Utopia: The Myth Of The DEI End-State

It is one of the most persistent clichés in modern corporate culture. You have likely heard it uttered by well-meaning consultants, senior HR executives, and even passionate Employee Resource Group leads. It sounds noble on the surface, framing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a tactical rescue mission designed to fix a broken environment and then gracefully bow out.

There is just one problem: it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of human organisations, social history, and the very nature of human difference.

The assumption that DEI work has a final “completion date” relies on the fantasy of a post-conflict, perfectly harmonious end-state. In political philosophy, we have a word for this static fantasy: Utopia.

If we want to build resilient, adaptive organisations, it is time to retire the flippant narrative of our own eventual irrelevance and confront what history, philosophy, and political theory actually teach us about human difference.

The Satirical Mirror: What Thomas More Was Really Doing?
When Sir Thomas More published Utopia in 1516, he was not providing an architectural blueprint for a real-world society. He was writing a biting, complex satire aimed at the political corruption, religious hypocrisy, and economic cruelties of Renaissance Europe, particularly the enclosure movement in Tudor England that displaced thousands of poor farmers.

More played a deliberate, famous linguistic joke on his readers. The word Utopia is derived from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place.” It was a pun on eu-topos, meaning “good place.” By conflating the two, More was offering a subtle warning: any attempt to build a perfect, static, frictionless paradise requires a society so tightly controlled, uniform, and regimented that it ceases to be human. In More’s fictional island, individuality is suppressed, travel is restricted, and social harmony is maintained through strict surveillance and state authority.

More understood that a society without friction is a fantasy; it is, literally, no place. When corporate leaders and DEI practitioners claim that their ultimate goal is to render their own work obsolete, they are unknowingly walking into More’s trap. They are chasing a static paradise where culture stops evolving, identity ceases to matter, and difference no longer creates tension. But a workplace without friction or disagreement is not an inclusive paradise; it is a homogeneous vacuum.

Globalisation: It’s Not A Flat Earth
This desire to reach a frictionless corporate end-state did not emerge in a vacuum. It is deeply entwined with the ideological promises of late-20th-century globalisation.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dominant economic and political narrative proclaimed the “end of history.” Globalisation promised a flat world: a seamless, universal market where national borders, local histories, and cultural specificities would gradually dissolve in favour of a single, rational, global market culture. Corporations embraced this vision, attempting to build universal company values that could be stamped onto workforces from London to Tokyo without friction.

Corporate DEI was frequently co-opted by this same globalising logic. Inclusion was framed as a managerial tool to smooth out regional and identity-based hiccups so that the global corporate engine could run without interruption. The implicit promise was that once every employee was properly trained in a universal set of behaviours, identity conflicts would vanish, leaving behind an idealised, frictionless global worker.

However, hyper-globalisation did not erase cultural identity or socio-political tension; it intensified them. Far from creating a uniform world, global integration has surfaced deep questions about power, representation, local context, and systemic inequality. To view DEI as a temporary task with a finish line is to cling to an outdated, technocratic vision of globalisation that assumes human beings can be standardised into quiet consensus.

Antagonism vs Agonism
If consensus is an illusion, how should we understand disagreement within an organisation? Here, the work of Belgian political philosopher Chantal Mouffe offers a vital lens.

Mouffe strongly critiques liberal democratic theories that assume society can, or should, reach a rational consensus where power dynamics disappear. In works such as The Democratic Paradox, she argues that conflict and disagreement are not flaws in a society; they are the defining, permanent features of pluralism. Human beings hold fundamentally different values, identities, and worldviews. Trying to force everyone into an artificial consensus does not eliminate conflict; it merely suppresses it, causing it to erupt later in far more destructive ways.

Instead of chasing a false consensus, Mouffe advocates for what she calls agonistic pluralism. She makes a crucial distinction between two concepts:

• Antagonism: A struggle between enemies who do not share any common ground and wish to destroy one another.
• Agonism: A struggle between adversaries who disagree deeply, but who respect each other’s right to exist and engage within a shared set of rules.

For Mouffe, the primary goal of any healthy institution is not to eradicate conflict, but to convert dangerous antagonism into constructive agonism.

This distinction is profound for ERGs. The purpose of an ERG is not to usher in a cozy, conflict-free state where everyone agrees on everything. Rather, ERGs create the agonistic spaces where differences can be voiced, power dynamics can be challenged, and constructive friction can take place safely. They ensure that disagreement is channelled productively into organisational growth, rather than souring into toxic resentment.

From Temporary Repair Kits to Permanent Civic Infrastructure
When we abandon the utopian fantasy of an “end-state” for DEI, our understanding of Employee Resource Groups undergoes a complete transformation.

The traditional, outdated mindset treats DEI as a temporary project with a set finish line. In this view, ERGs are seen as temporary support groups or emergency interventions brought in to fix a broken culture, with the expectation that they will eventually dismantle themselves once equality is supposedly achieved. This relies on the false premise that employee needs are static and that cultural friction can be permanently eliminated.

A far more mature and realistic approach views DEI as an ongoing organisational discipline, and ERGs as permanent civic infrastructure. Just as a growing city will always require public libraries, town halls, parks, and democratic forums regardless of how prosperous it becomes, a modern enterprise will always require civic spaces for its people.

ERGs serve as these permanent civic spaces. They are the radar systems that help an organisation sense shifting socio-political environments in real time. They are the training grounds where incoming cohorts of employees learn the practised skill of working across differences. As long as an organisation continues to recruit human beings with varied life experiences, political views, and cultural backgrounds, the need for this civic infrastructure will never disappear.

A Call to Action: Ditch the Obsolete Cliché
The next time you hear a colleague or executive say, “If we do our jobs right, ERGs won’t exist in ten years,” challenge the underlying assumption.

Remind them that society is not a calculus problem to be solved once and for all. Remind them that Thomas More created Utopia as a warning against dogmatic, friction-free ideals, and that global corporate culture cannot flatten human reality into a quiet, universal consensus.

Our goal as leaders, practitioners, and network members should never be to reach an imaginary, static paradise where difference is neutralised. Our goal must be to cultivate resilient, courageous communities that know how to navigate disagreement with dignity, curiosity, and constructive friction.

Let us abandon the lazy cliché of our own eventual obsolescence. Building inclusive, human-centred organisations is not a project with a finish line; it is an ongoing, vital practice. And that is precisely why it matters.

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