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This is utter nonsense. As every medical doctor soon learns, human nature is prior to experience. Nor is there anything in history or science that supports the belief that talent is equally distributed among persons. On the contrary, people are massively unequal in their abilities, in their interests, and in their motivations. And not just in relation to one another, but in relation to themselves over time. I am a different writer—a better writer—than I was ten years ago, just as I know much more today than I did then.

Such inequality, distressing in any time, is scandalous in our era, which overly values social status, partly in order to compensate for the dearth of higher value in the contemporary world. The matter is made all the more scandalous by group differences, which naturally reflect the general inequality of persons. There is, for example, a vast achievement gap between Asians and Jews on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. Similarly, since men tend to be higher in motivation than women, and since there is greater variance in male IQ, most of the smartest people are men (just as most of the dumbest are too), and men still dominate the upper echelons of society, in spite of the burning envy and manipulations of feminists.

The fallacious reasoning not only serves to thwart excellence. It is also the enemy of law and order. For as with universities and the workplace, so with discipline and punishment: Here too our perverse moral psychology rejects group differences. If more blacks are getting suspended from schools, or getting arrested more than whites, it can’t be because more blacks are breaking the rules and committing crimes. No, for since it’s painful for some to accept these group differences, it must be the case that blacks are discriminated against in these areas.

And so we waste tremendous resources vainly trying to prevent discrimination, even as we effectively encourage disobedience and crime by refusing to subject people to just discipline and punishment. The Chinese are well aware of this decadent foolishness, which they regard with open contempt.

Of course, by the logic of social justice, when it comes to school suspensions and arrest rates, we should think the same about whites and Asians as we do about whites and blacks. For, once we adjust for the respective proportions of the population these groups compose, we find that compared with Asians, whites are disproportionately represented, just as blacks are disproportionately represented compared with whites. And yet, tellingly, nobody considers whites to be victims of discrimination in these areas.

“Nature loves to hide,” said Heraclitus. More accurately, the weak do not want to see.

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