The American Virtues
“My biggest flaw and strength,” says James Damore, “may be that I see things very differently than normal.” This simple sentence reveals the essence of our fraying social fabric. For Damore’s “strength”—his rare ability to think for himself and exercise independent judgment—naturally leads to conflict with the majority, who, in their stupidity and weakness, must deem his virtue a “flaw,” a sign that he is not “normal.” For most people—those bundles of herd affect—“truth,” as they can understand it, is nothing but a means for their personal interests, which are mostly material and, beyond that, trivial. Hence their utter inability to understand a man like James Damore and their natural disdain for any principled truth-teller.
The former chess prodigy is now blacklisted from the big tech companies, despite having, in the language of the corporate rabble, a proven track record of success as a software engineer. In the Guardian article from which I have quoted, we learn that Damore was diagnosed with a mild form of autism in his mid-20s. Paul Lewis, the liberal author of this subtle hatchet job, based—where else—in San Francisco, describes Damore’s first failure to submit to the diversity idol.
Damore was on a two-day retreat for [Harvard] PhD students, which involved an annual tradition of inviting students to perform skits that lightly poked fun at professors. Damore’s performance included an awkwardly delivered masturbation joke that offended some female students. Two professors later wrote to students apologising for the “uneasiness, embarrassment or offense” he had caused. Damore still finds it hard to see why his skit was objectionable, but accepts he may view it differently, “because I’m on the spectrum.”
Like academia in general, Harvard is such a touchy, genteel environment that one can hardly sneeze without offending some Last Man and his intersectional master formerly known as a woman. This is why so many comedians will not go near our humorless colleges and universities. Masturbation has been a subject of comedy from Diogenes the Cynic up through Chris Rock. The belief that Damore’s so-called autism had anything to do with the playful incident is ludicrous. But it does reveal the conformity that is now de rigueur in this country, since otherwise the fools, frauds, and cowards in charge could not manipulate us so well.
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