Political Correctness is the Substance of Darkness PART I
My recent encounter with the booklet THOUGHT PRISON by Bruce Charlton was thought provoking enough and eye opening enough to challenge me to gather in to one place my thoughts on the nature of modernism, liberalism, leftwingism, socialism, materialism, pseudo-Darwinism, deconstructionism, and all the other ‘isms’ grouped under the general umbrella of Progressive thought. As Mr Charlton did, rather than struggle to find a word to define a cloud of thought its partisans take great pains to make undefined, I will here call all these streams of Progressive thought ‘Political Correctness’ or PC.
I recommend the book. My one reservation is that Mr Charlton sees no hope for the overthrow of PC. Because he writes in an aphoristic style, I do not know what reasoning or evidence convinced him of the point, so I cannot argue against it. I will, despite my general agreement and great admiration for his work
My opinion is that to define PC is tantamount to destroying it.
That is precisely why PC folk take such steps to obscure their meaning, goals, and means. That is why they will not be ‘labeled’ and why they dismiss those of us who label them as thinking in a way that is ‘too black and white’ i.e. too simplistic. Their thinking is to say ‘black is white’ i.e. inversion, paradox, falsehood.
When you say nonsense clearly, it has no persuasive force: you raise a smile rather than raise an army. But when you utter nonsense obscurely, ah, then you are like unto a spirit of the kingdom of darkness, and no one can see you, no one grapple you, no one smite you with his sword. The mission of PC is sabotage, not melee: and saboteurs do not like banners and uniforms to identify them no more than PC likes definitions, labels, reason.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, you need but call them by their right name to watch them rip themselves in half in fury.
The modernists of PC gained their predominance by persuading people not that PC was true (for they do not believe it true) but that it is nice, and that we, to be nice, must also pretend to be nice.Any opposition of the undefined niceness is defined as not nice.
Their gains were rapid, but it took them a century or more to gain them, and, by the nature of PC, the gains cannot be permanent. Let their losses begin today, and now, even if it takes ten centuries, or longer. I need but convince one mind to turn away from political correctness toward factual correctness, and their armies are forever one man shy. He need but convince two, and so forth. They did not win all at one dramatic stroke, nor shall we.
I begin with a quote from David M. Huntwork at Ornery American http://www.ornery.org/essays/2007-10-11-1.html. His is the introductory paragraph. Kai Chang’s words are in italics.
Kai Chang from the blog Zuky wrote a piece titled The Greatest Clichéé: The Unexamined Propaganda of “Political Correctness” which sought to ”reclaim” the phrase Political Correctness and to wave a finger at all those who have dared to strike back at the PC advocates. It has been hailed as the “”definitive analysis of Political Correctness”” by a variety of Left wing bloggers while at the same time completely sidestepping its true nature. The author manages to both deny and misguide when it comes to this issue. His obvious hesitancy in dealing with the PC movement is both striking and revealing.
The phrase “politically correct” can be used in two distinct ways: either with its original literal meaning, or with the mocking sarcasm that’s common these days. I’ll get to the former in a moment, but I’ll begin with the latter. As it’s commonly used, “PC” is a deliberately imprecise expression (just try finding or writing a terse, precise definition) because its objective isn’t to communicate a substantive idea, but simply to sneer and snivel about the linguistic and cultural burdens of treating all people with the respect and sensitivity with which they wish to be treated. Thus, the Herculean effort required to call me “Asian American” rather than “chink” is seen as a concession to “the PC police”, an unsettling infringement on the free-wheeling conversation of, I suppose, “non-chinks”. Having to refer to black folks as “African Americans” rather than various historically-prevalent epithets surely strikes some red-blooded blue-balled white-men as a form of cultural oppression. Having to refer to “women” rather than “bitches” lays a violent buzzkill on the bar-room banter of men preoccupied with beating on their chests and off other body parts.
Usually we conservatives are so taken aback by farragoes of vicious nonsense that we can think of nothing polite to say in reply. The sheer insolence of the denial of reality, the sheer nonsense of the illogic, leaves the conservative mind, which is to say, the rational mind, dumbfounded. We continue to be so amazed at the sheer effrontery of the falsehood, and unparalleled silliness of the denial, that our all too human reason is left with no traction, no means to construct an argument.
You cannot argue against Jabberwocky. If someone says you are a mimsy borogrove or a frumious Bandersnatch, what is one to say back? You cannot reason with a man whose denial of reality is absolute. Once the opposition has established that evidence simply does not matter, what evidence can you present to show that it does?
Here below is a good visual metaphor for the relation between Political Correctness and Logic, with Joey Bishop as Political Correctness, and Ann Morgan Guilbert as the bewildered faculty of Logic in the human mind confronted by arrant, arrogant, aggressive and utterly nonsensical evil.
Facts mean nothing, evidence means nothing, and as long as the pose of Political Correctness is utterly shameless, never cracking a smile or looking embarrassed, it can withstand any fact, any evidence, any logic, any proof, merely by going, “What? Who? Where? When?” ad nauseam.
Socialism has failed, and failed spectacularly, every place it has been tried. It does not work in practice, and, despite what they told you in school, dear reader, it does not make any sense in theory. So these folks and their dreams and schemes are not only evil, they are also wrong.
And they are immune to reason. History speaks, and renders a verdict. PC, like Joey Bishop seen here above, just pretend no one said anything.
“But Charlie? Aren’t you even ashamed of yourself?”
“Why…?”
What about all those tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people who were butchered, killed, starved, terrified, persecuted, dehumanized, harassed, enslaved, prodded, poked, annoyed, burdened, robbed, humiliated, annoyed, imposed upon, and lied to during this, the most violent era in human history?
Leaving aside the genocides of the violent strain of Eastern European socialism, what about the inhumanity and Nanny-totalitarianism of the mild Western European version, not to mention the waste, the unhappiness, the loss of dignity, freedom, meaning, treasure? What about the sheer, mind-boggling ugliness of your postmodern, postrational, postchristian world?
What about the divorce rate, the venereal disease rate, the abortion rate, the euthanasia rate and your general fascination, admiration, and love of death? What about the utter abandonment of decency in the moral sphere and reason in the mental sphere? Aren’t you even ashamed?
Such is my question for the gray and establishment-maintaining radicals. I expect no answer. They are machines programmed only to respond with personal attack. They cannot engage the issue or admit anything is their fault: they do not even believe in cause and effect, really.
My question for my fellow conservatives is this: if paragraphs like Mr Chang’s written above represent the definitive analysis of Political Correctness, and this is the best the foe can do, why is PC so utterly victorious in every arena where it is engaged?
It is now the dominant paradigm: even conservative presidential candidates routinely use phrases like “he or she” where “he” is called for, or use “African American” to refer to black people from countries not in Africa nor in America.
Except within an ever-shrinking circle of Conservative commentators, and all arguments about philosophy or policy start and finish from the unquestioned and axiomatic idea the life is meaningless save for what meaning the isolated individual arbitrarily chooses to impart to it; that the arbitrary choice has no higher authority to answer nor standard to consult; that all ‘values’ are relative; that all cultures are the same; that human life has no intrinsic worth whereas aborticide and euthanasia are expressions of dignity and liberty; that neither matrimony, nor anything else, is sacred. All arguments start and finish with the assumption that reason is unreasonable and reality is not really real.
The motto of the United States is no longer E pluribus Unum: it is now Sensitivity in Diversity.
They have won. But they are weak and absurd and nonsensical, not to mention vulgar and boring. And yet this, this, is the dominant paradigm and the Spirit of the Age.
But it is a spirit as craven as a naked rat, sniveling, shrill as a spoiled child, petulant, violent, and unutterably stupid and petty and small. We conservatives walk through the wreckage of vanquished walled towns and cathedrals, seeing the litter of statues of breathtaking glory trampled and broken underfoot, proud armies with shield and spear thrown down fleeing blindly into bogs, or laying motionless by muddy roads, a feast for murders of crows and packs of feral dogs: and everywhere all the signs of civilization torn, battered, demeaned, cast down. And at the far end of the cratered landscape, beneath skies black with the smoke of vanished empires, instead of a titan who wears the constellations for a crown, we find nothing more than a limp blob of an overweight and hairless brat, retarded of mind and obscene of taste and morals, lying in a puddle of his own offal, playing with his penis and puking.
This blot is the enemy, who who is so frail he cannot stand to be called liberal or socialist or progressive or leftist. This the Political Correctness, a being too toothless and shapeless even to admit to his own name, and yet this is what trampled Christendom.
And the wormy blotch claims to be both sage and saint, superior to us in wisdom as well as in morals.
His warrant for great wisdom is that he says all intellect is vain, merely the by-product of matter in motion, or the psychological side effect of childhood trauma. His warrant for moral superiority is that he adores a sexual license and sexual perversion, that he is incapable of simplest moral judgments, and that he promotes and fathers all fashions of cowardice, intemperance, imprudence, and injustice.
How is this possible?
Well, let us start with the paragraph offered by Mr. Chang. I have not read the remainder of the article, and make no comment about it. I merely take this one paragraph as so clear an example as to need nothing further. I am confident the rest of the piece was of like luminous literary quality and broadness of judgment and depth of philosophical insight: dark, narrow, and shallow.
Let us review: Mr Chang says no one can define Political Correctness, and the fault is that of “deliberately imprecise” Conservatives, who fail to define their terms so that they may use the word to “sneer and snivel” about the perfectly reasonable request that they treat others with courtesy and respect: and political correctness is nothing more than not using the word “chinks” to refer to gentlemen of the Orient and “bitches” to refer to ladies, and the sole reason to oppose PC is, not because it is totalitarian selfbrainwashing nonsense, but only because courtesy damps the spirits of those drunks preoccupied beating their chests and masturbating.
The unselfconscious self-parody of Mr Chang, who evidences his “respect and sensitivity” for we conservative gentlemen by calling us Onanistic barroom ape-men speaks for itself, and betrays itself. Our friendly neighborhood thought policeman is not thinking in this paragraph, he is emoting, hoping by the sheer volume and furor and offensiveness of his prose to overwhelm all opposition.
This paragraph is not a courteous request for courtesy.
The difference between a civil request for civility and this wild-eyed hate-vomiting screed is so wide as to exhaust metaphor: gulfs, canyons, oceans, worldlets beyond Pluto are not sufficiently immense in remoteness to measure the gap.
So this paragraph is not about what it seems to be about. No one can actually take seriously the accusation that we conservatives object to Political Correctness only because we want to utter racial slurs, and the only check on our otherwise venomous tongues is our quaking fear of the clucking mavens of PC.
Modern PC is one and the same with those radicals, back in the day, who in the name of freedom of speech and artistic authenticity abolished all censorship or public checks on lewd, crude, scatological, blasphemous or prurient language. I hope I am not the only one old enough to remember the campus rioters shouting obscenities at the top amplification of electronic bullhorns in order to provoke the campus officers (or, later, the police) to using force to stop them. That they would then turn on the Conservatives and upbraid us for being uncivil and indelicate in language shows an ability to form airtight compartments in the mind where two mutually exclusive and logically contradictory outlooks on life can be stored until needed, each blissfully unaware of the other, not to mention an unsurpassable degree of shamelessness.
So if this is not a civil request for civility, what is it?
It is what it sounds like. Read the paragraph again, this time ignoring the alleged denotation of the words, and listening only to the emotional import. It is the preaching of a hellfire-and-damnation preacher, someone who wants you to hate the devil and join the saints, excoriating unforgiveable evil.
What evil? Ah! Here is the core of the secret of success of PC, and why we Conservatives have so utterly failed to rout it, or defeat it, or check its rate of victory, or even to engage it.
Political Correctness, and, indeed, the whole Liberal, Socialist, Progressive agenda is actually, fundamentally, and ultimately about …. Nothing.
It is nothingness to its core. Political Correctness is nihilist.
It calls evil whatever might be at hand to call evil this season. It is whatever institution of the Western world, whatever aspect of Christendom, folly or convenience or whim or tactical advantage have decided to attack. It calls nothing good aside from airy abstractions, a fluff of words that have emotional connotations, but no denotations, no meaning, no definition.
As a science fiction writer, I recognize the art of using words that imply something yet mean nothing. “Sustainable Green Energy” is technobabble. It is something that is supposed to sound vaguely scientific and impressive. Equally content-free are words like “Diversity” and “Sensitivity” (good) and “Discrimination” (ungood) and “McCarthyism” (double ungood) and “Fascist” and Racist (double plus ungood). It is the same as saying, “Flooding the deflector array with tachyon particles via the annular confinement beam will quantize the antimatter reactor in the warp core!”
The causes and movements and policy issues are never about what they seem to be, women’s rights or saving the environment or increasing the scope of government or raising taxes or prohibiting drunk Tarzan from calling his Jane a she-dog. That is just the fashion of the season, or the distraction of the decade. That is not what it about.
Political Correctness is a process, or, if you like, a principle. The principle is merely to invert good and evil. Then you attack the good for being good, calling goodness by outrageously evil names (the more intemperate and outrageous the better) until the good loses legitimacy.
It does not matter what the good is, or what name is used to attack it.
You can attack the sanctity of life in the womb in the name of women’s health; you can denounce chastity in the name of freedom; you can revile the free market in the name of humanity; you can blaspheme God in the name of science. A moments reflection will tell any candid listener to your screed that all of this is utterly illogical: child-murder has nothing to do with health, sexual perversion has nothing to do with freedom, the free market is the ally of humanity rather than it’s foe and religion is the ally of science, which makes no determinations of theological matters one way or the other. The institutions and the names used to attack the legitimacy of the institutions are selected almost at random.
No one actually thinks using the word “gender” to mean “sex” either cures any longstanding injustice against women or clarifies any matter needing clarification. No one actually thinks aborticide is a health issue as opposed to an issue of disposing of the end-product of sexual reproduction.
The words themselves can be anything, just so long as they are false. That is the point: to make what is evil sound good and what is good sound evil. Any human institution can be undermined and made to look illegitimate merely by performing this simple substitution of moral inversion. You call the bad things good. It does not matter which targets you pick.
The only thing that matters is the process.
The process is self-righteous screaming, starting from an axiom of nihilism, and using nothing but ad hominem attacks to rob any opposition of legitimacy, preferably anonymously, preferably in a mob.
Political Correctness is a virus. The process is using an institution’s own foundations to attack it.
The perfect example, if only it could be done, of Political Correctness would be using the First Amendment in an American court of law to have the Constitution declared unconstitutional.
The process cannot be stopped by any Conservative method of finding a political compromise. The process is not political, and the enemy is not interested in compromise. It cannot be stopped by logic. Logic is used by the process only to show that logic is arbitrary and invalid. It cannot be stopped by truth. The process asserts that the only truth is that there is no truth, and the process uses some truth (or half truths) to show this. The process cannot be stopped by beauty: PC hates beauty like trolls hate sunlight. It cannot be fought with force: the process equates force to oppression, and plays the victim card, which appeals to Christian charity and Angloamerican sense of fair play. We cannot fail to answer appeals to charity and fairplay without becoming unchristian and renouncing English heritage: which include institutions the PC wish very dearly to destroy, our church and our history and our laws, and that imponderable thing called decency and fairness.
How does the process work? And why does it work so well? Let us return to our example and see.
As with most PC screeds, the vehemence of Mr. Chang’s rhetoric in this paragraph is disproportionate to the magnitude, or even the reality, of the complaint.
So this is point number one: PC never attacks real enemies.
They are always attacking either nonexistent foes, such as the Theocratic Nazi movement inches away from world conquest, or foes so meek as to offer no resistance, such as Wallmart. In this, they evince the courage of a shrewish woman browbeating her henpecked husband over some imaginary insult, or a sneering teenage bullying a mousy mother over some issue where she lacks the heart to contradict her precious.
Point two: the attack is never measured, temperate, balanced, just, nor related to reality. If an attack were related to reality, it could be counter attacked by facts and logic. The viral process requires unreality to operate.
The whole structure of PC thought rests on make-believe, that is, on the vehement (often violent) denial of reality, and the replacement of reality of by verbal formulae of Approved Thought, formulae justly famed for their zen-koan-like detachment from reason, and their mystical tripping-hippy-like detachment from reality.
In this particular case, does anyone, even the most partisan zealot in a PC faculty lounge, honestly think that in the 1950’s or 1940’s the cruel drunk patriarchs of the repressive White Supremacists States of America went around calling their wives and daughters ‘bitches’?
Does anyone not a psychopath in a straitjacket honestly think that it was the rise of Political Correctness in the 1980’s that ushered in the new era of courtesy toward women, now that it is commonplace for men to doff their hats to ladies, hold their chairs or their doors? Does honestly anyone thing the ancient respect for ladies so assiduously destroyed by PC now somehow springs from and only from PC?
If so, it is a good thing all those “stab yo ho” and “slap yo bitch” rap songs from the days of Ozzie and Harriet have been swept into the dustbin of history by the brave souls of the Progressive Movement!
(I doubt PC will admit it also yearns to destroy all ladylike and virginal and matronly behavior in women, and have them act bitchy.)
Does anyone honestly believe this?
Of course not. Mr Chang has no concern for courtesy. Courtesy is one more enemy institution of the West PC wishes to overthrow and destroy. It is merely a convenient weapon at hand to chastise the upstart conservatives for daring to object to PC, and, worse, daring to admit PC exists. Mr Chang reacts with typical PC anger because to speak factual correctness challenges his arbitrary and godlike authority to establish reality by fiat, or, what to PC is the same thing, to establish by fiat the social narrative defining reality.
So, point three: the PC process works by substituting meaningless verbal formulae for perceptions of reality in the minds of the PC Apparatchik. Whether they actually believe these notoriously and blatantly false verbal formulae is a point to consider later. For now, it suffices to say that the word-fetishes are false-to-facts, and deliberately so.
The more outrageously false, the better. Let us look again at the example: Does anyone think that it is the Conservatives who steadfastly refuse to define what PC is, or to say for what PC really stands?
I will offer both a definition and, for the sake of clarity, an example.
Political Correctness is lying.
Is that definition clear enough for ya?
Is it insufficiently precise and substantive? I will add more:
Political Correctness is lying for the sake of promoting nihilism via deliberate cognitive disjunction between connotation and denotation.
Too technical?
Political Correctness is lying to promote the Leftwing world view, which, being false and self-destructive, can only be spread by words that carry an potent emotional meaning, but which intellectually and literally mean nothing.
Political Correctness is the attempt to promote a nihilist metaphysical and socialist political agenda via the distortion the relationship between a word and referent so to rob the word of denotation (literal meaning), and substitute a false but convenient connotation (emotional meaning) for a true but inconvenient one.
It is the attempt to invert thoughts about reality and attitudes on specific topics by restricting word use to stereotyped false-to-facts verbal formulae or word-fetishes as approved by a self-anointed elite.
The commonly found (but not universal) characteristics of members of this elite is their inferiority in every aspect of life to the common man: they are intellectually dull, fearful and uncreative conformists, morally corrupt, artistically blind, ethically indifferent to normal human suffering if not outright sadistic while at the same time gushing with feverish compassion for specific mascots either human or not whose suffering is minor or unreal.
Politically, they favor totalitarianism in the name of liberty; spiritually, they are idolatrous and benighted pseudoscientific materialists or pantheists in the name of enlightenment; ethically, they are crass hedonists in the name of higher moral perfection; metaphysically, they are nihilists.
Their faith is in death. Oblivion alone they regard as sacred and sacrosanct.
All the specific verbal formulae of their cult are aimed at the propagation one or another of the aspects of these various views.
In a word, their world view is the negation of the Western, namely, the Christian world view. We believe in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. They believe in political correctness rather than factual correctness, i.e. truth; they believe in calling shocking ugliness , aberration, distortion, and violently malign deformity art, and dismissing as ‘kitsch’ anything proportional, symmetrical, natural, fair or lovely; they believe in subversion rather than goodness. They hate God.
Let me hasten to add that these comments only apply to committed and serious members of this camp in degree, and to any specific member of their loose aggregation of followers even less degree. No one can be a logically committed nihilist and live. No one can excise logic entirely from all levels of thought and all topics. Various liberals and leftists and socialists and fascists of various camps and movements all adopt a different form and different degree of political correctness depending on their particular needs of the moment.
No one can consistently, that is, with logical constancy, and reasonably, that is, in a way he can define and defend in debate, be devoted to illogic and unreason.
My condemnation cannot apply to all Thought Policemen or followers or slaves of Political Correctness. A socialist might be a Christian, for example, or a ferocious battler of the imaginary ‘racism’ of JOHNNY QUEST might be a supporter of the Second Amendment.
All PCniks have one element or another where they keep a toehold on sanity, which is why they have not all committed suicide, but which element they keep in the realm of reality differs from camp to camp or person to person. It is not consistent. There is no such thing as a consistent application of a philosophy of inconsistency.
There is no logic to how illogic works. But there is this: if you engage the socialist on any issue where PC has driven out thought, he will use the PC attack method to undermine the moral authority of whomever opposes or criticizes him, and he will heap scorn and insult and sneers on you, and throw a temper tantrum, and boast of his (usually imaginary) mental and moral superiority to you.
Let me emphasize that Political Correctness is distinct from merely propaganda or advertisement because it is tied to nihilism.
I do not mean this as an insult nor as an exaggeration: it is a technical description of the metaphysical belief of a world-system which denies all metaphysical beliefs. They believe that reality can be decided each man for himself, by fiat, which necessitates that reality ultimately be not solid, which means, not real. That is nihilism.
Obviously if reality is not real, words are not real. Words do not mean anything, which means that they only mean what the Thought Police say that they mean. So a word like ‘Oriental’ which means ‘East’ (or, literally, meaning shining, as in the sunrise and hence the direction of sunrise) can be redefined by the Thought Police to be a racist slur: whereas ‘Asian’ which means someone from Asia (including White Russians), can be redefined to mean an American of an Oriental race.
The whole point of political correctness is NEVER to define one’s terms, and always to change the definitions of terms, and always to use words in a way violently alien to their real meaning: not just to lie, but to twist the relationship between a word and the objects the word allegedly represents so as to rob it of denotation, and substitute a false connotation for a true one.
This can have several tactics, all of which are served by PC newspeak. PC terminology is either (1) to use an euphemism to praise some vice or ugliness or evil of which the West disapproves (2) to use a sneer-word to dispraise something virtuous or fair or good of which the West approves (3) to use a scientific-sounding word to suppress the ordinary and common-sense connotation the ordinary word deserves, when Big Brother opposes the common man’s conclusions on the topic (4) to use a conclusory word to suppress continued thought or debate on the topic, or to provoke an emotional reaction rather than to provoke thought, on a topic where Big Brother opposes the common man’s openmindedness on the topic.
(By “Big Brother” here I do not mean a specific political party, or even a school of thought. I mean fashion. I mean the ideas that preoccupy the imagination of the self-appointed elite for the current season or the current decade. Big Brother is no one person or formal group of people: it is the consensus of PC opinion makers. It is everyone and no one. It is chaos.)
PC is a particularly intellectual form of lying, since it proceeds by removing the definitions of words rather than simply stating the opposite of fact, so that the fact that one is contradicting the facts can itself be lied about.
Obviously, no liar can admit he is lying. He has to pretend he is telling the truth, or, in the case of PC apparatchiks, “a truth” or “my truth.”
Let us turn once more to the example. Conveniently, Mr. Chang is displaying in one paragraph, in a nutshell, all the elements of political correctness at work.
In the example above, Mr Chang simply denies the obvious with the sangfroid of Joey Bishop in the visual aid above: he says PC does not exist, but that it is a deliberately vague smear-word promulgated by Conservatives.
Many examples could be added to this: it is the two most commonplace PC tactics to answer an accusation of PC is to utter a bland denial that it exists, or, with a charming disregard for logic, to utter that same denial combined with the accusation that Right-wing PC is just as bad or worse. Element one: denial.
Mr Chang steps without pause into vulgar ad hominem combined with a straw man argument, saying that those who oppose PC are contemptible brutes whose only grounds of objection is a base desire to utter slurs and insults. The comment is not only an informal logical fallacy or two, the comment is also stupid.
No intelligent person would engage someone making such a comment in serious debate, any more than you would engage a steam-whistle or a roaring mob.
Element two: intellectual torpor. Emotion rather than logic. Aggressive stupidity. Stupid aggression.
While saying PC has not concise definition, without a pause, Mr Chang defines it as the promotion of tolerance and respect. His example of ‘respect’ is to demonize all opposition in vulgar terms. His example of ‘toleration’ is to pretend he has been insulted by a racist slur when no one has insulted him but himself.
Obviously he means neither word, he is merely repeating meaningless verbal formula. That he has just defined what he denied can be defined. Element three: illogic.
Element four: delusion, play-pretend, make-believe, pretense. Mr Chang flings out insults toward Conservatives while claiming (and in this, he lies) that Conservatives want to call him a “chink” rather than a “Asian American.”
I am a conservative, and I do not want to call him an “Asian American” (because the phrase is stupid and meaningless) but neither do I want to call him a “chink” (because the phrase is insulting) but I will call him a Yellow Man, or an Oriental, or, if I am in a scientific mood, a “Mongoliod” and, if he is from China, a Chinaman. He will pretend that all these old-fashioned expressions are expressions of race hatred as bad as “chink” and insist that anything other than his preferred phrase-de-jour is not merely rude, but demonically evil, tantamount to a lethal assault.
Whether this make-believe that he has been insulted is used to justify the insults he flings against me and mine, or whether it is just a double standard, does not matter. What matters is that it an act. If he believes his own act, that is testament to his amazing powers of self-delusion.
But is it still an act, still hypocrisy.
What matters is that he really called me and mine bar-haunting chestbeating wifebeating dongbeaters, whereas I never called him, or anyone, a “chink.” He invented an enemy in the deep of his imagination, and projected it onto the Conservative movement. So what we have here is not merely hypocrisy, but delusional hypocrisy. This is element five.
He is offended not at any real outrage that ever effected him, but only at things either symbolic (as slavery in the antebellum South, an offense which did exist at one time) or fantastic (as the celebration of Kwanzaa on the grounds that Christmas is “White” and thus racist, an offense which never existed).
The nature of the offense does not matter, only the magnitude.
Like the assaults by the entirely imaginary Fascist Theocrats, it is better if the offense giving rise to the grievance is imaginary, since this frees up the PC imagination from the need to keep the demands for reparation civil or proportionate.
Best of all is when you, merely by existing, give offense, because then nothing you do can repair or ameliorate the wrong of which you can be accused. If you are a white mother living on welfare with two crippled children, a young black professional woman with a higher salary than yours can accuse you of ‘white privilege’ and she can wax indignant if, due to her youth, you call her a girl.
The PC religion has no sacrament of confession and no atonement, but it does have original sin. The sin can provoke outrage, and the lack of sacraments can ensure the outrage always continues, always grows.
What matters is his outrage. This is element six.
All the elements of PC are here. To be PC is to deny reality, to substitute stereotyped nonsense-words for thoughts about reality, to use the very reality one denies while in the act of denying it, to accuse others of one’s own unadmitted guilt, usually by blaming an imaginary foe, and thence to wax intemperately indignant against them.
In nutshell, PC is lying for the sake of nihilism, by means of substituting emotional connotations for objective denotations. As such, its nature is to be (1) unreal (2) stupid (3) illogical (4) hypocritical (5) delusional (6) vehement (and sometimes violent).
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
