PC Corporate Culture Is a Plague That Government Helps Spread

Most people think that the 1st Amendment guarantees free speech. But the philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that free speech requires more than just the absence of legal strictures. The “tyranny of opinion” of the majority has the same effect as censorship enforced by law. When everyone lives “under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship” by their fellow citizens, there will be no free inquiry. If Congress “make[s] no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” yet challenging popular opinion gets you fired from your job and made into a pariah, the legal freedom is largely symbolic. Some people may speak their mind and suffer the consequences, but there won’t be free speech.

Mill extolled freedom of speech as a necessary condition for discovering the truth, and he took it for granted that truth is a valuable thing to have. But what about people who don’t want to discover the truth? For them, free speech is the enemy. And since legal protections for free speech are so strong in America, they must resort to extralegal means of silencing those who challenge the lies that they want to protect.

The liberal establishment has become invested in the scientific proposition that men and women have exactly equal distributions of innate abilities and dispositions, and so any disparities in behavior or achievement that we observe are entirely the result of social conditioning and discrimination. Questioning this belief is tantamount to heresy and will have one cast out of his (or her) community, as former Google engineer James Damore so recently learned.

The problem is that the scientific evidence doesn’t support the liberal view. Sex differences in interests emerge within several hours after children are born, with girls showing more interest in people and boys in systems/things. One-day-old girls look longer at faces than one-day-old boys, who spend more time looking at mechanical objects. Our primate cousins, rhesus monkeys, show exactly the same sex differences in interest as young children. Male monkeys prefer to play with trucks, female monkeys with dolls. Two- to three-week-old female macaques look more than males at other macaques’ faces, and four to five weeks after birth they exhibit more “affiliative behaviors.” Returning to humans, the greatest sex disparities in career choice are found in the richest and most egalitarian countries, where individuals have more freedom to pursue their interests. In Sweden, 79 percent of computer systems designers, analysts, and programmers and 97 percent of heavy truck and lorry drivers are men. Meanwhile, 89 percent of child-care workers and 74 percent of people working in research and development in education are women. In contrast, in relatively conservative and less wealthy India, more than 30 percent of computer programmers are women. Only 9 percent of engineers in the U.K. are women, while almost 30 percent of engineers in relatively poor EU countries like Bulgaria and Cyprus are women. Interest in people versus things is tied to prenatal testosterone levels even within sexes: Girls who had higher levels of testosterone in the womb end up with more stereotypically masculine cognitive styles and interests, and conversely for boys.

It is of course theoretically possible that one day we will discover that girls and boys are socialized to have different interests a few hours after they are born (or perhaps in the womb?), or that people are socialized differently depending on their prenatal testosterone levels. But since so far no one has come up with a non-ridiculous theory of how this socialization might work, it seems reasonable to assume that sex differences have (at least in part) a biological basis. The claim that the evidence supports an environmental explanation of all sex differences in interests can only be motivated by ignorance or dishonesty. To protect the men-and-women-are-exactly-the-same theory, the liberal establishment cannot appeal to scientific evidence, so it must resort to silencing dissenters: firing them, making ad hominem attacks, and calling them names.