Winston Churchill offered two brief, brilliant definitions of socialism: (1) “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” (2) “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” In other words, unhappiness is socialism’s lifeblood. It needs unhappy people to be the revolution’s foot soldiers and, after the revolution, its praetorian guard. Viewed that way, it makes sense to learn that a University of Michigan survey revealed that the larger the campus’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” program, the more unhappy students were.

The College Fix reports:

After implementing one of the largest DEI programs among U.S. higher institutions, the University of Michigan found in multiyear campus climate surveys that students felt less fairly and equitably treated than since the start of the initiative.

The number of students agreeing that they were treated fairly and equitably decreased by about 3 percent since 2016, according to the full results of the survey released by the university in January.

Student satisfaction with the overall campus climate notably dropped by almost 11 percent over five years, with respondents also feeling slightly less valued or that they belong on campus.

[snip]

The university began an expansive program titled DEI 1.0 in 2016. According to a July 2021 report by the Heritage Foundation, the University of Michigan had “the largest DEI staff on multiple measures.”

DEI administrative staff reportedly quadrupled between 2002 and 2021. More recently, the university employed five new faculty members as part of an anti-racism hiring initiative, which will eventually add up to 21 tenure and tenure-track faculty members.

A happy community is one in which people feel they are surrounded by potential friends and that their own lives have meaning and purpose that is tied to the happiness of others, as well as their own. Narcissists—those whose worlds are premised entirely upon their own needs and who view everyone else as either an enemy or a tool to be used—are unhappy people.

DEI, CRT, BLM, LGBTQ, third-wave feminism, and all the other movements, -isms, and ideologies of the left are inherently narcissistic. In true socialist fashion, these ideologies see the world and what it offers—wealth, happiness, faith, etc.—as a finite pie with only so many slices rather than something that continues to grow as generations add to it. With that in mind, they are in a perpetual battle to divide the world into enemies and allies, with the former to be destroyed immediately and the latter used until they, too, are enemies who must be destroyed.

That approach to life is a recipe for profound, perpetual unhappiness. The University of Michigan has taken taxpayer and private funds (including from parents paying for their children’s education) to seed unhappiness in their student body. In the old days, college was a time of football and friendship with, one hopes, learning mixed in. Now, it’s unrelenting, hate-filled, divisive activism.

I’m cynical enough to believe that this is not an accident. Socialists know well that they survive only through unhappiness, so they must get the institutions they control to keep people unhappy. Churchill was right all along.

If I were Queen for a Day, I would do two things to help America’s young people: (1) I would train men in fatherhood and both men and women in the virtuous necessity of fathers who are present for their children; and (2) I would try to turn back the clock to a time when campus life was (as much as possible) about wholesome fun, rather than drunkenness, cheap hookups, and racial, sexual, and gender madness and competition.

Image by Andrea Widburg, using U. of Michigan Law Quadrangle by jeffwilcox (CC BY 2.0) and Gloomy couple by wayhomestudio.