Kerby Anderson

Entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel recently spoke about the “Diversity Myth.” Back in the mid-1990s, David Sacks and he wrote a book by that title about multiculturalism and political intolerance on campus. The first chapter focused on the decision by Stanford University to abandon the great books as other universities were abandoning the teaching of Western Civilization.

He concluded that three decades later that almost every point he made was right. Back then it was called multiculturalism. Today it is called woke, which fights for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The original cancer has metastasized.

He even thinks the title “diversity myth” has held up well. If you emphasize the word “diversity,” that means that diversity is not real. It is a fiction. There is no real multiculturalism, it’s just monocultural. If you emphasize the word “myth,” then you can dismiss diversity out of hand.

He also noted that the ideas of diversity, wokeism, and multiculturalism also prevent finding real solutions. Here’s the flawed logic. “Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness.”

Diversity may sound like a wonderful goal, but it doesn’t lead to concrete plans of action. It may make the proponents feel good, but it never really solves anything.