Truth comes from combining perspectives, not eliminating them.

Diversity isn't ideology. It's the infrastructure that prevents strategic blindness.

Strip away different voices and you don't gain focus—you lose your ability to see threats clearly.

I arrived in the United States from Bangladesh at the age of 17, carrying dreams that outweighed my circumstances. I never imagined that one day I’d have the opportunity to contribute to innovation and transformation at the national level.

For almost a decade now, I’ve walked the halls of the Pentagon and sat in briefing rooms around the globe—places where decisions are measured in lives, security, and the world we leave behind. And that experience has taught me something vital—about both myself and my place in the country that I love.

Every time I walked into the Pentagon cafeteria, I saw something our adversaries fundamentally misunderstand about America.

People eating biryani brought in Tupperware from home alongside trays of fried chicken from the commissary. One table speaking Tagalog. Another, Arabic. A woman in uniform laughing in Spanish with someone who’d been writing reports in flawless English five minutes earlier.

This wasn’t a diversity brochure. This was the most powerful military institution on earth, and it looked like the whole world had shown up to defend one nation.

What struck me deepest wasn’t the technology, the uniforms, or the ranks.

It was the people—an extraordinary multicultural tapestry.

Men and women whose roots spanned every continent. Accents from Brooklyn and Birmingham, Lagos and Lahore, San Juan and Seoul. Faces carrying stories of immigration, sacrifice, faith, doubt, belonging.

All of them standing shoulder to shoulder in service of a singular purpose, defending something larger than themselves. And each contributing something unique to their work: a perspective that nobody else could replicate.

8 Billion Pairs of Eyes

Think about a time you were certain you were right and then the picture shifted because someone pointed out something you hadn’t noticed.

Not because they were smarter, but because they stood in a different place.

This is how human beings learn about the world, by looking at it together. None of us has an unmediated view of reality. What we see is shaped by where we stand, what we’ve lived, and what we’ve been trained to notice and to ignore. Our perception is necessarily partial and limited.

The solution isn’t to think harder. No amount of individual effort will let us experience the world from 8 billion different points of view simultaneously. But what we can do is bring together people who see things differently and add their perspectives to our own. Each individual point of view remains limited, but by combining many different vantage points we can gain the clearest possible understanding of the matter at hand.

I have watched this happen over and over again in briefing rooms. Someone who grew up in Karachi reads a geopolitical thread differently than someone who grew up in Kansas—not because one is a better analyst but because they bring a different angle that lets them catch what others have missed. And the different perspective those eyes bring makes all the difference.

The Illusion of Clarity

Now, consider what happens when you strip away that diversity of perspective.

If you enforce conformity of background and thought, you inevitably end up with a room full of people who share the same blind spots. And the worst part is, nobody knows it. Everyone agrees on the answer. Everyone thinks that it shines through clearly. The discussion feels focused, efficient, and decisive.

But that clarity is an illusion. Things seem so clear only because there is no dissent to challenge the consensual view. The room is seeing less and then mistaking that narrowness for focus.

In a corporate boardroom, this produces bad strategy. In a national security context, it gets people killed.

This is not hypothetical. The history of intelligence failures is largely a history of rooms where everyone agreed. The Bay of Pigs. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. Again and again, the pattern is the same: a lack of challenge to the consensual interpretation leads to a devastating error. Not because the individuals involved lacked intelligence or dedication, but because the room lacked the cognitive diversity to see what it was missing.

Foreign adversaries understand this well. They know that America’s pluralism is a source of power, and so they target it, amplifying fractures and exploiting the places where cracks appear in our trust in one another. A fractured America is a weakened America, and our opponents work hard to make the growing social fissures seem like a natural development rather than the result of strategic offensives.

But there is a more insidious version of this threat, and it comes from within. It comes from voices that frame difference as danger—voices that reduce patriotism to conformity and argue that strength comes from sameness.

An unparalleled depth of perspectives is one of America’s defining and enduring advantages, visible in our military, our labs, our economy, and our civic life. We don’t thrive despite diversity. We thrive because of it. We bring together the best talent from around the world and forge it into a single unit, the pressure of a common mission creating the kind of resilience no monoculture can hope to match.

Yet this strength is under deliberate attack. Foreign actors exploit our divisions. Domestic forces narrow “who belongs.” Increasingly, we see difference framed as danger, patriotism reduced to conformity, and pluralism turned into suspicion. This weaponization of diversity, its conversion from a strategic asset into a political wedge, betrays our institutions by threatening one of their greatest resources.

As psychologists and organizational scientists have established repeatedly, cognitive diversity leads to better analysis, better decisions, and better outcomes. If we lose the wealth of different perspectives that has its root in demographic diversity, we don’t gain purity or clarity or focus. We lose our ability to see the world for what it is.

Treat unanimous agreement as a warning sign, not a success. When everyone in the room agrees, the most useful question is: Whose perspective are we missing? Make it a habit to ask this before any significant decision is finalized.

Seek the critic, not the echo. Before committing to a course of action, actively find someone who sees things differently and ask them to make their case. Not as a formality, but because the discomfort of genuine challenge sharpens our thinking.

Notice who has stopped talking. In any team or organization, people who have something to contribute will keep their views to themselves if they no longer feel safe sharing them. If your meetings have gotten more agreeable, ask yourself whether that is really a matter of everyone becoming more aligned or because voices that would once have spoken up are now keeping quiet.

I’m deeply grateful for having seen America at its finest: diverse yet united by discipline and a mission that extends beyond ego or ideology.

Abandoning this diversity won’t make us safer; it will only make us smaller.

Every person in that Pentagon cafeteria carried a different history and saw the world from a different angle. Take any one of us out, and our understanding of the bigger picture gets a little less complete. The room sees a little less of what’s really out there.

The path forward isn’t about choosing between unity and diversity. It’s about remembering that these qualities have always been inseparable in the great American experiment. And walking that path depends on remembering that this is where American greatness has always come from.

We must defend this tapestry by recommitting to freedom, opportunity, and mutual respect.

And we can only do that if we refuse to sacrifice the infrastructure of truth on the altar of conformity.

© Psychology Today