I think I’ll do a quick one of these. I’m feeling inspired, and I haven’t done one of these in a while, sooooo here goes.
Today I went to the monthly dept. meeting at work. This month’s theme was diversity. The company I work for is in pharmaceuticals, and prides itself in being counted amongst America’s most “multicultural” and “diverse” companies. Meaning, it has within it a huge mass of raceless people who all think identically and do the same things.
It has always struck me as interesting how diversity never fails to bring with it conformity, boredom and lack of creativity. You would think it would turn out otherwise, but it never does. Back in the early 1900’s, when my company was new and staffed entirely by white men save the secretaries, it was renowned for it’s vitality and energy. It was a legendarily nimble company who innovated and created across the board, and contributed to the development of many industries. It was primarily a pharmaceutical company, yes, but it was also leader in areas ranging from pesticide creation to golf club production.
After a century of expansion, though, it fell into a doldrum. It lost it’s spark. It’s last great gasp of genius was to buy a particular smaller company for it’s patents- one of which became Humira, the world’s best selling prescription drug.
But, again, Humira wasn’t created in-house, because we don’t innovate much in-house anymore, despite the company’s alarmed attempts to “diversify” itself with an army of differently colored people who all think and behave the same.
It always baffles me how corporations in America do the opposite of what has worked in the past, when trying to achieve the results they used to get. It’s nuts. One would think that it would be obvious that to achieve the results of the past would require a set of conditions similar to those present in that era, and that this would especially be obvious to a pharmaceutical giant of all companies. I mean, pharma testing is all about recreating conditions. But apparently this isn’t obvious, for some reason.
So, this morning I sat and listened to a spiel. It was the usual stuff. Diversity brings “vibrance”, diversity is “progress”, diversity is the “way forward”, etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda.
We’ve all heard it a million times so I won’t bore people.
And the sales pitch was followed up, of course, with the usual stuff about “The Demographics Of The Future”. You know, the typical stuff about 2050. The dept heads basically all regurgitated the usual about how whites will be 50% of the population in 2050, and then laid out for us the rest of it, such as what percentage of the population then will be black, Mexican, Chinese, gay, atheist, Christian, and everything else. Needless to say, it was all very, very cultlike. Nothing was said this morning that differed in any way, even a little bit, from what you hear from every other official source regarding diversity. It is really creepy to continually hear the exact same phrases repeated over and over again from so many different mouths.
And as usual, the Diversity presentation this morning had not a little bit of religious fervor to it. Always, talk of The Great Changes Of 2050 seems like the stuff of fundamentalist prophesy, not history.
I mean, not once, all morning, was it mentioned by any of the speakers that mayyyyybe all of these predictions about The Great Changes of 2050 might not come to pass. I mean, they were talking about the year 2050, of all things. You would think they would at least try to hedge their bets a little, but no. The “statistics” and “facts” about our very distant future were presented to us as gospel, as if God himself presented them to the presenters this very morning on ornate stone tablets.
It was nuts to watch.
Always, it’s very disconcerting to hear this stuff, if only because it grates so horribly on my scientific mind. The distant future is of course absolutely unknowable. It is possible to make educated guesses about the very near future with some degree of accuracy, kind of, but any idea about what society will look like in 2050 is only a random guess. Honestly, they’re just pulling this stuff out of thin air. From today until 2050, a nearly infinite number of things will happen, and almost none of them will be expected. Wars will be fought. Empires will rise and fall. New ecomonies will be created and old ones will be destroyed. Innumerable new technologies will change everything in our lives. New diseases and unforeseen epidemics and natural disasters will change the world in ways nobody can possibly expect.
And yet, all of what I just mentioned will apparently not effect The Great Changes of 2050. Apparently nothing can effect The Great Changes of 2050. Yes, The Great Changes of 2050 are literally impossible to avoid.
Out of curiosity, I scanned the audience as the presentations went on. People were absorbed in rapt attention, as if receiving a religious sermon.
This was the moment that it all struck me. The stuff about the company’s scientific rut, I mean.
Obviously, there is no science at all behind predictions of The Great Changes of 2050. It’s just what the people with megaphones want to happen, so they’re trying to goad others into joining their visions and such. And with that being clear to those with a more scientific bent, it was truly disheartening to see so many people looking on as if enthralled. I mean, these were supposed to be scientists, for God’s sake! Where was the critical thought? Where were the doubting questions, after the presentation? Where was the affrontery to this insult to our collective intelligence?
It was nowhere, unfortunately. Afterwards, all I could gather from eavesdropping was how “enlightening” all of it was. I mean, it was as if they were relieved that someone figured out the future for them, so they didn’t have to bother with that difficult task of trying to figure it out themselves, or something.
Oy.
The thing is, is that all of this stuff is clearly just not going to happen. I don’t know what will happen, because nobody can, but I do know that to think that things will just proceed indefinitely, forever, in the direction of increasing diversity at the same rate that it is today is insanity.
The experts are wrong. They are always wrong. If you doubt this, just go back and read the common opinion of the experts at any time, on any subject ever.
My thoughts are still the same ones I explicated earlier in other essays. I believe that all of this stuff I just described in today’s presentation is a fad, and that a backlash is brewing. I think, in effect, that Donald Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. I believe that the near-distant future of the US is a country that is smaller and > 80% white. You know, similarly to how the super-multiracial Soviet Union broke up and became the Russia that is 80% Russian.
Well, I’ll talk more about this later. Maybe tomorrow or something. It’s 1:00 now and I’d like to go to bed.
*Yawn*…