Diversity Is Our Strength — And Other Loyalty Lies
This essay is adapted from the preface of Brutal Minds and appears on Informed.org with the author’s permission. Nothing has been softened. This is a story of one of the great subterfuges in American history. It is a tale of how one of history’s great institutions — the American university — is undergoing an infiltration by an army of mediocrities whose goal is to destroy it as an institution of knowledge creation and replace it with an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda. If you want to understand what is happening on America’s college campuses, don’t reach for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. That book is grounded in the coercive realities of communism — but it’s still fiction. Read Václav Havel instead. The Greengrocer’s Sign Havel was a Czech dissident who understood authoritarianism not as an abstraction but as a daily lived experience. In his landmark essay The Power of the Powerless, he gives us a greengrocer in 1970s Czechoslovakia who places a sign in his shop window. It reads: “Workers of the World, Unite!” “Workers of the World, Unite!” “Diversity is our strength!” The slogan changed. The function is identical. He doesn’t necessarily believe it. He may never have thought
