How Diversity Sets People Up for Failure | Dr. Carol Swain
I spent a lot of time studying the literature on managerial success. There's quite an extensive business literature on managerial success, and one of the findings of the managerial literature is that many managers fail because they're promoted to a position that they're not actually competent to manage: the Peter Principle. Exactly!
As an employer, the rule is something like this: I've learned this the hard way with my enterprises—do not do someone a favor when you're hiring them. Because it's not a favor if you take someone and you aren't thoroughly convinced that they're competent for the job. All you're doing is either setting them up for eventual failure or you're downloading all their obligations to their minions, who will have to work much harder under the thumb of an incompetent who's likely to become a tyrant, joylessly and without credit, to pick up the overflow. And there is nothing in that.
You also simultaneously demoralize the other managers who were hired on merit. It's a catastrophe! And I see that happening in spades in academia. One of the consequences of that, at least early on, was that there might have been a disproportionate number of unqualified minority students being admitted, but the probability that they would actually graduate was very low. So they tended to… well, you can understand how that would even further heighten racial tension. Because if you're brought into a school and everybody tells you that you belong there and then you fail, it’s very attractive—especially if you're being shouted at by the progressives—to do this constantly: to blame something like systemic racism for your failure.
Yeah, right! Well, you can understand why… And we're focused on higher education. Look what they're doing at K-12, where they're telling minority children—they're telling everyone—that math is racist. There's almost no job that you can do that you don't need math. Even an artist needs math! So they're taking minority students and, rather than trying to equip the ones that have the ability to learn, they're telling them that if you're not doing well in math, it's because it's racist.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and again, that's an extremely… psychologically, that's extremely demoralizing. Like, we know that people who have an external locus of control—that's the technical term; you may have encountered this in your psychology classes—if you believe that your life is governed by external forces, you allow yourself to believe that. You're much more likely to be ineffectual, depressed, anxious, and hopeless.
Okay, so that's not a great outcome because you don't succeed, plus you're miserable, and you have no happiness. Those are separable things, right? And so, whereas if you have an internal locus of control and you believe that you're an active agent in the construction of your own destiny, then you obviously have to take on more responsibility, but you have a lot more hope. You're much less likely to be depressed and anxious, and you're more likely to be effectual and successful.
The victim-victimizer narrative is an external locus of control narrative. It's like you can't succeed; the cards are stacked against you by evil, malevolent people who perhaps were even around before you were born. There's nothing you can do. Well, you know, if you do fail, it’s because of these forces that are arrayed against you. And of course, there is some corruption in the systems, and there has been racism and ethnic bias. So there's some of that criticism that's true.
But as a comprehensive explanatory framework, well, it's the victim-victimizer narrative that turns the world into enmity. Let me say this: I believe that what progressives are doing to minority communities—Black and Hispanic—that is criminal. Part of it is that they really do want to overthrow traditional institutions, and the crime and the dysfunctional behavior that you find in the Black community—progressives excuse it. They encourage it. And so they're really using people's misery.
Even with the LGBTQ community, they're using people's misery to advance a political goal. I don't think they care anything about any of the groups that they claim to represent.
Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so let's delve into that a little bit. There's a section of the literature on psychopathology that includes what are called cluster B personality disorders. Okay? So, if you have a cluster B personality disorder, one of them is histrionic. That's sort of a derivation of the old Freudian hysteric. You're dramatic; everything around you is a drama, right? You're a drama queen—because it's often a female pathology, by the way: histrionic personality disorder. So you're a drama queen; you play the victim. You make mountains out of molehills continually. You take a simple situation and you complicate it, making sure that the attention is focused on you while you're dealing, like a martyr, with your difficult life.
So that's histrionic—it's not much fun! Narcissistic means you want unearned social attention and status, and you'll do anything to get it. Then there’s borderline personality disorder, which is probably the most serious of all the personality disorders, and it's characterized by a pronounced tendency to victim-victimize and by radical emotional instability. And so that’s not much fun. Then you have antisocial personality disorder in that category as well, and that's more male. It leads more to overt criminality.
Okay, so now, the reason I'm telling you that is because those are the people who are most likely to pathologize a victim-victimizer narrative. So, if you're dealing with someone who's in that personality disorder cluster, they are after power and attention. The way they camouflage that is by presenting themselves either as a victim or as an ally of victims.
So, right? So that’s fun! The most serious personality disordered types are the kind who will use their own misery—even if it’s self-induced—and the misery of others to camouflage their own power-seeking. I see a tremendous amount of that in the so-called progressive movement. Because they are, you put your finger on it: they’re using—and probably abetting—the misery of these ethnic minority groups they claim to be compassionate toward. They're using that as justification for their own ideology and for their own power striving.
And you know that happens even within families! The real cluster B types will martyr; they'll make victims out of their own children just so that they can parade themselves as martyrs. It’s really ugly. It’s really ugly.
Well, you know, to go to something positive, I feel like these people are strategically placed, but they are by no means the majority. And whether we're talking about Congress, that's dysfunctional—it's because the people who have common sense have no courage. Because they could stand up to the extremists! I believe the extremists—the ones that are driving the agenda—they are a minority, but they are placed in a way that everyone’s afraid to challenge them.
Yeah, well, there’s no doubt they’re a minority. You know, no doubt there’s a minority, but the thing is, you don’t want to underestimate the strategic brilliance of the approach. Because if I position myself as either a victim or an ally of victims—which is even more convenient because then I don’t have to go through the trouble of being a victim—but now I’m making the case that everything compassionate and loving resides in me.
They believe it, though! And so, I know they do. Well, but then the upshot of that is, so I’m one of these people now—compassionate to a fault. Now, if you oppose me, I can easily just say, “Well, you’re against compassion? What sort of person is against compassion?” It’s only the worst of the predators that could possibly be against compassion! You wouldn’t be one of the worst of the predators, would you?
And so that's the accusations that come out right away. And if those are made out against people who have some conscience—and so the typical conservative, for example, tends to be high in conscientiousness—if you make allegations like that, especially as a mob against someone conscientious, the conscientious person is likely to think, “Oh my God, all these people are upset with me! You know, I probably did something wrong, and maybe I am a little more sexist than I should be, and maybe I am a little more racist.”
You know, the psychopaths and the cluster B types—they have no shame! So if you accuse them of something, they don’t care. But if you accuse a conservative or someone of decent moral standing, you're going to put them back on their heels. That’s also part of the reason that people are afraid to speak.
Well, that's why the conservatives appear at times to be losing. And I can tell you, with my interactions with Harvard University through my lawyers, you know, they don’t care! Claudine Gay has one of the best lawyers in the country, and there have been no apologies. The insult to injury, when it comes to the plagiarism, is that they have never acknowledged that Carol Swain exists!
Well, we're going to do something about that.