What’s Wrong With The World Part III —Illogical
Illogical
The first glimmerings I had that the rot afflicting the Modern Age was much deeper than suspected came, as I recall, in the 1980’s, when I saw a news report on what was being called political correctness or “PC.”
The new form of censorship came not from the Right but from the Left. It seemed that the Left, those freedom-loving nonconformists always willing to utter a swearword calculated to give the vapors to the small-minded bourgeoisie in order to advance the cause of liberty of speech and expression, wished to curtail liberty of speech and expression, not just of those things that gave them the vapors, or provoked their ever-more-hypersensative ire, but also to curtail even the possibility of honest and straightforward discussions and reflection on any topic related to their dogmas.
The sheer gall of the project appalled me then and still does now. The Moderns have an allergic reaction to the truth so deep that certain taboo matters cannot even be discussed. Not only do the Moderns erect psychological defense mechanisms to avoid confronting the truth, they have schemed to have the general society around them erect social, political and legal mechanisms.
It is appalling to me that the general society has so gracefully acceded to their irrational demands. Honest folk, whom I know in no way support man-hating feminism, will use “he or she” as if this is the correct pronoun for a human; honest folk, whom I know in no way wish to offer a mortal insult to their forefathers, will use “C.E.” (Common Era) rather than “A.D.”
To call political correctness ‘insane’ is to trivialize it. Of course it is insane: but it is a deliberate, coldly calculated, if one might say, sane form of insanity. Political Correctness is the deliberate corruption or confusion of speech in order to confuse or corrupt thought. This is done with the ultimate purpose of altering reality, by altering the perception of reality.
In other words, PC is the deliberate confusion of thought for object, symbol for reality. It is deliberate insanity.
It is a massive project of play-pretend, where thousands and millions of innocent dupes and unwilling collaborators are swept up into the project of playing make-believe as false as the flattery once paid by cringing courtiers to a tyrannous emperor, telling him with one voice that he was immortal, godlike, and his invisible new clothes were impeccable.
The modern manifestation of this cringing flattery is even more incomprehensible, wicked, and stupid than the flattery paid tyrants, because there is no emperor on the throne to punish a truth-teller.
It merely adds irony to insult to hear this insanity and inanity preached with fiery zeal from the sect that has always preached liberty and nonconformity, as well as preached the moral goodness of pornography, insult, and impoliteness. The coercion applied to the nonconformist is hence nothing more terrible than the frown of hypocrites who pretend to admire nonconformity.
If you are not philosophically inclined nor morally straight, I doubt you can comprehend the deadly hatred with which I, and all honest men, regard political correctness. For us, the honest, defining terms correctly is the essential single act which makes logical reasoning, and any rational or systematic thought such as law or science, possible.
Imagine trying to study physics without an agreed-upon definition of the basic measurements, values or properties of objects being studied; imagine a murder trial where the elements of the crime, the standards of proof, the procedures of the court were not defined.
Now imagine that an evil deceiver has deliberately, with the intent of preventing scientific research, with the intent of obstructing justice, redefined the standard names and terms of things to mean their opposites: you will have a notion of what moral, intellectual, and political chaos is created by a host of such deceivers injecting their nonsense words into the middle of otherwise ordinary discussions. There are certain political, social, and moral problems which we cannot solve, nay, we cannot even discuss, because the Orwellian vocabulary of propaganda has replaced the vocabulary of truth.
The madness here is radically and fundamentally ontological. The Moderns have a wrong theory of the nature of being. They think reality inheres in words, and not in the real things toward which the words point.
The Moderns are witch-doctors who cannot tell the difference between symbols and the objects symbols represent. To the modern, metaphorically sticking a pin in a doll is a crime (specifically, a hate crime), because the doll is the person; whereas actually sticking a scissor-blades into the skull of a man (particularly an unborn man) is not a crime, because a person is merely a manikin, an “unperson” to them.
The modern theory of ontology is that whatever we imagine in words is real: reality is hence personal, subjective, and optional.
Now, in real life, logic applies to reality, and paradoxes and self-contradictions exist only in words. The modern mind, since it has a diseased ontology, hence must have a diseased theory of reason: the moderns conclude or tend to conclude that reality is a thing of paradoxes and self-contradictions, and that if such paradoxes are discovered in speech, thought, or action, well, that can be dismissed either with a shrug of Gallic insouciance, a sniff of British condescension, or a scream of Prussian rage.
Hence modern philosophy takes no notice of logic at all, except, perhaps, to scoff at it.
In Communist theory, for example, it is held that the categories of thought, that is, the logic of the proletarians, and the logic of the bourgeoisie, are incompatible and incommensurate. In Nazi theory, it is held that the categories of thought between the master race and the under-man races are incompatible and incommensurate.
This theory is called ‘polylogism’ and it is honestly and actually believed by no one, not even its promoters, because if meant honestly, the polylogists would enunciate the various differing categories or rules of logic utilized by the different economic classes or racial castes: that is, the polylogist would say why “A is A” is true for Aryans and not for Jews, and what rules of logic Jews have instead.
Formal polylogism, far from dying off with the destruction of the Nazi regime or the fall of the Soviet Empire, has re-emerged in an understated or unstated form as Political Correctness in America and Europe, where it is merely assumed that members of non-White races, members of non-Christian religions, members of the fairer sex, and persons who indulge in sexual deviant behavior, have such different psychologies and mental categories from Caucasian Christian males whose sexual behaviors are chaste, wholesome and natural, that no understanding and no sympathy is possible between the two groups.
Such a massive repudiation of thought could not take place in a society with either a normal level of cultural self-confidence or a normal level of brainpower.
Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by design, the education system, firmly in the hands of the political Left, has lowered the standards and infantilized the students falling into its machinery to the point where most modern students cannot even comprehend the issue of what might be wrong with utter irrationality, utter subjectivism.
Hence their only mode of answering criticism is an ad hominem argument, preferably an ad hominem tu quoque, best of all an ad hominem tu quoque on a topic unrelated to the topic of discussion.
My complaint here is not that political correctness is dishonest. My complaint is that political correctness is knowingly, calculatedly, insolently dishonest: back in the 1980’s, I first realized that the rot of the Modern World was deeper than it seemed because I realized that the Modern mind rejected even the idea that words were supposed to represent things.
In real life, a word is either honest or dishonest. A word is honest when it represents what it is meant to represent. A word is dishonest when it misrepresents what it is meant to represent.
Modern philosophy teaches that words and symbols have no nature, no innate meaning, that indeed words and symbols are utterly arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.
This theory conveniently frees the propagandist to invent any set of words or phrases he wishes to have any emotional impact he seeks, without being chained to truth or honor. He never has to pay for his lies because if all words are equally meaningless then no one can ever call him on it.
For the Modern, words are either effective or ineffective; they either strike a target and achieve an emotional impact or they do not; they either move the listener or fail to do so. All speech is Madison Avenue advertisement, all writing is Pravda propaganda.
The Moderns call all speech and writing propaganda because all their own terms and words are propaganda: the pretense that these rude and vicious vermin are motivated by kindheartedness or a desire to include those whom the innate prejudices of languages exclude is contemptibly risible. The kind of people who call the Soviet Union a “Republic”; or who call National Socialists (Nazis) by the same word (“Right-wing”) that they call Republicans; or who label sound economics “Capitalism” as if the freedom to trade and labor were a coercive ideology rather than a description of the nature of man; or who use the name of Senator McCarthy as an synonym for Witch-hunting paranoia; or who use “he and she” rather than “he”; or who use the term “C.E.” rather than “A.D.” — such people cannot be reasoned with because they do not want to be reasoned with. Reason is the enemy to any who count self-deception their friend. The heart of a liar is not motivated by kindheartedness, but by a desire to deceive and to be deceived, and hence a hatred of truth and of the truthful.
Philosophy, the study of formal logic, cannot cure political correctness.
A person fallen into such a theory cannot be educated out of it, because he will dismiss the truth as propaganda, an attempt to manipulate. A person who embraces Political Correctness cannot be reasoned back to honesty, because (1) the process of reasoning presupposes honesty; and (2) the point of embracing Political Correctness is to halt the mental process of reasoning by effacing the meaning of words.
It is darker than it seems. The man of the modern mind is not illogical because he has not been trained in logic. The modern man is illogical on purpose, because he rejoices in unreason.
He thinks this servility to unreason makes him free. But free of what?
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.
