Diversity for the sake of diversity is a nihilistic, irrational hatred of values and standards. On Sunday democratically elected leaders of the free world were standing shoulder to shoulder with tirants, some of which are of the worst oppressors of the press and the free word.
'Diverse' leaders marching for the freedom of expression and against terrorism. Guest list.
By any rational analysis, racism and individualism entail opposite philosophies. The former evaluates people by the collective attribute of race; the
latter, according to each person’s own characteristics. Why, then, would multiculturalism equate the
two? Because they both evaluate - i.e., they differentiate some people from others based on some standard. The fact that racism rests on an irrational
standard, while individualism rests on a rational
one, is meaningless to the multiculturalist. To him,
the very use of standards is anathema.
An egalitarian leveler does not raise a drug-besotted bum into a moral ideal. He has no moral ideal.
His defense of the non-ambitious and non-productive is mere window-dressing for his real motive: the
desire to squash the productive and the ambitious—a desire he pursues by insisting that we not
discriminate between the productive and the non-
productive, and that a bum and a Bill Gates should
therefore enjoy equal comforts in life.
The egalitarian is far worse than, say, the devout
religionist who condemns the rich. For the latter is
upholding an alternate set of values, albeit an irrational one. He calls for the forswearing of wealth because he believes in the supreme value of a non-material, supernatural dimension.
Egalitarianism,
however, is a lower species of irrationalism. It is
stark nihilism. It reveres no values—it seeks only
the destruction of values. It promotes a leveling for
the sake of leveling, an eradication of value as an
end in itself, or—as Ayn Rand puts it—"a hatred of
the good for being the good."
This is the philosophic mantle multiculturalism
has donned. Multiculturalists uphold the primitive
not because they believe it to be a superior
value—but because it is inferior, because it is a non-value. They want to annihilate what they regard, not
as evil—but as good. They do not embrace a standard of value according to which ugliness and disability are esteemed. The multiculturalist esteems
nothing. (...)
For decades the liberals fought to have
race ignored. "Color-blindness" was their professed
ideal. They denounced those who judged any member of a minority not by his objectively important
characteristics, but by the unimportant one of race.
Yet now, while they aver that no race is superior to
another, they are more obsessed with skin color
than any redneck racist. Why?
The answer is: precisely because race is unimportant—i.e., because it is a non-value. (...)
From "The Return of the Primitive"
Original edition published as The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), by Ayn Rand
Additional articles by Peter Schwarz
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