How "The Minority Rule" Destroys Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Paradox of Tolerance: To be tolerant, you must be intolerant of intolerance

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a hot new buzzword that entered the corporate lexicon around 2021. The U.S. federal government and Johnson & Johnson adopted DEI policies with the stated goals of:

• Hiring a heterogeneous workforce¹

• Empowering minority groups who bear the scars of historic oppression

• Creating a culture where no one feels like a second-class citizen.

Let’s say your workforce is predominantly male. If you worked for the Herman-Miller ergonomic chair company, there wouldn’t be enough women to tell you that your logo resembles a skimpy bra. Likewise, only women (and OB/GYNs) would realize that the Texas Longhorns logo looks like the female reproductive system.

Good luck trying to un-see the resemblance. We tried.

In an ideal world, corporate DEI policies would accomplish what Cyrus the Great supposedly said² 2,500 years ago:

But there’s a fatal flaw in most DEI policies. Let’s start by examining a benign phenomenon called “The Minority Rule,” and later we’ll see how it undermines DEI policies.

“The Minority Rule” Explained

Note: in this article we use “The Minority Rule” (with capital letters) for the concept introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Skin in the Game, chapter 2. This idea is only superficially related to the political science concepts of the dominant minority and minoritarianism, which are sometimes called “minority rule” to contrast with “majority rule.”

Take a moment and visit your kitchen or office break room. If you’re reading this on your phone, even better! Bring this essay with you. Look closely at the product labeling on your salt, pepper, vinegar, sugar, coffee creamer, and other packaged food. Do you see any of the following symbols on the labels?

You might need a magnifying glass; the printed symbols are tiny. Readers from outside the USA might see different symbols that mean the same thing.

If you see any of those symbols, you’re eating kosher food. Whether you realized it or not, you’ve been conforming to ancient Jewish dietary laws. Mazel tov!

Over 40% of the packaged food sold in the United States is certified kosher. Even your soy sauce has (probably) been kashrut-ified by a rabbi! Yet, Jews who keep kosher make up only 0.3% to 0.4% of the U.S. population³. Most online articles try to explain the proliferation of kosher products by noting that:

• The Seventh-Day Adventist Church encourages its members to keep kosher

• Muslims sometime eat kosher foods as part of a halal diet

• Some gentiles perceive kosher food to be cleaner and/or healthier

• Certain ingredients (e.g. shellfish) are forbidden from kosher foods, so people allergic to those ingredients prefer certified kosher.

But these other consumers, combined with the microscopic fraction of Jewish Americans who keep kosher, still don’t come close to 40% of the U.S. population. What gives?

The Minority Rule: survival of the stubborn-est

A tiny minority can exert a huge impact on the rest of society when the following conditions are true:

1. Minority intransigence: the minority group must stubbornly refuse to partake in what everyone else is eating, buying, believing, smoking, speaking, and verb-ing.

2. Majority accommodation: the majority group must be tolerant of the minority’s stubbornness and willing to compromise with the minority.

3. Minority distribution: members of the minority group must be scattered throughout the majority population, not secluded on a desert island or space station.

Someone who keeps kosher will refuse to eat anything else (#1: stubborn minority). Someone who is non-kosher will readily eat kosher foods (#2: accommodating majority).

Meanwhile, the cost of getting a kosher certification for ultra-processed frankenfood is tolerably low (#2 again), so why bother creating one kosher and one non-kosher product? Might as well make all of your frankenfood kosher! That way, manufacturers don’t need two separate labels and two separate assembly lines, grocers don’t need to keep two inventories in stock, and restaurants don’t need to worry about accidentally offending their diners.

Finally, the distribution of kosher eaters are spread more-or-less evenly throughout the United States (#3).

Put these elements together, and you get The Minority Rule. This is how a tiny group comprising 0.4% of the U.S. population can have 100x the impact, causing over 40% of packaged food to be certified kosher!

The Minority Rule: other benign examples

No peanuts 4 U

If you have a peanut allergy, it’s likely to be severe (stubborn minority). Most people without peanut allergies can find plenty of alternative snacks (accommodating majority). Even though less than 3% of the U.S. population has a peanut allergy, most U.S. schools and airplane snacks are 100% peanut-free.

Welcome to the Hotel California

After choking on smog from the 1940s through the 1980s, the U.S. state of California now imposes strict environmental laws and regulations on its residents⁴. California made it illegal to sell cars that belch out too many noxious fumes (stubborn minority). Most of the U.S. rolled their eyes at California, but several other states throughout the country adopted similar rules (minority distribution). Car manufacturers decided that instead of doubling the number of car models in production – one set that meets California and copycat requirements, and another set that meets less-stringent standards – it was better just to build one set of cars that can be sold in all 50 states (accommodating majority).

Thus, California infected the rest of the country by The Minority Rule. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!

Lingua franca

Imagine a group of businesspeople from Kenya, Germany, and India meeting at the headquarters of a German manufacturing corporation. If none of them are fluent in Swahili, German, or Hindi, how will they communicate?

By speaking English, of course!

If a single person cannot speak the language used by other conversation partners (“stubborn” minority), all parties must switch to a common language (“accommodating” majority). This phenomenon also explains why constructed languages like Esperanto have been so slow to catch on. If an Esperanto speaker converses with a non-speaker, both will have to switch away from Esperanto to communicate. Languages obey The Minority Rule even though no one is being “accommodating” or “stubborn” in the traditional sense; inability has the same consequences as unwillingness.

Organic food vs. genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Someone who insists on eating organic food (stubborn minority) will not eat conventionally-farmed food. The reverse is not true; most people will eat organic food (accommodating majority) as long as the price isn’t excessively high. Now compare that with GMOs: most people who are intolerant of GMOs will refuse to eat them, while people who are tolerant of GMOs will still eat GMO-free food.

You get the idea…

The Minority Rule also drives the proliferation of mediocre-but-unoffensive restaurants, automatic transmissions in cars, and accessible bathrooms.

An unstoppable force meets an immovable object

At the heart of The Minority Rule is an asymmetry of tolerance. The spatially-distributed minority is unwilling/unable to join the majority, while the majority is accommodating enough to dabble in the minority. What would symmetry look like?

If the stubborn minority suddenly became tolerant, they would assimilate into the majority, cease to exist, and The Minority Rule would stop functioning.

Now consider the opposite case, where the intransigent minority refuses to compromise. Reaching symmetry would mean that the majority must become as intransigent as the minority. A sizeable proportion of the majority would need to reject kosher food, low-emission cars, peanut-free policies, Esperanto speakers, and automatic transmissions. When the minority and majority are equally stubborn, symmetry returns – and The Minority Rule ceases to function.

In the benign examples we’ve covered so far, it’s unnecessary for the majority to take a stand against The Minority Rule.

• Sometimes, an intransigent majority already exists. There remains a small population of car holdouts enthusiasts who would rather drive off a cliff than release their clutch on manual-transmission cars. Many cuisines are built on a foundation of non-kosher foods, and their adherents would sooner start a holy war before they give up their bacon-wrapped lobster tail with Alfredo sauce.

• Other times, the majority would gain nothing but self-inflicted injuries for their intransigence. Few people would pay more money for more vehicular air pollution just to defy California’s environmental crusades. If Esperanto speakers refused to transact with non-speakers, it defeats the purpose of why the language was constructed in the first place: to connect people.

Now let’s examine some less-benign examples of The Minority Rule. This is where the asymmetry of tolerance becomes dangerous.

The Paradox of Tolerance Will Destroy Your DEI Initiatives

Organizational DEI policies are mired in the Desert of Good Intentions. The Minority Rule creates explosive unintended consequences.

Over time, a tolerant society will proliferate with subcultures. This is the flavor of diversity that your organizational DEI policy encourages – presumably with the best of intentions. But what happens when one of those subcultures is intolerant of another? What happens when a subculture is intolerant of tolerance?

Recall the elements of The Minority Rule: if an intolerant minority is scattered throughout an otherwise tolerant majority, the minority will eventually impose their intolerant views on the rest of society. Even a tiny minority can have a disproportionate impact, like the 100x impact of kosher eaters (0.4% population → 40% packaged food). Over time, a DEI policy that is overly-tolerant of diverse viewpoints will be destroyed from within by the most intolerant viewpoints.

This is the Paradox of Tolerance: in order for a society to be tolerant, it cannot tolerate intolerance. Those who miss this point will find themselves lost in the Desert of Good Intentions while searching for a utopia where everyone sits around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.”

The Paradox of Tolerance and the dark side of The Minority Rule

The Minority Rule will slowly corrupt a tolerant society into an intolerant one. Consider the asymmetry of tolerance in each of these examples:

1. In the U.S. state of Michigan, an LGBTQ+ community welcomed and supported Muslim immigrants. In 2015, residents elected a Muslim mayor and Muslim-majority city council in defiance of the Islamophobic climate in the United States and Europe at the time⁵. Since then, the relations between the two communities have soured, then curdled. In mid-2023, an all-Muslim city council voted unanimously to ban LGBTQ+ rainbow flags from city property⁶. Many residents feel betrayed by the same people they helped years earlier.

2. Most censorship is driven by The Minority Rule. All it takes is a small, motivated, and extremely stubborn minority to ban books, the use of four-letter words and racial/ethnic slurs, and the display of certain body parts. The tolerant majority may find the censorship distasteful, but they rarely fight back with the same ferocity.

3. During the Holocaust, why didn’t gentile residents in the occupied city of Warsaw help their Jewish neighbors? According to historian Peter Fritzsche, they usually did. But it took 7-8 gentiles to help one Jew. Meanwhile, a single informant could turn in a dozen Jews and their benefactors. In this case, the intolerant minority enjoyed an asymmetric structural advantage over an equally intolerant majority.

4. A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. That’s because misinformation spreads by The Minority Rule. There are two asymmetries here:

   1. First, the tiny minority that generates misinformation is extremely intolerant of truth, while the majority is comparatively tolerant of falsehoods. How many people go out their way to fact-check everything they see?

   2. Second, it’s much easier for a tiny number of people to manufacture misinformation than it is for fact-checkers to disprove it. Even when misinformation creators and fact-checkers are equally intolerant, the creators have the upper hand.

How to defend your DEI policy against the encroachment of intolerance

The Paradox of Tolerance postulates that a tolerant organization must be intolerant of intolerance. For an organization’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policy to work, it must suppress the diversity of intolerant opinions, treat those viewpoints as unequal, and exclude the people who hold them. In practical terms, that means sabotaging the three elements of The Minority Rule:

1. Minority intolerance: the people with intolerant viewpoints can be trained or re-educated⁷. Failing that, they must be prevented from organizing and acting on their viewpoints.

2. Majority accommodation: the leaders who enforce the DEI policy must stop accommodating intolerance and start fighting fire with fire. Becoming as intolerant as the minority will neutralize the asymmetry that drives The Minority Rule.

3. Minority distribution: members of the intolerant minority can be fired or sequestered into a part of the organization where they can’t do damage.

For an organizational DEI policy to survive, the leaders must impose a tyranny of tolerance. The fluffy, touchy-feely verbiage of “creating safe spaces” and “inclusive environments” must be enforced with an iron fist.

Sounds illogical, right? They don’t call it the Paradox of Tolerance for nothing.

The iron fist and the Silver Rule

Which flavors of intolerance deserve to be suppressed? What distinguishes benign intransigence from destructive intolerance?

• Benign intransigence: people who fall into this category just want to be left alone. Most people who keep kosher want to nosh on their rabbi-approved meals in peace; when’s the last time someone forbade your eating ham with butter? Most LGBTQ+ people just want to shtup each other without interference from straight people; there are plenty of straight couples who send their kids to “pray the gay away” camp, but have you ever heard of a gay couple sending their straight child to “pray the gay will stay” camp?

• Destructive intolerance: At the opposite extreme are the people who force their values on others. They’re the ones who are intrusive and/or persistent with their persuasion attempts, and they’re often contemptuous of outsiders.

The line separating the two is the “Silver Rule”:

Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto you.

Note the double negative here; the Silver Rule is not equivalent to the better-known Golden Rule⁸. Benign intransigence obeys the Silver Rule, while destructive intolerance breaks it. Here are two alternate characterizations of the Silver Rule that are less abstract, more colorful, and hopefully more memorable:

Whatever floats your boat and doesn’t sink mine.
Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

People who obey the Silver Rule usually want to be left alone; they are compatible with DEI policies. People who fail the Silver Rule are usually invasive; they are dangerous to DEI policies.

Where The Minority Rule bows to majority rule

Things get trickier when a minority straddles the line between “leave me alone” and “in-your-face”:

• A vegetarian can co-exist peacefully with carnivores, but someone with a peanut allergy could be endangered by a peanut-vore. How far should the peanut-phile bend for the sake of the peanut-phobe?

• Pregnant women, disabled people, and sufferers of chronic medical conditions (physical or mental) have special needs that impose a cost on the rest of society. What counts as “reasonable” accommodation for their needs?

• Minority groups bear the scars of oppression for generations, long after the majority has forgotten. Should these minority groups:

  • Display flags?

  • Have dedicated remembrance holidays?

  • Receive reparations?

To answer these questions, one must conduct a balancing test between the needs of the minority and the tolerance of the majority. An organization or country’s wealth affects its ability to accommodate, while its values affect its willingness. In these cases, majority rule determines how far an organization or country will accommodate special needs.

The DMZ of intolerance

At some point, someone will complain that the iron fist inside the velvet DEI glove is discriminating, censoring, or retaliating against their religious beliefs, cultural values, or personal freedoms. This often happens when someone’s freedom of self-expression (displaying a flag, using certain words, dressing a certain way) clashes with someone else’s religious beliefs.

• Suppressing either side exposes the organization to a discrimination lawsuit.

• Suppressing both sides is a form of censorship that creates a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the warring factions. This undermines the spirit of the DEI policy while upholding the letter.

Which is the lesser of two evils? Would you rather fend off a lawsuit or monitor a DMZ where the tension is so thick you can cut it with a knife? This dilemma is a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” and there are no right answers.

Tolerate No Intolerance

Let’s recap this long essay:

• The Minority Rule allows small populations to wield disproportionate influence.

• The Minority Rule requires a spatially-distributed intransigent minority and an indulgent majority.

• The key to The Minority Rule is an asymmetry of tolerance. Restoring symmetry will neutralize the minority’s outsized influence.

• The Minority Rule drives the proliferation of subcultures, including intolerant ones.

• The Paradox of Tolerance: for a society to remain tolerant, it must be intolerant of intolerance.

• Distinguishing between the intransigent (“leave me alone”) and the intolerant (“in-your-face”) is a good start for deciding how to enforce a DEI policy.

• If two belligerent factions are both protected by a DEI policy, the leaders are guaranteed to be burned by the lava flows of Executive Mountain.

1. What counts as “diverse/heterogeneous” aligns closely with protected categories in anti-discrimination law – what a coincidence! They include such categories as:

• Race | Skin color

• National origin | Ethnic background

• Religious beliefs

• Pregnancy | Family/marital status

• Age | Disability | Medical conditions

• Sex | Sexual orientation | Gender identity or expression | Intersex status

These policies don’t (explicitly) care about other forms of diversity, like the shape or nonexistence of your eyebrows, whether you prefer dogs or cats or saber-toothed owlbears, or closely-held beliefs about whether toilet paper should be oriented over the roll or under the roll.

2. As Abraham Lincoln once tweeted X’ed: You can’t believe everything you see on the Internet. “Diversity in counsel, unity in command” is an apocryphal quote first attributed to Cyrus the Great – without any proof – in a book published in 1979.

3. Jews make up roughly ~2% of the U.S. population, but almost 80-85% of them don’t keep full kosher. A sizeable proportion of Jewish people partially observe dietary laws, with abstinence from pork consumption being the most common taboo.

4. ⚠️WARNING: This Substack can expose you to critical thinking, which is known to the State of California to cause cancer-like growth of ideas, birth of defective trains of thought, or other harm to reproducing the status quo. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.

5. In 2015, the United States was flooded with political campaign ads that eventually led to Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Meanwhile, Europe was struggling under the migrant crisis.

6. The council prohibited all flags except for U.S., state, city, and POW/MIA flags, so in isolation the flag ban appears to be a non-targeted move. Put in context of the rising tensions, however, it’s easy to deduce the true motivation behind the flag ban.

7. In our experience, it’s (usually) a poor use of resources to break people out of their closely-held beliefs. It isn’t ideal to train people to remain silent about their intolerant opinions, but it might be enough to halt The Minority Rule. If you can’t cure, quarantine.

8. There’s an asymmetry between the Golden and Silver Rules. The Golden Rule is additive because it encourages action, while the Silver Rule is subtractive because it discourages action. The Golden Rule encourages you to interfere in other people’s lives (such as “rescuing” them from damnation, unsafe food, poor life choices, etc.) while the Silver Rule tells you to mind your own business.