Fred Gransville

Abstract:

Modern social justice introduces its protagonists-an eldritch theatre of characters in ever-altered roles, upon whose stages everybody in the audience seems constantly torn between cheering them on or just getting up to leave. This paper tries to deconstruct this intricate ballet called DEI-not with the scalpel of earnest critique, but rather with the feather duster of satire. It is an analysis of the paradoxical nature of DEI, its noble aims, and often farcical execution that attempts to throw light on the absurdities that arise when virtue becomes a commodity and morality a marketable asset. And because I'm feeling particularly curmudgeonly today, I'll throw in a few grumpy asides about why no one seems to notice how ridiculous this has become. Introduction:

The DEI movement was born from a laudable desire to correct historical injustices, but it has grown into a sprawling ecosystem of policies, training, and performative gestures. This is the world where even the very language of liberation has been hijacked by structures that it seeks to dismantle, each reflection being a distorted image in the hall of mirrors that signifies progress.

Therefore, the dialectics of virtues are debated in this paper, with satire being the magnifying glass that brings into full view its numerous hypocrisies and paradoxes.

Since I am on a roll, I will add, well, why nobody appears to have the guts to state that, well, the emperor's new clothes are, well, a patchwork quilt of buzzwords and good intentions gone wrong. Some sort of disgusting, absurd play in which the actors had forgotten their lines and the audience wasn't quite sure whether to applaud. Chapter 1: The Virtue Bazaar

Social capital is currency in the Virtue Bazaar, and everybody's a trader.

Instead, it requires one to pay another form of entrance fee: the willingness to commit to DEI-especially principles by buying into symbolic goods such as diversity statements, equity audits, and inclusion workshops. In The Bazaar, a struggle consistently for moral one-upmanship supplants a search for equality. It's the high school popularity contest, where instead of 'Most Likely to Succeed,' everybody is competing for 'Most Likely to Be Seen as Woke.' It is a performance, a show pulled out for the sake of looking good while the actual work that is required for equality gets left undone. Take, for example, the "Allyship Badge." Of the rest, it is one of the most in-demand badges at the Bazaar.

An Allyship Badge is obtained via loud and public support for whichever marginalized groups one can round up in support-often simply and loudly proclaiming one's allegiance. But it's within the nebulous criteria that the mad scramble to gain said badge, frenziedly out-virtuous from peers, sees the marketplace which results too often sacrificing authenticity on the altar of performative wokeness. And let's be honest, half the people sporting these badges have no idea what to do, or at least the thing that gets them kudos at cocktail parties. Chapter 2: The Equity Paradox

Equity- the watchword of DEI- is a concept riddled with paradox.

At its root, equity seeks to level the playing field by redistributing resources and opportunities to those at a historic disadvantage. It can easily slip from there into inequality, where someone's identity marker bypasses one's merit. It's much like trying to stop the faucet leak by ripping out all of the plumbing in your house: admirable theoretically but, in real life, all you're doing is flooding out the basement. What the DEI movement has become is just not some clean-cut solution for complex problems, but rather contravening paradoxes that get on better with nuance. Take, for example, the case of the so-called "Equity Index" that organizations make use of as a tool in measuring their movements toward equity. The Index provides scores based on the demographic makeup of an organization, with organizations receiving higher scores the more diversity present. Most such metrics, however, lie flat in assessing nuances of lived experience, reducing persons to not much more than data points in their ill-conceived reach for statistical perfection. In so doing, the system seeking to create equity fosters a new kind of exclusion. And of course, these indices alone are like solving a Rubik's Cube wearing oven mitts and a blindfold. Chapter 3: The Inclusion Illusion

Inclusion, the last leg of DEI, is arguably the most ethereal.

It promises a world where everyone has a seat at the table but in reality so often offers only a table that is a mirage. Inclusion Illusion is a belief that representation would be enough to create magic around feelings of belonging rather than structural changes more profound to build an inclusive environment. That's like inviting people into a potluck and then setting ground rules they can only bring side dishes, yes, they may be sitting at the table but are not of the meal. Think of "Tokenism Theater" an act of placating where there is organizational stated commitment to inclusion where those on the most fringes get highly visible but completely powerless jobs.

These tokens are paraded as evidence of progress, but too often, the presence of just those tokens obscures the more profound inequities. It is a performative gesture that accommodates the optics of inclusion while leaving most structures that cause exclusion unhampered. Whereby the answer is, these tokens are so overworked and underappreciated in their roles that they burn out, and voilà-an organization again has to scramble for a fresh face to fill in. In endless rounds of musical chairs, except that the music never stops, and the chairs are on fire. Chapter 4: The DEI Industrial Complex

The DEI Industrial Complex is grand and diversified: consultants, trainers, and administrators have made big business of it.

In that world, the language of liberation is reduced to a commodity and its tools are sold to whoever pays more. It deploys its tools by means of a cycle of crisis and response through which such dependence of its services is instituted that the object itself is defeated. Your gym membership is paid for, month in and full of regret, but the only thing getting stronger is your guilt. The ultimate status symbol in the Complex: "DEI Certification"-a personal testament to one's commitment to the cause. Still, this is acquired mainly through a very tortuous bureaucratic labyrinth of endless training hours and pieces of paper. This means that the system is generally form and not substance, wherein the appearance of compliance is valued more than actually changing.

It is very expensive, and is only accessible for those who would have been in a position to do their part with that one resource in place. It is like charging for the privilege of being told it is your fault. Conclusion: The Dialectics of Virtue The DEI movement has, with all good intentions, become a study in contradictions: a world where the pursuit of equality creates new forms of inequality, a quest for inclusion entrenches exclusion, and the commodification of virtue undercuts the very goals it purports to achieve. Yet, within these contradictions lies the potential for genuine progress.

Embracing the dialectics of virtue allows us to transcend the performative gestures and bureaucratic entanglements that define today's diverse ecosystems of equity and inclusion, and start dreaming of another world where diversity is valorized, equity is real, and inclusion is more than an illusion.

But to do this, we would need squarely to face the many absurdities that beset the movement, realizing all along that effective social justice requires something other than simply using the right words; it requires the courage to challenge the status quo and the humility of recognizing our participation in the very systems we would change.

Epilogue: A Call to Satire-and a Grumpy Aside Ultimately, satire is not an indictment but a mode of liberation. By laying the absurdities of the DEI movement bare, we might envision another world where virtue denotes the shared commitment to justice and equality, rather than a commodity. Let us then laugh at its contradictions with the hope of striving beyond them, for in the dialectics of virtue lies not only the prospect of folly but also that of a better world.

If I may add to that, could we, by the way, while we're at it, take a unified vote to retire this use of "woke" as if that is some sort of moral high ground?

The word has gotten used so much, it does not mean anything anymore.

That's like calling something "artisanal" or "curated." Sure, those sound great; if you press it, those mean fancier ways of saying, "We put thought into this," which practically always means the thought behind it was probably no more than "How can this look good on Instagram? Which leads me to the final thought of this piece: we're only going to find our way out of this if we stop taking ourselves seriously. We will never be able to about-face and start bringing in some change until we can begin laughing about how wild it is.

If it requires me to be that old codger who keeps pointing out the obvious, then so be it.

Somebody has got to. So, if that is the case, tighten up your seat belt, shoulder harness, Kevlar and brace yourself firmly against the coming onslaught of pejoratives rewrites of history wherein Lincoln and Hamilton, Washington and Madison shall all be the unwashed, unwoke. In this Star Trek "in a mirror, darkly" Universe, Einstein, Euclid, Newton were elevated via their privileged skin color and could only achieve as a function of their gender privilege. In a mirror darkly, off course, has the Black Wrights flying a Black Wright Flyer. The Roosevelts and Churchill were mere dullard alcoholics who, for the good of society, really should have enrolled in health farms. All lacked the requisite token LGBTQ+, female, and ethnic trans-side-kicks needed for genuine success. They were obvious low-brows, judging by the absence of Yarmulkes.

Adam and Eve were short on the essentials for any real accomplishment: nose-rings, tattoos, Adam and Steve smooching on TV. Everything is wrong, everything needs re-write, Trump needs a wrist swishing, badly lisping diminutive Asian man to explain to us all what he really means. This would make him socially acceptable to the true power centers, Hollywood and New York. But never worry; the history revisionists will do a marvelous rewrite of them all. The first step is that humans evolved directly from Porpoises. They are less Primal and more social, more woke.

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