The Patriot Post® · The Left Will Teach You How to Think

In the movie “A Clockwork Orange,” thug anti-hero Alex is forced to endure aversion therapy to mend his violent ways. The “Ludovico Technique” consisted of strapping Alex in a chair, while employing a specula to hold his eyes open. He was then forced to watch a series of violent images after being given a drug that would induce nausea, fear and paralysis. The therapy was aimed at conditioning Alex to experience extreme sickness when he got involved in, or even thought about violence, with the intent of eliminating such behavior forever.

While the movie and the novel that inspired it were works of fiction, the National Football League is poised to take a similar technique and make it reality.

“The NFL hopes to leverage the immersive power of virtual reality, referred to by experts as ‘presence,’” reports USA Today columnist Marco della Cava. “By putting on goggles that replace the real world with interactive VR scenes, the brain comes close to truly believing what it is seeing. The effect of such realism could be lasting behavioral change.”

Concussions do the same thing.

What behavioral change do they want? Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, whose mission includes using VR technology to “improve everyday life,” makes the intent of this particular application clear: “Feeling prejudice by walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is what VR was made for.”

In other words, the NFL wants to strap VR headsets on its players for the purposes of diversity training.

“VR can deliver on real social issues that allow people to be better,” insists NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent, who visited the Interaction Lab last summer with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. “We’ll start using this as another teaching tool later this year. We want to be known as the best place to work.”

Being the best place to work apparently requires a religious worship at the leftist altar known as diversity, and the NFL intends to force-feed that diversity into management positions. At the NFL’s first ever Women’s Summit held in February, commissioner Goodell announced he would implement a “Rooney Rule” for women. It mandates that at least one woman be interviewed for every executive position opening. This is an update on the original Rooney Rule, established in 2003 and named after 84-year-old Pittsburg Steeler owner Dan Rooney, who chairs the league’s diversity committee. The original implementation required teams to interview at least one minority candidate for any open head-coaching position.

The NFL has 32 teams. Currently, six head coaches are minorities — five black Americans and one Hispanic — meaning they comprise 18.75% of the league’s head coaches. Minority assistant coaches, of which there are hundreds, comprised 16% of staff in 1991, increasing to 36% in 2007 and 29% in 2013. Nonetheless, The New York Times bemoans the lack of diversity in a league where black American males comprise nearly 70% of the players, despite being only 6% of the U.S. population.

Regardless, the NFL intends to take the concept of diversity to an entirely new level. “The Interaction Lab’s diversity demos are designed to transport users into unfamiliar and unsettling realms,” della Cava explains. “In one scenario, a user is represented by an African-American female avatar who is being angrily harassed by a white avatar. When the user reflexively lifts his or her arms in self-defense, the hands feature black skin.”

Harassed by a white avatar? There have been 23 NFL players arrested since the 2015 Super Bowl. Every one of them is a black American. Arrests do not automatically translate to guilt, but it certainly indicates that many black American players have at least poor judgment — which won’t be improved by diversity training.

Even worse, the league is pursuing this effort despite concerns by some scientists that overexposure to VR might induce trauma rather than heal it. “The question seems to be, if VR is so real it can be used for treatment, then can it also create experiences that are traumatic?” asks Mayank Mehta, a neurophysicist with the University of California-Los Angeles’ Center for Neurophysics.

What about good, old-fashioned diversity training? A decade of corporate-sponsored sessions studied by Harvard reveals that many of them are ineffective or also counter-productive, because many of the attendees felt singled out for “implicit criticism.” Perhaps that’s because the entire premise of diversity sessions is based on the progressive-inspired nonsense that everyone is a walking, talking swamp of “unconscious biases” that must be eliminated on the way to their version of Social Utopia.

Unconscious biases, as defended by whom? Mel Slater, a professor of computer science and psychology at the University of Barcelona and co-author of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, believes virtual body swapping could be an integral part of job training for people who need to be more attuned to the siren song of diversity. Quite unsurprisingly, he cites policemen as group of employees whose sensitivity levels might be enhanced by such “training.” Slater says, “[Officers] could experience themselves being in the racial minority walking down the street in virtual reality and being stopped by white policemen and just understanding how that feels.”

Or perhaps some of those racial minorities walking down the street might experience what it’s like to be a white or black police officer faced with the reality that black Americans committed more than half the nation’s murders between 1976 and 2005, and have an arrest rate for robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes that remains two to three times their representation in the population.

But flipping the agenda on its head is simply not part of the equation. “New approaches to diversity training are being pioneered, such as Google’s ongoing bias-busting workshops aimed at its entire workforce,” della Cava explains. “And the pressure is on to explore other solutions, as companies address workforce demographics that tend to skew white and male, despite goals to reflect the diversity of their customers, and as cities grapple with repeated instances of police brutality against African-Americans and low recruitment rates for minority police officers.”

Pressure from whom aside, one is left to ponder the ultimate question: Will NFL players, along with other employees in various professions, be forced to undergo VR training and other equality intrusive procedures aimed at giving them the “proper” outlook on race relations? Judith Williams, the new head of diversity at cloud storage company Dropbox, envisions a world where job interviews could be conducted in their entirety using avatars to make a potential employee’s race or sex unknowable, because for some people, “it’s really just a matter of never being exposed to their own privilege.”

Genuine privilege is owned by leftists who embrace a profound level of bigotry arising from the assumption they own the franchise on proper thinking. Even more appalling, they now insist that any deviation from their worldview must be eliminated, even if means having people endure VR training or other scientific “advances,” all designed for the same purpose: the elimination of free will — by any means necessary.

“A Clockwork Orange” is tame by comparison.