Imagine you’ve had success in a field that has historically been dominated by people who look like you. You’re a man, and everyone, or most everyone, in your profession or organization is a man. Or you’re white, and everyone, or most everyone, in your profession or organization is white. That’s just the way it’s always been, and being white or a man yourself, you haven’t thought much about it. You’re comfortable, and successful, and the people you work with look to be the same.

Then this comfortable stability gets challenged. Women enter. Or society tells you that the reason your organization, or department, or profession is overwhelmingly white men is because of historical and contemporary discrimination. Now, you’re not the kind of person who views yourself as racist or misogynist. So your reaction to this critique isn’t, “You’re damn right we’re discriminating against women and minorities!” But if you accept the discrimination critique, things get a bit awkward. Because you also believe you earned your position by being better at whatever job it is you do than all the people who didn’t get that job. And because your job is high status and high prestige—you’re a leader in business, or a professor at a good department—lots of people want it. But you earned it.

Except, if the discrimination critique is correct, then maybe you didn’t. Or didn’t earn it quite as much, or quite as clearly, as you thought you had. Maybe you’re not as talented, or smart, or deserving, compared to everyone else, as you’ve been telling yourself, or assuming, you were all these years.

So you look for a way to deflect the critique. Yes, there’s discrimination against women and minorities out there in the world. But not here. Not in my organization, or my department, or my profession. Here all we care about is merit. And you’ve got a lot of it. And it just so happens that all the people with enough merit to get and hold this job are white men. Or, at least, the vast majority of them.

You need to be smart, and you need to be rational, and you need all these other positive intellectual traits to have your job. So what if it turns out that women and minorities lack those? Or don’t have them with as great a degree or frequency as white men? If that’s the case, then the reason women and minorities aren’t proportionately represented in your organization or department or profession is because, simply put, they’re less likely to cut it. Maybe it’s not discrimination at all, but just a natural unevenness in the distribution of the traits needed to succeed.

And here are these people doing race and IQ research who offer the appearance of evidence for that conclusion. Don’t dig too deeply into the scholarly consensus on that research, which demonstrates rather dispositively that it’s junk. IQ differences between the socially constructed categories we’ve labeled “race” are not large, and they’re not consistent, and those differences are much better explained by environmental factors. There are guys out there insisting otherwise, and if they’re right, then your position is, in fact, fully earned. So you want to believe, and that wanting to believe turns into actual belief.

Or here are these people telling you that evolutionary psychology (a more credible field, but one that gets misapplied and misused with much enthusiasm) shows that evolution built women to be less capable of reason and smarts and the focused drive needed to excel in intellectual pursuits. Women choose mates because they’re built to have babies, and your genius is a naturally gender-biased trait you’ve benefited from, like how only male peacocks have impractical tails, and one that signals your mate-worthiness to the women on their biological clocks. This makes sense. The evolutionary psychologists, or the armchair evolutionary psychologists, have pretty intriguing just-so stories to explain it, and if those stories are correct (and compelling stories must be correct, or they wouldn’t be compelling), then the earnedness of your position is secure. Women naturally won’t be common in your organization, or department, or profession.

The point, the reason you find so many elites drawn to these ideas, and why so many more of them express sympathy for these ideas behind closed doors, is that they’ve benefited from historical and social contingencies and a challenge to those contingencies—or the mere act of pointing out that they are contingencies, and arbitrary ones at that—is a challenge to the benefits they enjoy.

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