Playing musical chairs is about as mature as playing tic-tac-toe.
The Corporate Sister hypothesized that black women find themselves at odds with each other because corporations supply them with too few opportunities. She compared it to a game of musical chairs in which the seats are being taken away, and the players fight over what remains, naively trusting that the seating arrangement will stabilize soon enough to make the game worth playing.
The following musical chairs theory has the same form, but suggests that the opportunities are more often designed for people of certain evaluative types (e.g., jobs for creative people vs. conservative people vs. competitive people vs. empathic people, etc.), rather than for specific race or gender, but racism and sexism impact who gets opportunities that are in short supply.
As a result, if there are more than enough people of an evaluative type to fill the legitimate social positions for that specialization (e.g., natural leaders), then minorities may be under-represented in those positions and over-represented in illegitimate roles specialized to the same type (e.g., in crime). This would create an especially deep evaluativism inside minorities, where the type lacking opportunity becomes associated with illegitimacy (e.g., women and blacks believing it would be improper for them to act like Steve Jobs).
There is much to be tested about this new musical chairs theory (e.g., are black conservatives less represented than other black populations in prisons?), but it is consistent with evidence gathered thus far. Medical doctors attempt to support the diversity of cells they encounter in the human body--they do not devise foods that only neurons can process, for example--they treat the human body as a wondrous design worthy of respect. In contrast, social engineers (politicians, business builders, etc.) attempt to re-think society from scratch. Rather than set the number of jobs of each type to match the number of people of each type, they let the "market" determine what kinds of jobs will be available.
Worse, because the market also determines salaries, the people competing to secure a high-paying job designed for a creative person, for example, may also include many non-creative people. Not only does this leave us with a bunch of unqualified people in high-paying jobs, but increases the number of people who lack an appropriate job. The highly creative white guy from a wealthy family who showed promise as a scientist ends-up as a mediocre database administrator, employed out of pity. Meanwhile, equal talents in an impoverished black woman are never recognized--she is labeled "handicapped" and left to the mercy of charity.
The root problem is that modern social engineers are even less competent than medical doctors. At least medical doctors can recognize the difference between a bone cell and a muscle cell, and can convince us that both kinds are valuable. Modern social engineers cannot tell who is pretending to be something they are not, and they have failed to convince us to value our differences (e.g., between liberals and conservatives). Until we develop such basic competencies, any social engineering is as bound to be quackery as medicine was a thousand years ago.
Yet we cannot stop social engineering. We live in a world of nations, corporations and churches, so there will be allocated numbers of chairs. The only way to avoid competition is to align the allocation of chairs with our natural design. We have accumulated a debt--the debt of getting ahead of our knowledge--to pay it off we must spend on learning. We must buy competence in social engineering.
You can think of this debt as a tax. Our leaders must pay by gaining competence in social engineering, and most would do so eagerly if only educators would offer that knowledge. Educators are less inclined to offer new curriculum, but could be hired to do so if the science were clear. Scientists, however, expect to be able to research whatever they want. Even if grants were aligned with social health priorities, many sociologists wouldn't know how to do the research. More innovative people need to be recruited to the social sciences, and they need to be given more effective research tools, such as in vivo EEG data of entire social groups.
There are parts of the world where the extended family still provides jobs, education, and conflict resolution. The game of musical chairs is less of an issue there because jobs are less defined, so the number of chairs for each specialty adjusts toward its frequency in the population. However, a creative person who serves as an artist in a tribe might have had an opportunity to serve as a scientist in a corporation. Lack of opportunities in tribes prevents fighting over them, but that is hardly a step forward.
Perhaps the major reason why other parts of the world end-up playing musical chairs is that we cling to the model set in those parts of the world. The social engineers in those parts of the world are born to their privilege, so they face no expectation that social engineering requires talent or science. Even the corporate world treats leadership as an art rather then as a science--leadership is seen less as the mundane activity of researching the nature of a society than as the glorious activity of devising an inspired vision.
The punishment we pay for failing to develop competence in social engineering comes not just as lost productivity, but also as retribution from those denied a seat. The modern buzzword for that retribution is "terrorism," though we experience the costs most in what we pay to defend ourselves from terrorism. People who have a seat do not engage in terrorism, so the only reason why we must engage in military protection is that social science is not sufficiently advanced to design a world that provides seats for everyone.
Our world spends over $250 billion on medical research each year. We should spend even more to understand social health, but instead spend less than a hundredth as much, as though expecting social leaders to work miracles (as doctors were expected to do a thousand years ago). Meanwhile, annual military spending hovers around $1.5 trillion.
Rather than recognize and regulate the game of musical chairs we are playing, we fight over the chairs.
Does that sound mature to you?
