Beyond Arday: Affinity Groups, Collectivism and the Psychopathy of EDI

In my original July article I set out the practical case for why Affinity groups in UK workplaces function as leftist micro-unions. They exploit any law; including the Equality Act, manufacture grievances, impose conformity, generate legal and financial costs, and punish those who refuse the ideology.

In light of the Arday case where his recruitment and subsequent employment was heavily influenced by affinity-style working groups and EDI priorities, with him then taking a committee role within that EDI/DEI ecosystem, I think this topic is worth revisiting.

To understand the true nature of the EDI/DEI industry it is vital to grasp the mechanics of these groups, how they operate and the dynamics, and psychopathy at play.

We hear much talk of the psychology of the workplace, but little about that very psychopathy, so we can ask...

Why do these groups reliably produce the same pattern of division, coercion and institutional damage?

From the outset affinity groups are political formations of left collectivism who organise people by identity categories and place a power and oppression narrative at the centre of the collective.

That narrative, drawn from critical theory traditions is often labelled cultural Marxism which treats social relations as structured by systemic domination along lines of race, sex, gender identity and other related categories.

Coupled with intersectionality which supplies the ranking system, individuals can be scored by overlapping identity positions, and institutional resources are demanded accordingly.

The group then becomes defined by the applied shared identity as a member of that group, which by default, becomes steeped in grievance due to the fixed, unhealthy and obsessive worship of the oppression narrative.

As with any tribal behaviours this allows outsiders to be othered easily. Those who fall outside the preferred categories, or who reject the narrative, become the out-group.

This other can then be framed as privileged, resistant to equity, or actively harmful to whatever victim identity the affinity group lauds as priestly.

Both empathy and institutional protection are then rationed by category membership you are either in, an ally, or out, an enemy. It really is that simple and mirrors the absolutist nature of the very philosophies these groups worship.

Dissent is used as the primary evidence of the power and oppression in action the group claims to resist, a pseudoscientific loop creates an impenetrable barrier to accountability.

The Mindset of Relativism

Cultural and moral relativism removes the remaining constraints to any semblance of normality. Universal standards of evidence, competence and truth are subsequently subsumed and treated as relative to group intersectionality positions only.

This is the creation of an anti-meritocracy.

The application of which enables “Lived experience” (in truth just opinion) which is weaponised to override objective criteria, including science itself “Trans Women are Women”, or in the humanities; such as History, “Marsha P Johnson threw the first brick at Stonewall”, a falsehood that prevails even though corrected multiple times by those who were there; such as Fred Sargeant.

Though Fred, bringing that “lived experience” came from the “other” so is instantly discounted as a heretical utterance.

Wherever these groups or EDI are found, academic or professional standards become secondary to representational outcomes. Biological reality can be dismissed as violence when it conflicts with identity claims. Without shared external standards, the backbone that built our civilisation, the collective answers only to its own hierarchy of grievance and the actions that spring from that point of origin.

The Dangerous Psychopathy at Hand

This internal tribal structure, devoid of the shared civilisational spine that shaped our world, inevitably selects for and rewards psychopathic traits.

Empathy stops at the category boundary as defined by the group internal dynamics, it is selective and political in nature, a faux empathy no better demonstrated in the vigils held for Arday, no better illustrated than in the chanting of his name in London on the 17th .

The highest status and affirmation is gained by detecting impurity and enforcing the totalising line intrinsic to leftist collectivism, which increases as it devolves and corrupts over time.

Moral and emotionalised language becomes a weapon for domination, wielded by adherents, their allies and the politically and ideologically motivated elements of the media.

This often involves setting up straw men and working to silence others, as with Arday, where terms such as “lynching”, “murder”, “gentle soul” and “vulnerable” were used to construct a protective narrative around him and to frame criticism as illegitimate.

It could be read as a process designed to create a timely Messiah for use by the collective and its adherents to cement the untruth of the situation in the historic record a la George Floyd and BLM.

Though the George Floyd/BLM lie has been widely exposed and debunked over the last six years or so, it is not hard to see the same dynamics at play, the same leftist playbook and the same ill informed public reaction fuelled by their own gullibility and lack of curiosity.

Those who can best perform this type of manipulation and lying, coupled with outrage and virtue signalling, rise quickly to the affinity groups upper echelons, obtaining leadership roles through Machiavellianism sandwiched between purity and zealotry.

Once there they will feel little cost in harming designated targets (The Other) through the collectivist demands and processes of these affinity groups, and those who insist on evidence, proportion or ordinary reciprocity are side-lined or expelled on their way up for wrongthink.

Not every participant is a clinical psychopath of course.

The system simply makes ordinary conscience a liability and the relevant behaviours emerge in the maladaptive framework and constructed grievance of the group mantras.

History Repeating at Cambridge

The historical parallel is behavioural rather than identical, the historic record shows a consistent path driven by these behaviours in collectivised form.

That collectivist essentialism that collapses the individual into a hostile group category appears in different forms through history, which by rights should be a lesson to learn.

The Nazi hated the banker because he was a Jew. The Communist hated the Jew because he was a banker.

In both cases the person disappeared into the category and the category was treated as inherently hostile. Modern affinity groups reverse the moral polarity (oppression rather than threat) and operate inside liberal institutions rather than totalitarian states, yet the mechanism of collective essentialism and the othering of outsiders remains recognisable.

Maoist practice offers the closer match in methods of workplace ideological enforcement though the behavioural pattern remains the same. Struggle sessions, betrayal of family members and the destruction of the nuclear family in favour of an overarching toxic parent.

Cambridge illustrates the pattern inside a major institution quite clearly, though we could replace that failing institution with the civil service or some of the corporates and the situation remains the same.

Official staff networks function as affinity cells organised by race, gender identity, LGBTQ+ and sex. Intersectionality appears explicitly in university documents for it is the integral mechanism of decision making.

Recruitment practices are weakened, people are urged on by these groups and the ever present EDI/DEI bureaucrats to be “inclusive” in creating shortlists, and over time this manipulation and equity driven practice becomes widespread, thus anti-merit embeds at the heart of the process.

In the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, an equality and inclusion working group; that had supported Black Lives Matter protests, advised on hiring decisions and Professors who had published attacks on “whiteness” sat on the panel that appointed Jason Arday, and we should ask, how many others?

The pattern is consistent across organisations, identity categories define the moral hierarchy, networks enforce it, and dissent is met with collective pressure.

We must wake up to the fact that affinity groups are not benign support networks that went astray.

On the contrary; they are collectivist formations built on power and oppression narratives, sustained by relativism, and incentivised toward the othering of outsiders and the elevation of psychopathic behaviour.

They, like all organisations over time, tip to corruption which is why they fracture workplaces, erode merit and punish reality.

Abolition remains the necessary, and to be frank, only response.