Political Correctness is the Substance of Darkness PART II
In our last episode, we discovered that PC is (1) unreal (2) stupid (3) illogical (4) hypocritical (5) delusional (6) vehement (and sometimes violent).
Let us examine each point in more detail.
(1) Deny reality. The writer here does not merely deny that Political Correctness exists, he says the word is a deliberately undefined buzz-word used by racist misogynists wife-beating drunks. He certainly does not admit that he himself is loyal to Political Correctness and zealous in its cause.
My first dizzying glimpse of the true and appalling lack of honesty into the empty souls of the PC crowd came when I was at a science fiction convention, listening to a panel on the topic of Political Correctness, and one otherwise sane-looking individual stood up, and pronounced in tones of smug and utter certainty that BOTH Right and Left were equally guilty of political correctness, and therefore morally equivalent, therefore the Right could not criticize the Left for being Politically Correct under the principle of equality we lawyers call estoppel. She acted as if she did not think anyone would contradict her.
The cold-blooded sangfroid of the psychopathic lie uttered by the sane-looking individual gave me chills then and still does. I do not know what is more disorienting and appalling: that she believed it, in which case she is insane beyond measure, or that she did not, in which case she is dishonest beyond measure.
(2) Stupid. The words selected by PC-niks are aggressively false-to-facts, the more false the better. The overall effect of adopting their Newspeak terminology is, as Orwell correctly autopsied back in 1948, is to prevent the speaker from speaking sense about reality. PC makes you stupid.
Let us not mince words. While there are some Politically Correct thinkers who have the gift of the gab, or have achieved either modest, or, in rare cases, great success in some unrelated field, by and large when it comes to matters of economics, politics, ethics, philosophy, religion, history, or any discipline of thought or learning requiring rigor of thought, clarity of insight, or knowledge of reality, the Political Correctness thugs are grossly unintellectual if not anti-intellectual.
The cannot express themselves in their incoherent lingo because their lingo exists for the purpose of being foggy, paradoxical, vague, and emotionally provocative.
Political Correctness is stupid. It is knowingly, deliberately, in-your-facingly, butt-achingly, vomitously, venomously, blatantly stupid.
To be PC, you have to say things like, “She is the first African-American of any country to win a medal at the winter Olympics.” You cannot tell from the sentence if she is the first black from America or the first black in the world to achieve the goal. And, considering that it is only her race which makes the victory history, the PC is left in the stupid position of referring to race as if race is all that matters, while, at the same time, pretending race does not matter, and, indeed, race does not exist at all, but is merely an arbitrary social construct.
To be PC, you have to refer to people as having a “gender” rather than words in a declined language, meanwhile pretending that sex does not exist but as an arbitrary social construct.
To be PC, you have to refer to the first year of the First Century as being “1 C.E.” the Common Era, but you have to pretend that there is no particular reason what makes it common to anything nor can you say to whom it is common nor why, nor can you adumbrate what event took place then from which are dated all the calendars of Christendom (whoops! BLANK OUT! There is no such thing).
To be PC, you also have to pretend someone, Jews or atheists or someone, both have a right to use the Julian calendar, and a right to be offended by the initials A.D. so that to insist on the factually correct terminology is tantamount to trampling the First Amendment, or committing a social gaffe or solecism. It is, of course, nothing of the kind, and if it were the PC crowd would not care, since they admire neither civil rights nor civility: but the process seeks to use your own sense of fairplay to destroy your sense of honesty.
The celebration of the event from which the calendar is dated, which (how convenient for you!) you still get off work, is referred to as the ‘Holiday’ because Christmas has also carefully been airbrushed out of the official pictures by the hardworking counterfeiters at the Ministry of Truth.
To be P.C., you have to consider it a serious question whether sodomites should marry, or whether teenage girls should compete with lusty teenage boys in school wrestling, or whether perverts performing bestiality should wear a state-supplied condom to prevent the spread of penis-rotting diseases, or whether a waiter’s lawsuit to get employment as a Hooter’s Girl is a valid EEOC complaint.
To be P.C., you have to take completely seriously the complaints, no matter how stupid, which complain that ordinary language, ordinary thoughts, human institutions, age-tested traditions, are deeply offensive to whoever and whatever claims to be offended. Since no one actually believes that the offense is legitimate, the PC must make up for the innate incredibleness of the complaint by uttering the complaint in a shrill, scenery-chewing spew of swearwords and insults and threats, preferably anonymously, preferably in a mob.
To be P.C., you have to say that all that is needed for disparate groups to get along is to have more state-forced diversity, as Jewess lesbians mingling with Jihadist Muslims.
Then say you can borrow your way out of debt.
Then say disarmament produces peace.
Then say policework causes crime, or is worse than crime.
Then say dropping the a-bomb of Hiroshima was racism.
Then say the US Constitution was based, not on English ideas of legal theory, but on Iroquois tribal federation arrangements, which the White Man copied from the Red Man. (Except you have to call him a ‘Native American’ even though that word means ANYONE born in America, and you have to call naming a sports team after a tribe of them a racist slur akin to Nazi Jew-Hatred.)
To be P.C., you have to say Islam is a race, and not a religion, and that opposition to Jihadist terrorism is racism.
The essence of PC is to define all opposition as a psychopathology: Islamophobia. Likewise a concern, either moral or medical, for the damage done to self, partner, family, or society by normalizing deviant sexual behavior is a psychopathology. It is defined as insanity: homophobia.
Likewise, there is no legitimate argument or valid reason to withhold consent from the more extreme claims of eco-alarmists preaching the End of the World. This is likened to Holocaust Denial. To believe that Global Warming is not settled science is defined as insanity: Climate Deniers.
The sheer improbability that all human beings whatsoever from all history and all nations except for that small circle of like-minded conformists to which one belongs, that same small circle which recites whatever the slogans and pieties of this season’s fashionable causes happen to be are, one and all, insane, is an idea so stupid that no one can believe it. The idea that there is no honorable opposition, no point on which reasonable men can disagree, and that fashion controls that agenda, is — I speak with regrettable bluntness—a stupid idea.
To be P.C., you have to say stupid things that sound stupid without giggling.
And yet, for all this, the PC regard themselves as intellectually your superior in every way.
You can quote Aristotle and Homer in Greek, let us say, or solve a quadratic equation, or write a sonnet, or change a tire, or run a business. They studied Antebellum South American Lesbian Puppetry, and got a major in Grievance studies and a minor in Whatever Dude. That makes them an expert in climatology, and, despite any evidence to the contrary, smarter than you.
These morons boast about their smarts like Bizarro from the cubicular Bizarro World boasting about his good looks.
A related bit of make believe business is to pretend that someone of authority and predominance, usually a scientist, has already proven some matter (usually one no one can possibility prove, such a whether or not men have free will) with such abundant clarity and persuasive power and publicity that no one could disagree—ergo all disagreement is profoundly dishonest, a product of moral corruption or intellectual incompetence, if not loutish ignorance.
From this bit of business we get the risible spectacle of sophomoric half-educated halfwits pretending the geniuses who disagree with them, Aristotle or Aquinas, are half-wits.
A parallel bit of make-believe concerns their moral superiority. We behold the equally risible, but far more disgusting spectacle of pro-perversion pro-deviancy antinomians and moral anarchists holding up their lack of moral character as proof positive that they occupy the moral high ground, that they are superior on the moral plane, and speak with the authority of the saints, and have the right to despise and condemn the common decency of common men.
Why? And since it is so obvious that PC is false to facts, why does it win victory after victory?
Political Correctness was started by Marxists who, disappointed after the Russian Revolution that Utopia, as scientifically predicted, did not eventuate, and annoyed that reality did not conform to theory, decided quite deliberately to abandon reality. What they adopted instead was a strategy called ‘Critical Theory.’
Critical Theory is the theory that, instead of just criticizing the current Capitalist world system on the basis of economics, to criticize anything and everything in the current world system on any basis whatsoever, and NEVER to offer any alternative. To destroy, but not to rebuild. To tear down, but not to offer any plan for what might be put in its place. In effect, the mainstream of Leftwing and Socialist thought departed from the Marxist philosophical roots and became anarchist. They departed from the materialism which formed the metaphysics of Marxism and became nihilists. Materialist believe in matter. Nihilists believe in nothing. Their point is to deconstruct reality.
The idea of ‘Critical Theory’ is to be critical of everything, every institution. The idea is to make so many absurd claims that reality would be smothered in the white noise, and the opposition would not know which absurd claims you really mean, and must be fought, and which can be safely ignored.
Since, ultimately, the principle of Political Correctness is simply the principle of inversion—good is bad and bad is good, black is white and day is night and property is theft and speech is repression and love is rape and sodomy is love, etc—it does not matter where the conservative chooses to defend. Any nonsense he does not answer can be used next season and promoted as unquestioned verity.
The point is the nonsense. PC is stupid on purpose: and the purpose is hellish.
You cannot drown out Right Reason in the human soul without first driving out Reason from the human mind. That has been the point and the purpose of every modern thinker from Nietzsche to Hume to Sartre to Freud to BF Skinner to Peter Singer. They don’t really care if you are a soul in a body as opposed to a meat robot programmed by environment: all they care about is quelling the faculty of reason, because without a paralysis of the reason, the conscience cannot be silenced.
(3) Illogical. In attempting to silence the conscience, Political Correctness uses the very axioms it criticizes. The picture of Political Correctness is of an idiot lumberjack sitting on the very tree branch he is busily sawing off.
For intellectuals to pride themselves on their inability to reason, and on their incompetence at basic syllogisms is somewhat startling to those of us who live outside Cloudcuckooland.
In previous years, some Political Correction Officers made attempts to write up a coherent set of doctrines or arguments to support their world view, but since their world view is one that fundamentally has no place for a world view, the efforts always involved some self evident contradiction, or glaring unwitting confession of hatred, inanity and insanity.
Karl Marx, for example, is regarded with just contempt by real economists. Real economists talk about things like the effect on wage rates of high tariffs. Karl Marx talks about the apocalypse at the end of history and the New Jerusalem it will usher in, and he never set foot on a factory floor in his life, but pretended to be the Darwin of economics, pretending to set all the thought of economic affairs and the rise and decline of civilizations on a scientific footing. He did this by ad hominem: he called all sober economists puppets of their class interests, whose consciousness was conditioned by the material properties of the tools of production around them.
Nietzsche is regarded as one of the most popular and insightful philosophers of the modern day, albeit no two thoughts of his that I have ever read were ever connected one to the next by any logical sequence. His books are like reading stream of consciousness philosophy: James Joyce doing Socrates. His most famous moment came when he declared God was Dead. He did this by ad hominem: he called those who believed in God cowards.
BF Skinner is regarded as a psychiatrist. His basic thought was that all human thought is meaningless because conditioned or caused entirely by material stimuli in the environment. He attempted to argue in favor of this point rather than simply describing the environment into which we should put ourselves so as to be conditioned to believe it.
Freud believed all human thought is created by subconscious infant trauma. He supported this theory by ad hominem: when Jung proposed a different theory, Freud had him expelled and anathematized, and attributed the aberration to some subconscious infant trauma in Jung.
Political Correctness proceeds from the basis of a world view that is fundamentally hostile to the norms of human experience, tradition, reason, wisdom, and logic. Its basic world view is irrationalism: in a nihilistic world where there are no facts, no reality, no standard, the only thing that serves as a basis to accept or reject a thought is the person on whose authority one accepts it.
Hence, all PC thinking at its root is conformist and totalitarian. The anger and outrage, the plethora of insults and slanders that issue from the organs of PC against those who dare question it, is the anger of a petty and uncertain tyrant whose authority is challenged. They ALWAYS respond with a personal attack, because they feel in their hearts that for you to challenge their authority is always personal.
Hence, argumentum ad hominem is their first, last, and usually their only line of attack. There is never a defense, only an attack.
(4) Hypocritical. The Ad Hominem attack is usually nothing more than a confession of the attacker’s own guilt. He accuses others of being what he himself is, or doing what he himself does. Hence you have the grotesque spectacle of the Democrat Party, the party that supported the South during the Civil War, and supported Jim Crow laws, and supported the KKK, and opposed the Civil Rights Act (at least, in greater numbers than Republicans) calling the people who armed the blacks with firearms after the war to protect themselves from whites, the National Rifle Association, racists. No Republican ever stood in a schoolhouse door to prevent a black student from entering.
Political Correctness is a virus in that is uses the very institutions it is attempting to destroy to destroy them, in the same way a virus destroys it host to reproduce.
The peculiar helplessness of Conservatives in the face of aggressive Political Correctness attacks is akin to the helplessness of the West in the face of suicide-bombers. We have no way to engage the suicidal in our Western way of war, which attempts to minimize civilian causalities and to attack an enemy head-on. Likewise, there is no way to engage an aggressively illogical foe, one who regards logic as weakness and folly, with a logical argument.
The Conservative, being a logical thinker, always attempts to engage the topic being discussed. But the only topic being discussed really is the hatred of the PCnik for the Conservative. There is no other message. It does not matter what is being talked about.
This is another reason why the Conservatives are singularly helpless before the onslaught of nonsense. The PC hypocrite has no particular loyalty to whatever the fashionable cause of this season happens to be. He will betray women’s rights to placate the Islamic terrorists the moment feminism is no longer useful to denigrate Western civilization and Islam is. As of that tipping point, whenever it appears, Eastasia is no longer at war with Oceania and has never been at war with Oceania; Oceania is at war with Eurasia and has always been at war with Eurasia.
One second before the tipping point the PC are so careful and solicitous of the rights of women that they insist schoolgirls engage in school wrestling matches with schoolboys as equals, and that the nuances of pronoun use in the English language be altered to accommodate them, and that offering to walk a female employee to her car to protect her from muggers in an unlit parking lot is grounds for a sexual harassment lawsuit; one second after the tipping point, the PC are defending the President Clinton’s use of this office to slander and punish females objecting to his ruthless sexual exploitation of them, the PC are calling the Playboy Bunny suit “empowering” rather than humiliating, the PC are writing up praises of wearing head-to-toe burkas to indoctrinate schoolgirls into the belief that fundamentalist Islam is egalitarian and pro-feminine. I am not making any of those examples up.
As with women, so with Jews and blacks and child-murderers and gays and any other minority or special interest group or deviant cult the PC takes under its wing. The nature of the Political Correctness process forbids it from forming loyalties. You are only being used as a weapon to destroy the institutions of the West. The moment a better weapon comes along, if it is incompatible with you, aside you go.
How is the Conservative mind to address such ever-shifting chaos? If you speak to the issue the PC is clamoring about that season, you are wasting your time, since that is never what the conversation is really about; but if you speak to the real issue and ignore the clamor, they claim you dodge the question.
The essence of PC is when racists call non-racists racist because of the non-racists do not want to set up a Nazi-style government bureau tracking everyone’s race.
No matter what your stance on the bureau (or whatever the topic of the day might be) anyone and everyone can be accused of racism who takes or fails to take a stand on it. A person who claims that man should be judged on the content of his character rather than the color of his skin is called a racist. Because PC operates by the principle of inversion, being a sheep in wolf’s clothing, no matter what you do, they win: if the shepherd drives the sheep-dressed wolf away, the wolf accuses the shepherd of hating sheep or failing to protect strays like it pretends to be; if the shepherd for any reason lets the sheep-dressed wolf into the fold, the wolf eats sheep, and again accuses the shepherd of hating sheep or failing to protect sheep. The point is not to eat sheep but to desecrate the office and authority of the shepherd.
The reason why PC is hypocritical is not an accident. It is because PC is the attempt to use hypocrisy to destroy the current institutions. The ‘Critical Theory’ is merely using axioms you do not admit you do not believe to attack conclusions you do not admit you do believe. It is demanding police protection for your riot.
The hypocrisy is even more obvious as Political Correctness ages, for the current institutions are the ones previously erected by the former generation of Political Correctors. When PC, to destroy the home, wants women to be in the workplace rather than as housewives, it encourages women to be pretty stewardesses and Playboy bunnies, and they ally with pornographers like Hugh Hefner. Does anyone remember those days? Later, the PC turn on the surprised pornographers, and declare that women being employed for their looks is exploitation, and they insist women find full time careers, and marry late or, better yet, not at all. Meanwhile they insist on reforming the free market by establishing endless grievance-based regulations to control the male-female ratios and interactions. Later, to destroy marriage, the PC side is no-fault divorce, allegedly in the name of freeing women from male control, because the bond of marriage is a contract, like the free-market contract, and therefore not sacred. Later, the PC side with homosexuals declaring their attempting to form households together (it is not marriage and cannot be called so) to be a matter of civil rights, the idea being the marriage is so sacred that it cannot be denied to sexes who cannot biologically wed, and who suffer from a mental disease they themselves admit is genetic in origin.
Each time, the PC uses the opposite of what they mean to destroy the opposite of what they were destroying last season. No proponent of gay marriage proposes an abolition of “no-fault” even though, theoretically, if marriage were sacred they would be vocal advocates of restoring the sanctity to this institution. No proponent of allowing women to compete freely in the free market advocates the abolition of the de facto quota laws allowing some women to be promoted above where the market would freely put them, even though, theoretically, if the free market were a respected institution, they would be as vehement about abolishing quotas as libertarians. No proponent of pornography encourages this demeaning exploitation of women on the grounds that it makes the house and home a safer and more sacred place, and exalts maidenhood and motherhood, and no one really believes that being a porn model exalts women or makes them safer from male sexual predation or makes the erotic pleasures of marriage more full of joy, and so on. And again, no one argues that restoring women to their traditional roles as wives and mothers, housewives and matriarchs of large families is what women really want, even though facts, those pesky things, show that by and large it is.
It is all hypocrisy. As with feminism, so with any other issue one could name. The PC are not truly in favor of any of the things they support, because their world view is based on a metaphysic that says nothing is truly real.
Ah, to be sure they are sincere about their issue. Sincerity is a different thing. Sincerity is an emotion. Emotions they have in abundance, and to the exclusion of reason. More on this paradox later.
(5) The delusion is an aggressive make-believe. They sometime change from decade to decade, so it does not matter what this season’s fashionable make believe is. The point is to believe in something, believe in anything, believe in yourself—just as long as what you believe in IS NOT REAL.
The make believe is aggressive, because it only takes one little boy to point out that the Emperor’s New Clothes do not exist at all, and that the emperor is naked. It must be aggressive, because one voice can shatter the spell, or wound the self indulgence of utter narcissism. The crowd can use their power of pretense to pretend the boy did not speak in the same way they can pretend the Emperor is not naked, but if he continues to speak, they must call him a racist, and if he is not cowed, must stone him.
This explains the particularly over-the-top aggressive tone in Mr. Chang’s paragraph above. He is like an Inquisitor not accusing a heretic but like one accusing a witch.
Consider: The Inquisitor accusing a heretic must list statements made by the accused which contradict specific points of established doctrine. This requires careful effort from the prosecutor’s office. But a witch can be accused of anything from flying a broom to consorting with cats to whistling up storms: anything goes, and the more outrageous, even deranged, the accusation, the better. You see, because a heretic need only be wrong to stand before the Inquisitor, but the witch needs to be not only evil, but utterly, absolutely, irredeemably evil: evil without limit. She has to be accused of everything, including things no one believes. (I am trying to think of the last book by a conservative political commentator complaining about political correctness who called his wife a bitch and then went to a bar to beat his chest and masturbate in public. No names spring to mind.)
But in the make-believe world of Cloudcuckooland, conservatives are ape-men and sexual deviants and foul-mouthed racists, not to mention hicks and rednecks and KKK members, whereas, in Cloudcuckooland, Democrat members of congress are not now and never were KKK members, and so there are no conservative political commentators. There is Rush Limbaugh, who takes drugs, and Bill Bennet, who gambles, and therefore nothing they say can be trusted, unlike Dan Rather, who is objective and neutral and nonpartisan and honest.
That is merely their model; their make-believe. Since it was never based on facts, no facts can undermine it.
PCniks are not merely uninterested in evidence, or skeptical because the evidence so far is insufficient: they are utterly immune to evidence, and an enemy of evidence. Indeed, the MORE evidence there is in favor of a proposition, the greater in their mind is the laudable strength of will and firmness of purpose in ignoring it. Why, anyone can disbelieve rumors of Yeti, for who has seen one? That is a weakling’s disbelief! The true hero can disbelieve in the law of supply and demand, or, more to his credit, disbelieve in the law of cause and effect! The fact that Socialism fails wherever it is tried PROVES we need more of it.
The reason why PCniks are consumed with hatred for Nazi Theocrats and fascists, the reason why they call everyone and everything fascist, is because there are not fascists, or, to be precise, the number of neonazis in the world is roughly equal to the number of flatearthers or practicing Albigensians.
You can find Nazis, if you look hard enough, stuffed away into the corners of freakland, but no leftwing political philosophy has been more entirely discredited than National Socialism of Germany and Fascism of Italy. (Yes, they are leftwing: socialists, radical, anti-tradition, anti-Second Amendment, anti-Ancien Regime, the guys all those conservatives in the 1940’s killed to smitherines. Their philosophy is the same Darwinian survival-of-the-selfish-gene nonsense as modern science-idolaters.)
But the important point for PC is to accuse Republicans and Christians and Catholics of being fascists. They know we are not fascists, and they do not expect the accusation to be believed. It is a ceremonial behavior, a make-believe, like the Two Minute Hate delivered against Emmanuel Goldstein. The fact that Goldstein does not exist and never existed means nothing.
PC Apparatchiks are utterly immune to evidence. They are nihilists. If you don’t believe reality is real, then you perforce believe truth is what you make it.
(6) Vehement. PC is hate for what it opposes, and hysteria for what it affirms, but it neither opposes nor affirms anything in particular.
PC is always intemperate and vehement, and sometimes breaks out into violence. It is mob psychology. In the savagery with which the Soviet treated their foes, the deranged hatred offered up against George Bush and Ronald Reagan before him, the vehemence of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters makes a marked contrast with the peculiar formlessness of the reason for the hate. What are the protesters protesting for, again, exactly? When an excited, nay, hysterical mass media selected candidate Obama for our next president, and, to the eternal shame of our democracy, the mass media got away with herding and controlling public opinion so the voters affirmed whom the media had anointed, what exactly was the hope for which they hoped, or the change they wanted changed?
It is not eerie how these things for which PC stands so firmly seem not to have an substance, but to change and adapt like the Darwinian emergence of species, one form after another, with no fixed end point?
Whatever is true, whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, that is what the PC Spirit of the Age opposes with all the strength of their dark and monstrous hearts, and all the wit of their chaotic and hate-poisoned intellects.
They do not disapprove of the good and beautiful, they hate it with a passion. (In the example of Mr Chang above, one does not call people masturbating apes if you disapprove of them, but only if you hate them.)
When the hate is hot, they scream; when the hate is cool, they sneer, or pretend to ignore you. Contempt is hate, not indifference, even when it is delivered in lofty nonfunny joking tones as if one had just uttered a witticism. Note, for example, the word-play above between chest-beating and beating off—it is meant to be a witticism, except it isn’t.
Indeed, one of the principle bits of make believe in which PC apparatchiks indulge to act as if, when sneering at normal, true, beautiful or honest things, a witticism has already been spoken, at which, as if on cue, they are to nod and smirk, even though nothing really was said.
Please note the anarchic nature of PC. Like fashion, there is no formal leader, no party, no apparatus aside from voluntary conformity to an ever-changing consensus.
Like fashion, to be caught out of fashion is both unexpected and the penalties are immediate. I will not draw your attention to actors who made “gay” jokes and then found themselves, no matter what their previous credit with the mavens, pressured into Soviet style public self-criticism sessions, reeducation and sensitivity training: my stomach would turn if I even provided a link. I assume you are aware it happens.
No one is safe among the vampires, because they prey on each other without warning, whimsically, with total hate.
I have often wondered, aghast, at the lack of loyalty or memory or love among the PC. For all their gushing expressions of kindness and courtesy, the moment any icon of theirs, or any stalwart of the past generation, no matter his contributions to the cause, is denounced by the Big Brother of fashionable rumor, instantly he becomes Emmanuel Goldstein.
I recall being horrified at the treatment afforded Robert Heinlein, once he was dead, by the sexual revolutionaries he spent his entire adult career serving and inspiring and popularizing. He was the man who introduced me, and my generation of science fiction readers, to the notion that all cultural norms were relative, and that all sexual norms should be absolutely as free and liberal and libertine as possible, no matter one’s culture. But in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND the pro-homo scene was too indirect for the mavens of PC, who demanded a more open adulation of the misbehavior, and so Heinlein was subject to the Two Minute Hate. All he had done for them to make them mainstream was forgotten.
But this vehemence, and this ever present threat of riot and violence (for no man would pay the least attention to demonstrators who stand for nothing if they did not threaten violence) serves to maintain the cohesion of what otherwise would be a disintegrating and mindless herd. The herd members each fear betrayal and denunciation, and so each is eager to support the latest cause of the season with utmost fervor.
And since PC does not really stand for anything, it only stands in eternal rebellion against Christendom and Western Civilization, the utmost fervor is always some form of vehemence or cruelty and insult or hate or contempt or open violence.
To recap: PC is lying by means of rendering words meaningless for the end of spreading nihilism where the nature of PC renders it (1) unreal (2) stupid (3) illogical (4) hypocritical (5) delusional (6) vehement (and sometimes violent).
With this sixpart definition in mind, let us answer the question why Conservatives are helpless before it.
Whenever we Conservatives, like Ann Morgan Guilbert in the clip above, see the arrant and aggressive make-believe of the Joey Bishop of PC in action, we are at the same loss as to what to do as she is.
Because, first, we cannot really believe that anyone is that dishonest, that they would lie so blatantly, or so gullible that they would believe that lie. So we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt and think that they are sincere, and will respond if we address them reasonably.
Second, we cannot really believe that anyone is so malicious that they would hate so deeply, and on so many topics, and that hate would be the first and foremost element of their political philosophy. We cannot believe that they do not want to live, they merely want us to die.
So we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that some compromise can be reached, whereby all parties can get part of what their goals are. But, of course, there are no goals to PC. It is a process, a virus, a method of attack. It is not a political philosophy. They are not attacking us to get something out of us: they are attacking us because they hate us.
Third, we cannot really engage illogical people with logic. Both the democratic process and the free market process assume a minimal measure of rationality on the part of all persons in the system. Neither one has any mechanism for vomiting or producing antibodies to remove from the system an irritant or virus whose point is to destroy the system.
Indeed, Christian charity and English ideas of fairplay and Capitalist incentives to please customers act against any exclusion or isolation of the enemy irritants within them.
Fourth, Conservatives assume a man is innocent until proven guilty and that he has a right to speak any matter not slander nor fighting words nor treason nor pornography; whereas the PC assume a White Male Christian is guilty, no matter whether there is proof or no, of anything of which he can be accused, and that he has no right to speak other than correct thought as pre-screened by Big Brother. The two when placed on contact with each other always favor the PC over the Conservative. He condemns us while we are still trying him, being fair, gathering evidence: he uses the First Amendment as a tool to make porn and treason and slander legal and legitimate, whereas he uses speech codes and the thousand petty harassments of a disorganized and headless mob to eliminate words and phrases and arguments and policies from public discourse.
Fifth and most importantly: you are wondering, dear reader, how the PC apparatchik can both believe such utter putrid nonsense and monstrous folly, and be seriously about destroying himself and the civilian around him, and also be so flippant, and frivolous, and cruel, while at the same time being concerned, civilly responsible, orderly, neat, and do things like recycle and give to charities that help starving Spotting Owls in Asia?
No one you know matches the bugbear I have hear described. No one can be that evil on purpose: not one can be that ignorant and be making so monstrous a mistake innocently.
This is an old, old debate. Socrates thought all evil was caused by ignorance in the mind, and that proper and patient instruction would lead mischievous boys to be virtuous men. Saint Paul speaks of evil as being caused by a corruption of the will, and laments that man can know the good and yet will the evil.
Without resolving that debate, let me point out the fundamental, aye, the very basic difference between PC and all other human systems of thought, ancient or modern, Christian or Pagan.
Political Correctness assumes at its root that political considerations trump all aspects of truth or falsehood, reality or make-believe, logic or illogic.
PC is nihilism. It is the worship of nothing, loyalty to nothing, glorification of nothing.
THEY DON’T BELIEVE REALITY IS REAL.
This unreality, which you or I or any sane man would regard as terrifying as the discovery that we were trapped in the Maya of Buddha (or, to use a pop-culture reference, in the Matrix of Neo) they regard as liberating.
If there is no reality, there is no God, and therefore there is no moral law, all things the corrupt heart desires can be achieved, and the voice of conscience must be silenced.
The unreality liberates them to believe in whatever they need to believe in with all the strength and passion of their dark hearts and all the short-circuited voltage of their feverish and lopsided brains, just for so long as they need to believe it, and not one second longer. That is why they can throw feminism under the bus for the sake of a pro-Abortion president without batting an eye; that is why they can throw gays under the bus for the sake of appeasing Jihadist terrorists without even a Dear John letter.
The reason why such nice and reasonable people can, without any hesitation, support such monstrous evils as abortion, as Stalinism, and can apologize for dictators and fly to the defense of terrorists and murderers is that it is all, to them, in their world of nihilism, a make-believe.
They are not REALLY lying, not even to themselves, because they occupy a mental space where the difference between truth and lies is moot. They are not REALLY evil, because likewise the difference between good and evil is a matter of opinion or taste. They do not really believe what they are saying and they do not really disbelieve it. They are shallow and empty.
They react with overwhelming hate and passion and violence when confronted for the same reason a drug addict resents being wakened from an opium dream, or a book reader snatched out of his favorite fairy tale in time to do the yardwork, or why patrons shush the loudmouth who talks during a stageplay, or a group of children playing tea when someone will not play along with the play pretend, and points out the cups are empty. Even a single jarring moment, even a single word, breaks the spell of suspension of disbelief.
In this case, the spell is not meant to lure a reader or theater goer into what is merely a diversion of an afternoon. The spell of PC is meant to fill up the void of nothingness which is the center and the idol of the meaningless lives of men who have been told that they are beardless apes or meat-robots programmed by brain atoms, brought forth of nothing for no purpose and destined for nothing but eternal oblivion.
The spell is meant to fend away the image of an empty and indifferent cosmos which otherwise must drive them mad.
The thin tissue of make believe is all that hangs between them and the chaos of utmost nothingness. Their self esteem, the meaning of their meaningless lives, their loves and hates and the precious silence that benumbs their consciences is this thin tissue.
Small wonder they fight like mad wildcats if any word disturbs it.
While the spell lasts, they can dream of creating paradise on earth. If you speak against the paradise, such as by asking how the Islamic terrorist is going to fit in next to the homosexual Jewish libertine, or if you question who is going to pay for all pie coming down from the sky, or dig up the gold wherewith to pave the streets, you do not merely snap them out of a pleasing opium dream, O Conservative: you become, for them, the foe of paradise, the enemy of heaven and thus of all that is good.
The obstacle preventing paradise is not reality—there is no reality in nihilland—the only obstacle is YOU. Small wonder their hatred is without temperance and without bounds. Small wonder they are so impatient of legal niceties and constitutions and economics and history and all.
The only thing to which I can liken this weird psychology, and to explain how they can be so utterly sincere in causes which make no sense at all and which can be forgotten in the blink of an eye when the Big Brother of fashion so commands, and why they can turn on each other with the remorselessness of sharks, and savage their own without compunction, and still be perfectly nice neighbors who recycle, is the enthusiasm of cultists for an idol or gamers for a role playing game.
No idolater actually thinks his statue of bronze and brass contains the divinity: he merely makes a false-to-facts association in his mind to blend the two in consciousness, that he might treat the statue, the image or symbol, as if it were the divine reality, the thing the symbol represents.
No gamer in a role playing game actually thinks he is a half-elf split character class ranger/bard from Ladyswood. But he gets into character. While the game is going on, he may speak in an accent, and use Shakespearean, or at least Stan Lee-ean, archaisms. He takes it totally seriously, and, for him, it is real. Real make-believe.
The PC crowd is the same way. They are half-educated sophomores make believing to be smarter than the rest of us, and so they use long and sonorous Latinate words like the half-elf using archaism. They are greybearded adolescents arrested at a primitive and emotional stage of development make believing to be scientific and rational. They are hysterics pretending to be cold-eyed and coolly rational philosophers, who reached all their determinations by pure logic. They are conformists pretending to be bold rebels.
They are old men with guilty consciences, failures at life, eager to break moral laws or, better to see others break them, and they are old women who have killed a child she should have loved and brought to term: or they are young men and women without experience or wisdom who like the game of pretending that they are wiser than their elders, because this frees them of all responsibility to be responsible for anything in their lives. The duty to learn from history evaporates; the duty to live up to standards is gone; the duty to be fully human becomes optional.
Raising a child is hard. Killing a child in the womb is easy. Killing him is far easier when you use a play-pretend verbal formula to call the child something other than what he is: fetus, or blob of cells, or product of conception. Far easier when what you do it presented to your conscience as a dignified necessity of civic right, or of woman’s health, or of equality, that blessed estate above all others that justifies, in the modern world, all crimes.
Being honest is hard. Men will revile you. Lying is easy. Lying is even easier if all the lies are nice, safe, soft, inoffensive, and politically correct.
Working is hard. Collecting welfare is easy. It is yet easier if all trace of manly pride, all hint of the moral code that says a man must support his family and rule them and lead them is jackhammered out of one’s conscience.
Prying the sturdy poor off welfare is hard. Merely letting them rot is easy. All one need do is spend other people’s money. Spending other people’s money is even easier, once you use a meaningless verbal formula to assure yourself that need trumps greed and that property is theft.
Building a family is hard. Breaking a family is easy, especially if the conscience is benumbed with the meaningless verbal formula that says that you were born that way, that your true self, your authentic self, is an adulterer, and that marriage is nothing more than a business contract, dissoluble at the whim or either party. It is easy to say Love Conquers All.
Virtue is hard. That is why no one speaks of virtue any more, only of ‘values.’ A virtue is a reality, a type of strength or power needed to be human and be happy in a given area. (As chastity is the virtue needed for happiness and honor in sexual matters, or courage the virtue needed in combat, or honesty the virtue needed for freedom of thought.) But a value is something you pick for yourself because it pleases you, like a consumer picking shoes.
Worship of God is hard, for He is the ultimate reality, and the one thing without which all human philosophy is vanity and flatulence, stubble and straw. Without God, there is only nothing, for God is All.
Worship of Nothing is easiest of all, for one can sleepwalk through life, snarling at anyone who threatens to jar one awake, protesting against moral order, and complimenting oneself because one is brave enough to fight fictional fascists, and bold with the boldness of Prometheus, for the courage to rebel against reality, the audacity to take up arms against sanity and reason and conscience and logic.
All the sleepwalkers need do is recycle, or some other pointless and purely symbolic act and, like Jesus Christ, they have saved the planet.
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.
