Liberal society—forever trying to turn anomalies into the norm


Marissa Meyer, the 37-year-old CEO of Yahoo, who returned
to her job two weeks after giving birth to her first child

There are three impossible-to-achieve goals which are central to the modern liberal project and which no one may publicly question without losing his place in liberal society: making blacks as intelligent as whites, making women as powerful as men, and making Muslims democratically adopt liberal democracy. In a scathing post on the second of those goals, Laura Wood points out that notwithstanding the unceasing hype about the wonders of female CEOs, women occupy only 18 of the CEO positions in the Fortune 500 companies, less than four percent, and that that figure has not changed in six years:

Women are still interesting novelties in the chief executive suite, and everyone wants to know how they do it because everyone knows, though no one will say it, that women will always be anomalies at the top.

And to think that modern society, which is devoted to such gross delusions as racial and sexual equality of outcomes, and which mercilessly ostracizes anyone who disbelieves in them, prides itself on having rejected the “blind faith” and the “subservience to authority” that characterized the Middle Ages!

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David H. writes:

It’s worth noting that Yahoo has gone through five CEOs in the last five years, they’re basically Roman emperors in the dying days of the empire.

LA replies:

Hah.

But if a woman is one of these transient presidents of an expiring entity, she has POWER, she is that quasi-sacred being, a POWERFUL WOMAN.

LA writes:

Laura Wood’s phrase,

“no one will say it, that women will always be anomalies at the top,”

inspired the title of this entry,

“Liberal society—forever trying to turn anomalies into the norm.”

And it’s not just a catchy phrase, it’s a new way of describing liberalism. There are some blacks (actually very few) who are highly intelligent; liberalism thinks they are or can be made into the norm. There are some women (actually very few) who have functioned competently at the highest levels of executive authority; liberalism thinks they are or can be made into the norm. There are some (actually very few) moderate Muslims, a powerless minority in the Islamic ummah; liberalism thinks they are or can be made into the norm.

The same applies to every area in which liberalism seeks to include and equalize some favored minority group.

Gintas writes:

You wrote:

“But if a woman is one of these transient presidents of an expiring entity, she has POWER, she is that quasi-sacred being, a POWERFUL WOMAN.”

I thought about the old fertility cults, but our female cult is bizarrely sterile. I guess it’s really an equality cult, but only nonwhites and women get to be equal.

But equal to what? you may ask. If you are a white man forget it, you never get to be equal, but if a woman or a nonwhite man achieves what white men routinely have achieved, BIG NOISE, YOU ARE SUPER SPECIAL TOTALLY EQUAL. Everyone please bow down, now, to someone who has achieved equality (accompanied by fanfare and fireworks).

LA replies:

Yes. Once you have gone beyond pure right-liberalism, i.e., equality of individual rights, to left-liberalism, i.e., equality of group outcomes (and, as I’ve shown, right-liberalism automatically mutates into left-liberalism), then the very equality which is supposedly the goal is contradicted. The groups that are being raised up must, in order to be equalized with white men, be treated as special. Their every accomplishment, no matter how routine, is celebrated as a ground-breaking, sacred event. The process of raising the designated group and celebrating this advance takes precedence over equality. A current example of this: there are now more women than men in institutions of higher learning, but the believers in sexual equality, far from seeing this new inequality as a problem, are boasting of it as a great accomplishment. So these liberals don’t even pretend to believe in equality any more. They are openly seeking to degrade the place of men in society and raise women above them.

What does this mean? It means that old-fashioned liberalism, classical liberalism, right-liberalism, automatically turns into its hard-left opposite, the supremacism of the formerly “oppressed.”

In short, liberalism must destroy itself. It’s only a question of how long this takes.

LA adds:

What I’ve always said about the Civil Rights movement, that its real aim from the start was not some abstract racial equality, but the advance of blacks, by any means that would work, turns out to be true of all the equality movements that have emulated the Civil Rights movement.

October 24

Gintas writes:

Marissa Meyer was successful at Google, but had been slowly pushed into the background, and she was no longer the Google Starlet. So she jumped to a high-visibility position at Yahoo!, a failing company into which you can stick a fork. But she gets to be the Yahoo! Starlet.

Brandon F. writes:

Notice Meyer’s pose. Men don’t pose like that, only women. She is using a little bit of a variant since she is making a fist on her hip instead of the usual outspread hand. I think this is like an attempt of the photographer to show her feminine and powerful sides.

Robert P. writes:

Women CEOs are only slightly less damaging to corporations than black CEOs.

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina for example. Both managed companies and had success early in their career, but floundered into their exits. I theorize that they have the early aggressiveness required to build a successful company, but as the company grows underneath them their doting motherly nature results in protection of the existing at the expense of future growth.

As for the pregnant Marissa Mayer, personally I believe she was brought in to fail so that the Board might reach an agreement on what to finally do with the company. This will give her the ability to fail yet still be seen in a positive light as the successful pregnant/new mother career woman CEO.

D. Tanner writes:

I don’t want to sidetrack the conversation too far, but you did mention that women are now outnumbering men at colleges and universities. I think it’s important to point out that men still vastly outnumber their female colleagues in science and math programs, while women gravitate towards social sciences and liberal arts & humanities. One of the consequences of liberalism is the constant push from administrators to dumb down the hard sciences so more from the “victim class” can enter. Thankfully, it has been slow going for them, but it’s not hard to imagine that in a few decades what is now considered undergraduate level study will become graduate or doctorate level study.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2012 01:41 PM | Send