care, which is its telos. The same is true of education, transport, or any other government function.

In the private sector things may appear more complicated, although really they are not. The telos of a private company is to provide goods or services to customers that they want to buy, at prices they are willing to pay. Today, of course, you are more likely to hear that the purpose of a company is to make money for its shareholders, but a moment’s reflection suggests that’s silly. You can only make money as a result of some activity, even if it's just bank robbery or fraud. Making money is clearly essential to the survival of the company, but  it’s the second purpose, not the first: a result, not the principal objective. A company that pursues profits to the exclusion of its primary purpose soon ceases to be a company. Yes, it’s true that companies can make large profits through underhand practices, abuse of market position, freezing out competitors etc, but there still has to be some economic activity that’s being undertaken. (Micro$oft did at least make software, even though most of it was crap.) So the telos of a bank is to look after peoples’ money and provide loans and financial services. The banks that crashed, or nearly did so, in 2008, had simply forgotten that.

There are also important consequences for those who work, or might work, in organisations that have forgotten what their telos is. Those who are favoured or promoted will be those who know how to fulfil the parts of the organisation’s functions that are most in fashion, and most valued by its leaders. Massaging financial results, making Ministers look good, manipulating statistics for hospital waiting times or acting as an authoritative-looking mouthpiece for the political leadership and saying things you don’t believe, are more important for your future than doing a good job. A Chief of Defence who smiles and tells the media that of course he can do everything with nothing, or that the latest mad diversity initiative is a good thing, will do well. The one who speaks frankly will be pushed into retirement, and of course this acts as a signal for all those looking for senior positions in the future.

In effect, organisations of all kinds have essentially returned to the pre nineteenth-century model of predation and parasitism, where the state (and these days private corporations) are there just to be exploited and looted. You choose your career according to the benefits you can expect, and you arrange your professional life to maximise them. You say and do the right things to secure advancement, and in due course, you cooperate with others in positions of power to loot the system, and pass on. The benefits may be financial, but they may also be those of status and perception, and indeed your first career—in the public sector for example—may be no more than a preparation for a much more lucrative one elsewhere.

Aristotle would have said that this is a betrayal of the telos of the human being, which is happiness through virtuous living. If that sounds impossibly quaint now, and if there always have been, and always will be, greedy and ambitious people in any organisation, it is still true that such behaviour is now officially recognised and expected to be the norm. But it is simply impossible for any organisation to function effectively under those circumstances.

And perhaps it’s impossible for a society to function in that way, either. I’ve commented many times on how our contemporary western society is based on ego-gratification and the satisfaction of narcissistic wants. Society, and in effect other people, are just there to be looted for our emotional and financial benefit. Schools and universities exist purely to give us skills to help us become wealthy. Governments exist just to provide us with things we claim as “rights.” We seek to coerce institutions and companies into acting and speaking in ways that we find pleasing, reflecting the continual changes in the balance of power in our societies, irrespective of their real functions and objectives. All of life becomes a competition to extract the maximum benefit out of others, even as they try to extract the maximum benefit from us. And this seems to be polluting personal relationships as well: you simply cannot go through life with a shopping-list of characteristics you demand from others to meet your emotional needs. At the very least you have to reflect seriously on what it is you can contribute, too. The consequences of forgetting the telos of human beings, and viewing them just as mechanisms to facilitate emotional satisfaction, are everywhere apparent.

In the end, it turns out that institutions and political systems function best when they and their members pursue their fundamental purposes, and when they employ excellent people and encourage them to be excellent. The fact that this view now seems radical, rather than self-evident, is the result of the steady accretion of power by outside forces—administrators, MBAs, the media, NGOs—and the social trends which have changed our society from one of producers to one of consumers, including consumers of each other. Yet ultimately, everybody knows that administrators can’t teach, managers can’t provide medical care, MBAs can’t build things in factories, information technologists can’t transmit knowledge, irrespective of how much they are paid. (How many MBAs does it take to take a sick child to hospital? None: there’s no money in it.) So our organisations will continue to decline, our services will fall apart and our factories close, while all the time the looters in the system will take more and more from what’s left. I’d like to think that at some point we may rediscover things like excellence and purpose, but I fear it may be very later in the day indeed, before that happens.