Last Crusade 28: Thought is Thought Crime
In a previous column (here) we discussed how, if one were the Devil’s Advocate, one would dress up the Devil’s case to have the best chance of fooling the gullible. The first deception advancing the Devil’s cause is to say the Devil does not exist because no spiritual truth exists.
The second (here) follows from the first. If no spiritual truth exists, then only secular truth is true, and only science can settle it. Unfortunately, real science by definition is neutral and silent on social and philosophical issues, so the Devil’s Advocate can only advocate Junk Science, which is deadly.
The third (here) is that science has settled all issues, and no more debate is allowed, no curiosity, no thought.
A final deception follows from the first three:
For the Left, all thought is thought-crime. Thought must be abolished.
If thought it so be abolished, all must be browbeaten into a dishonesty not just of statements and thoughts, but of words themselves.
The Devil’s Advocate must advocate that all men never be allowed to call anything by its right name.
Clarity of thought depends on clarity of definitions. Instead of saying ‘infanticide’, say ‘pro-choice’. Instead of saying ‘sexual perversion’ say ‘sexual orientation’ and so on. The art of substituting a real and honest word for a false and deceptive one is called ‘lying’ but this art requires that lying itself receive a new name: Political Correctness.
In the worldview of the Devil’s party, words are weapons used to provoke emotional reactions, not tools used to convey thought. To speak plain speech frankly is called cruel and backward, but to use the elliptical euphemisms and jabberwocky of Newspeak is saluted as polite and enlightened.
The Devil will get no traction if he openly advocates evil for evil’s sake.
So any number of meaningless buzzwords must be invented which condemn normal things and sane things and good things, and imply am unspeakably vile motive is the sole motivation prompting a love of the right and fit and wholesome and good. Then the matter can be condemned for the sake of the motive, and the thing itself never be discussed.
A man who promotes chastity, that is, simple prudence and honor in sexual relations, is called a homophobe, and accused of having a phobia that is, a psychopathological disorder.
Sexual relations are called heterosexual, as if there were such a thing as sexual relations between two members of the same sex.
(There is a perversion of sexual desires, certainly, and mutual masturbation of the sexual organs to produce a sad, sterile, and unsatisfying mimicry of sexual relations, but as a matter of biological fact, the sex act can only take place between two members of opposite sexes.)
Hence, the matter of two sodomites wishing to desecrate the sacrament of matrimony by pretending their mutual masturbation must be sanctified by laws as a mating ritual, can be framed as a question of marriage equality, and the whole question reduced to a wordless bumper sticker showing an equals sign.
The nature and purpose of marriage, or the nature of the two sexes, can now be ruled beyond the bounds of discussion. Anyone who even uses words such as I use here, plain words, can and must be dismissed as an extremist.
Common sense and obvious facts can and must be ruled out of bounds.
Thought is thought-crime. Reason is hate-crime. Free Speech is hate-speech. So the Left can and must label all the faculties that make us above the beasts, for otherwise we will not surrender the gifts given to Adam of thought, reason, and speech.
Ergo one who says marriage is between male and female is called a homophobe; a one who says all men are born equal is called a cuck and a traitor.
Naturally no one can argue against marriage only between two sexes or against the innate equality of Man, since these points are tautologies. But if anyone who says them is heckled rather than answered, soon no one says them.
Likewise, a one who says male and female are complementary rather than interchangeable is called a sexist and misogynist; one who says private property is sacrosanct is called greedy; one who says the false prophecies of junk science must be proved scientifically before they are accepted is called a science denier; one who loves his country is called a racist.
All these falsehoods are not merely falsehoods: they are denying tautologies. They are denying self-evident truths. A self-evident truth is one true by definition. A self-evident truth is known to be true as soon as a words describing the idea are correctly defined.
Hence, all definitions must be changed and all vocabulary words must be false-to-facts, mere nonsense phrases.
The accusation is that anyone telling the truth has a bad, a terrible, and a reprehensible motive: he is a hatred-filled goon and a slope-skulled, lice-infested Neanderthal, loathsome and foolish in all respects. Likewise, the flattering defense of the lie is that the liar has a good, a wonderful, and a laudable motive. He is a paragon, an altruist, and a saint.
The single most successful lie of Political Correctness to date is the corruption of the word equality. The word is now as useless to describe something positive as the word racist or fascist to describe something negative.
Now, this is not because fascism and race-hatred are suddenly not obviously bad things, nor is this because equality is suddenly not obviously good. It is because the Devil’s Party wishes to abolish all discussion of these things by making the words no longer mean what they are supposed to mean.
One cannot eliminate the sunlight, but if you can convince the gullible that the sunlight contains invisible rays that will kill them, they will stay away from sunlight. So, likewise, once a large group of the gullible are deceiving into thinking the words racist and fascist merely mean a patriot or a tax protester, these things seem glamorous rather than repellent.
Likewise if the word equality is used both for a legal concept and its direct opposite, the word becomes meaningless, and even allegedly educated men lose the ability to understand what the definition means even hypothetically. They lose the ability even for the sake of argument to comprehend what living without a class or caste system, and having equal laws impartially enforced might mean. They are more than blind; they have lost even a memory of light.
Because many zealously dishonest men, no matter how often the matter is repeated, pretend not to understand that word “equality” let it be emphasized that we are speaking of those moral realities which all men by nature possess. That is, we speak of the essential property that makes a man human (his capacity for moral decisions, i.e. individual free will). In saying all men are born equal, we are uttering a tautology: all man by nature have the nature of man.
All men who are men fit the definition of man. One aspect of that definition is man’s moral nature, which makes it wrong to treat him as a beast, as mere property, as an animate tool.
An argument asserting that one class or caste of men by birth are born to rule and their inferiors born to serve is merely a flat self-contradiction, for its states that some men are men, and have a moral nature, and a right to think for themselves and for their inferiors; whereas other men are not men, but are children below the age of reason ergo never accountable for their acts, ergo have no right to think, and thus can and must be ruled by their superiors.
Luckily, this argument is never heard coming from the lips of a man who deems himself childlike and unable to decide his own life for himself. By the great good fortune of happenstance, or perhaps by naked hypocrisy, the man who argues in favor of inequality always imagines himself holding the whip, never receiving it.
Those who make this argument never apply the logic to themselves to conclude that their moral superiors are hence allowed to dictate their thoughts, including the thoughts leading to this belief in inequality.
An argument saying some categories or races of men have disproportionate numbers of intelligent, wise, or hard working members is neither here nor there. Whether true or not, it makes no difference to the nature of man, of law, of morality, or of logic.
It says nothing about any individual man or his rights. Is a dull witted man to be deprived of this fruits of his labor, or his right to select which bride to have to wife, merely because he is dull witted? His life is still his own, to make or mar as he would.
Those who scoff at the inequality between one man and his neighbor are not talking about the differences in their property, fame, talent, or moral stature.
They are advocating the adoption of partisan, partial, and unequally enforced laws, that is, replacing a standard with a double standard.
They wish to abuse the law, and make it an instrument of policy, to perverted to be a tool that favors one party or group or race or faction at the expense of all others. That such corruptions of the law are commonplace in primitive societies is no argument that civilized and law abiding men would tolerate such a perversion, or should.
In any case, using the power of Caesar to level all the accomplishments of men, so that instead of rich and poor all men are penniless slaves and are poor equally, and instead of wise and foolish all are forced to speak foolish Politically Correctness equally, and instead of winners and losers all losers get participation trophies equally… these and countless examples of partial and unequally enforced laws are called equality by the Political Correct liars, but in fact all these are the mere opposite of equality. They are egalitarianism.
Equality is the doctrine that the law play no favorites. Elitism is the doctrine that the law play favorites to punish the low and poor and weak, and make them serfs. Egalitarianism is the doctrine that the law play favorites to punish the elite and chain everyone into a slavery fare worse than serfdom.
Elitism sneers at equality as if it were egalitarianism. Egalitarianism sneers are equality as if it were elitism.
Both are Political Correctness, that is to say, lazy-minded lies to deceive the unthinking.
The words racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, homosexuality, people-of-color have been invented by Political Correctness to give a name to meaningless or untruth or self-contradictory concepts: those who say that civilization is not the same as barbarism cannot be contradicted, but can be called names, and so can those who say men are men and woman are not, and that sex with the opposite sex is not the same as homoerotic mutual masturbation. The words truth and justice, equality and equal rights cannot be eliminated, but they can be stretched to cover the opposite of what they mean, so that they cannot be used any longer.
Political Correctness both eliminates real words that refer to real things, and invents pretty words and phrases that refer to nothing.
The big lie of Political Correctness is that failure to use this politically correct vocabulary is an act of cruelty which will hurt the feelings of the person who is shouting you down.
Hence the second lie is that it is correct to lie.
The third lie follows from the second. If you (as his advocate) advise the Devil to tell men to lie, something must be done to forestall the obvious counterattack from honest men revealing the lies to be lies. The Devil cannot use the truth to deceive people, only half-truths, partial truths, shaded truths, and silence.
The Devil must silence any opponent, must make sure the honest question never gets a chance to speak, never gets to present his case.
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.
