More just

The Human Resources (HR) people have seized control. They have all been trained in the Eric Holder school of diversity thinking. And, just as they were installed in prominent positions in academia, so now are they likewise being installed in similar prominent positions throughout Silicon Valley. They are like Comrades Yeltsin and Kaprugina, the stern-faced, yet petty, political officers of the Communist Party, in Doctor Zhivago. They do not actually contribute anything to the productivity of the organization. Instead, as Uri remarks, their purpose is to enforce the party line in order to make things "more just."

Their increasing influence is symptomatic of the sclerosis that is taking root throughout companies in Silicon Valley. Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the process with startling clairvoyance even in the 19th century:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.