DEI is America’s brewing soft Songbun system, and you know it
DEI is a soft caste system dressed in buzz phrases, like identity over merit, and silence over truth. And most are too afraid to say it.
America doesn’t have a Ministry of Loyalty because it doesn’t need one.
In today’s elite and everyday institutions, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) already functions as a soft version of North Korea’s Songbun system, a rigid, identity-based caste structure that determines opportunity, status, and worth.
Songbun 101: A system built to control
In North Korea, Songbun was a hereditary status the state assigned. It sorted citizens into three classes—loyal, wavering, and hostile—based on family background, ideological purity, and wartime loyalties.
Your status dictated where you could live, what jobs you could get, whether you could go to school, and whether you lived North Korea’s version of a good life or died performing back-breaking labor.
It didn’t matter what you did. It mattered who your grandparents were, and your bloodline became your fate. In other words, for those in the hostile Songbun, they’re trapped in state-sanctioned collective guilt.
Sounds a little familiar, don’t it?
The brewing American parallel
Fast forward to modern America. DEI doesn’t call itself Songbun. It doesn’t have to, but it functions the same way:
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Your race, gender, and “lived experience” may override your merit, character, or accomplishments.
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If you belong to the right demographic category or “protected group,” doors might open whether you’ve earned it or not.
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If you belong to the wrong category, you could be told to shut up, listen, and check your privilege, even if you came from nothing.
They may judge your identity profile, not your accomplishments.
Reputation as a weapon
The Songbun system punished dissent with exile or execution, something Shin Dong-hyuk lived through after he was born a prisoner because of something a past generation did.
With DEI, dissenters may face cancellation, firing, and public humiliation. No, the state doesn’t do it (yet), but the social media mob, HR departments, and cowardly corporations afraid of bad press have.
Say the wrong thing about DEI?
You might get labeled a racist, sexist, transphobe, the whole nine yards, regardless of intent or truth. And once that label sticks, good luck finding work in academia, publishing, or tech again.
It’s moral coercion with institutional power backing it, designed to make people self-censor and conform out of fear.
A manufactured moral hierarchy
DEI’s logic is simple: Some groups are forever victims, others forever oppressors. Sounds like something Lenin, Hitler, and so many other dictators whose actions ended up killing millions of people believed in.
The so-called “fix?” Reverse the order.
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Formerly “oppressed” = promoted by default
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Formerly “privileged” = demoted, silenced, re-educated
It’s a similar revolutionary logic Kim Il-sung used to justify Songbun: “We’re not building a caste system. We’re correcting historical injustice.”
No, Kim never said the above quote. That’s how he sold it and how the DEI mob sells it. It’s also how people swallow it.
Hell, even Salazar Slytherin thought that way if you read between the lines in Harry Potter. Why did he hate Muggles? They were suppressing witches and wizards. Funny how there’s so much truth even in fiction, yeah?
The grand illusion of inclusion
DEI cloaks itself in the language of healing and community, just like totalitarian systems always do.
They’ll claim they’re protecting, and not coercing you. That they’re holding people from historically “privileged” groups accountable.
That’s why it works. It’s not a jackboot, but a branded seminar. Not a gulag, but a LinkedIn post.
Still, make no mistake. The effect is the same. It’s ideological conformity enforced through fear, social pressure, and bureaucratic control.
America’s new caste system
We used to reward people based on what they built, what they achieved, and what they sacrificed. Now we reward people based on what they are, and punish them if they don’t recite the new orthodoxy word-for-word.
This is a power grab masked in justice. And like Songbun, it will destroy the very thing it pretends to protect: human dignity, individual worth, and the merit that once made the West great.
Want to break the cycle?
Stop playing along, stop being a coward, and start telling the truth, even if it costs you.
Because the only thing more dangerous than a boot on your neck is a smiling face asking you to kneel and lick that boot.
Yeah, and do you know who else refuses to kneel? Kaija Jokiharju, the protagonist in my dark paranormal fantasy, Cursed Mage. It’s subtle, but the libertarian theme’s there, and Kaija wastes no time reassuring her roommate, Satu, that the girl’s not a judgmental person.
But the question is: Why does Sats, as she’s affectionately called, think she’s so judgmental to begin with? Because Fenn University, where she and Kaija attend school, made her write a summer essay with the prompt, When did I realize I was a judgmental person.
Sats is a smart girl, don’t get me wrong. But Fenn, an Ivy League-equivalent of our own world, sees Sats, a well-off girl from an affluent family, as rather privileged. So, it’s no wonder they made her write such an essay.
And it goes to show that, even if Sats is a libertarian, she’s vulnerable to cognitive conditioning.
Want to meet her and Kaija? Why not give Cursed Mage a whirl? Get the book at my own personal store, and save yourself both money and peace of mind that there won’t be an algorithm tracking that sale.
