Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.
~Martin Luther King

Some ideas achieve longevity because they are relentlessly exposed to challenge, falsification, and disconfirmation. At the scale of nations, anti-fragile constitutions that enshrine individual freedoms, personal liberties, and legal amendment fare better than societies that prioritize the special interests of the state, racial identity, males, or religious cohorts. At the scale of firms, ideas for products and services must eventually lead to profits, and stand-alone enterprises will only thrive longterm if they continuously deliver innovations that lower production costs, sustainably meet consumer needs, or both. For all its myriad defects and inequities there is simply no better idea than liberal capitalism for both countries and companies. We’ve tried. Nothing works better over time.

At the other end of the epistemic spectrum are ideas that are provably mistaken, emotionally motivated, or simply wrong. Until recently, these eventually burned themselves out because the barkers who promoted them—the ecclesiasts, the megalomaniacs, the charlatans, the quacks—were ultimately ignored, exposed, or fired. Threats of hellfire could not protect purveyors of guilt and pretense from real people who were hungry, infected, bankrupt, or bereaved. Lies eventually cannibalized their hosts and withered.

Alas, today’s franchisees of untruth garner unnatural attention because they paint on digital canvases. Horrifyingly destructive memes are splashed impulsively, propagated quickly, and shielded cynically from open debate. Discourse that was once self-attenuating has become self-reinforcing. The consequence of this electronic climate change is a hothouse of unfounded animosity, thoughtless in-group allegiance and out-group hatred, and rough coercion of teleologic thought and coordinated behavior.

The illiberal Left violates the core tenet of individual dignity (“all whites are racist”), and the authoritarian Right violates the core tenet of truth-telling (“January 6th was a peaceful protest”). Ideological purity tests the boundaries of both constitutional law with baseless appeals for a recount, and of objective knowledge with baseless casuistries of lived experience.

Their entangled sailcloths are woven from the same fragile threads of group entitlement, righteous anger, and retribution visited upon those who question their madness. Their reciprocally irrational abstractions erupt in corporeal violence, on the streets or in the Capitol. Their unreasoned messages collide in the confusion. Both sides ferociously squelch debate and attempt to muffle objective knowledge production wherever and whenever it fails to serve their respective goals.

Racism, misogyny, bigotry, and prejudice are as objectively real as Trump losing the 2020 presidential election and COVID vaccine safety. But which is worse: the bursting hernia of science denial on the Right or the asphyxiating obstruction of motivated thinking from the Left? Both destroy the body politic. Epistemic rigidity is the dominant characteristic; the combatants reject truth and verifiable facts on one hand, and dismiss evidence and intent on the other. False communion is their only reward.

But the apparent safety is a mirage, and, in the era of pandemic, lethal. In his new book, Woke Racism, John McWhorter calls this the “catechism of contradiction.” At some point, the economically, educationally, and environmentally disgusted will organize and purge. The question is how long it will take, and at what cost in time, treasure, and lives?

Consider, for example, the case of Bari Weiss, who resigned from the New York Times 16 months ago, after being subject to what she has described as a "hostile work environment" in part because she questioned “social justice movements that have taken root in recent years.” In her resignation letter, she wrote:

[The] lessons that ought to have followed the election [of 2016]—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

If Bari Weiss or Nicholas Christakis or Steven Pinker can be publicly eviscerated as bigots, racists, and homophobes, my episode seems mild indeed. But the disease—disregard of truth and the process of finding it, contortion of disagreement into blistering personal attack—is the same, and it is spreading.

In my career I’ve been a tenured engineering professor, a public official, and a start-up entrepreneur. Remarkably little about my formal training or professional experience would recommend me as an expert in progressive entitlement, or the faux curricula of gender, sexuality, and race. I was involuntarily thrust into that world by lies on a public website, and I chose not to remain silent about it.

With the help of a human resources professional, my company surgically removed the lesions of workplace activism. We achieved this by rejecting identity-driven prejudices, and with authentic care for people and their careers. That went—and goes—for everybody, irrespective of race, religion, gender, sexuality, age, rank, status, and politics.

I was not and am not interested in sanitized differences for the sake of artificial harmony. I was then and remain committed to creating an environment in which employees can discuss their personal lives and outside-of-work experiences, within reason, without fear of them being weaponized or worse. We welcome people who think, vote, and pray differently. It helps if they enjoy and can take constructive feedback about their work. We are interested in discussions about objective standards of good design or good software, the benefits of authentic collaboration and trust-building behavior, our proscriptive style guide, and our commitment to on-time, high-quality, at-cost delivery. We list “a good sense of humor” among our position requirements.

Principled debate about racism and gender prejudice is not only possible, it is vital. Evidence-free convictions that any company (especially those led by Caucasians and cisgendered males) is irredeemably broken and can only be mended by public confession and continuous re-examination of systemic prejudice is as wrong as evidence-free convictions that vaccines don’t work or that the 2020 election was a sham. Although our public sphere is still democratic, our private workplaces are not. Indeed, this is exactly why victimization and conspiracy meta-narratives are doomed to failure. They do not—literally cannot—deliver a profitable product or service or keep a free country safe from its totalitarian enemies, foreign or domestic.

My company’s credo is that:

Our highest human resource goal is to screen for and nurture employees who, beyond their capability, credentials, or experience, share a profound commitment to supportive interaction and effective collaboration. An undercurrent of presumed bias because of any attribute of personal identity is abhorrent to leadership and hurtful to the morale and cohesion of the enterprise.

Colleagues who do not believe this tend to have shorter tenures. I am not saying offense is not possible and does not occur, just that when it does it is wrong, no matter who violates the credo, or why. Both the unfounded accusation and the sincere apology are opportunities to learn to be less sensitive and more aware, respectively.

Liberal secularization succeeds; it illuminates the difference between commercial exploration and selfish exploitation. There is a large middle ground between “I built this” rents that accrue to the lucky and the talented, and “I want this” rants of the indolent and illiberal. Kinney Zalesne makes a similar point, describing her experience of pivoting “from head-to-head to shoulder-to-shoulder, working side by side on a common project.”

I fear the situation is going to get much worse before it gets better. In August, Quillette published a piece that reaches even further upstream. While we are dumbing down our K-12 math curricula in favor of bullshit definitions of “data science” and cultural sensitivity, our Chinese competitors are producing more objective knowledge, and more knowledgeable people, than we are:

In order to achieve what the authors call “equity” in math education, the [proposed California] framework would effectively close the main pathway to calculus in high school to all students except those who take extra math outside school—which, in practice, means students from families that can afford enrichment programs (or those going to charter and private schools). [...]

The authors write that “a fundamental aim of this framework is to respond to issues of inequity in mathematics learning”; that “we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents [and the] cult of the genius”; and that “active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities.” And yet the research they cite to justify these claims has been demonstrated to be shallow, misleadingly applied, vigorously disputed, or just plainly wrong.

The emphasis here is mine and it is reminiscent of Antoine Lavoisier’s death sentence during the French Revolution because “The Republic [had] no need of savants.” He invented chemistry. Where does the California Department of Education think electricity, airplanes, GPS, and nitrogen-fixed fertilizers come from? I would previously have included a list of life-saving and provably safe vaccines, but apparently that is contentious now. The Chinese are not confused about this.