Political Correctness, albeit animated by a spirit that hates commerce and capitalism, thrives and is aided by the impulse toward arbitrary and inappropriate and illogical free-association of images of sex and power. To persuade inattentive marks to purchase their products, advertisers merely juxtapose one image with another: a healthy cowboy with an unhealthy cigarette, a nubile nymph next to a cold metal car, a comic polar bear sipping a soft drink. Such arbitrary mixing of images can only be taken seriously by populations whose poetic imaginations are utterly corrupt.
By the poetic imagination, I mean that faculty in man which makes and apprehends metaphors and archetypes (particularly those literal metaphors called words and ideas) and associates those metaphors to their proper emotions and passions.
Unfortunately, while the faculty seems instinctive, it is not. Like the conscience, it must be trained and domesticated in order to render the young fit for civilization.
It is not natural (that is, not instinctive) for a boy to feel it is sweet and decorous to die for the ashes of the fathers and the altars of the gods; but this must be inculcated into him, along with a sense of honor that forbids him to steal even when he is hungry and even when no one is looking. Otherwise, in a land of no patriots where all theft is licit, the soldiers will not march and the workingmen will not work.
Poetry, when it is licit, is the attempt to train the young imagination to prefer fit and decent metaphors and images, and to have the decent and apt emotional reactions to objects, concepts and events he may encounter. It is unnatural for the youth to react to every image of fatherhood and authority with jeering and defiance, and therefore the poetical imagery which portray all fathers, literal or figurative, as buffoons and tyrants in order to train the imagination of the young so that this seems normal, is likewise unnatural. See the nearest Disney cartoon for an example of fathers either buffoonish or tyrannous.
The young must be taught to love the beautiful, the just, and the good, and to hate what is ugly, unjust, and corrupted.
Political Correctness Rots the Soul
Philosophy would be impossible without the soul. Animals do not contemplate abstractions, and are not ravished by contemplating the elegance proofs nor the beauty of the hidden laws of the universe.
The soul in an innocent and uncorrupted state is naturally inclined to philosophy. Note how often children ask “why?” It is the simplest question, yet the most philosophical. To ask why is to ask the reason for things, the meaning, the purpose, for what sake the universe exists.
It is the one question Political Correctness hates most of all, and seeks to silence. In the unspoken assumptions behind Political Correctness, it is taken for granted that the universe has only two parts: a lawless blind willpower ruling human minds, and an unwilling blind matter ruling the material universe.
This worldview eliminates the question “why?” It eliminates questions of honor and honesty. There is no such thing as honor to the utterly unhindered will, nor is there any such thing as honesty in reference to the blind and meaningless raw material of matter.
There is no answer to the question “why?” in a meaningless universe of matter occupied by egotists possessed of unbridled and totally arbitrary willpower. The only answer is either “that is just the way it is” or “because I said so.”
If the universe is nothing but the blind yet godlike willpower and the blind void of empty matter, there is no room for the poetic imagination nor for the trained conscience. There is no room for honor or honesty. And, as I fear we shall soon see, no room for civilization.
And there is no room for the soul.
The Unreality Principle: Civilization Gone Mad
Civilizations go mad just as men do.
A man goes mad not when his thoughts are false. Everyone has at least some false-to-facts belief. A man goes mad when he loses the faculty that corrects for errors. The faculty he uses to keep his mind trotting on the narrow bridle path of reality is broken: his thoughts no longer answer to the bridle and bit of reason, but run wildly, spitting foam, and carry him not where he wants to go.
A man goes mad when he no longer has the ability to compare the picture in his mind with the world around him, and correct the picture to conform it to the world. Instead he develops a faculty to explain away inconvenient facts. This is what paranoid delusions are: elaborate structures of excuses justifying his contempt for facts and hatred of them.
A madman has no power to correct his falsehoods. They rule him, he does not rule them.
Every civilization is based on a certain number of shared ideas and ideals, what can rightly be called the spirit of the civilization. These ideas and ideals are rarely debated and decided explicitly: they are more like the terms of an unspoken social contract. They are a consensus of the expectations and mutual obligations binding the social order together.
A civilization goes mad not when the ideas and ideals forming its spirit are false. Every society tells itself at least some myths to justify the pains of shouldering the burden of civilized behavior. A civilization goes mad when the faculty which would otherwise bring the ideas back to reality is broken.
The Unreality Principle: Loyalty to Lunacy
Recently in this space, we have discussed the Unreality Principle, which is the moral principle governing Leftist thought and discourse. In a word, it is the principle that if something in Leftist thinking is false, the Leftist believes it because it is false, not despite the falsehood.
And he is more proud and more unwavering in his loyalty to the false belief the more absurd and more obviously false it is.
And, likewise, if something is true, it must be denounced as false, and the more obviously and patently true it is, the more vehement must be the denunciation.
There are two senses in which the Unreality Principle operates: one is in the abstract, the other is in the concrete.
The abstract application of the Unreality Principle in embodied in the seven basic bogus ideas of the Left, previously discussed in this space.
There are abstract or philosophical ideas which are not merely false, but blatantly false, as if proud of their falsehood:
- Solipsism — the paradox that asserts that truth is personal, hence optional: “It is not true that truth is true.”
- Relativism — the paradox that asserts that virtue is subjective, situational, relative: “It is wrong for you to judge right and wrong.”
- Subjectivism — the paradox that asserts that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as if ugliness could be made more beautiful than beauty by an act of will.
- Irrationalism — the paradox that asserts reason is untrustworthy, therefore it is unreasonable to trust reason. Such is the reasoning.
- Pervertarianism — the paradox that asserts it to be licit to seek the gratifications of sexual union of the reproductive act without the union, without the reproduction, and, in the case of sodomites, without the act.
- Totalitarianism — the paradox that asserts that freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength. Making the state larger, more powerful, less answerable to the people somehow helps the people.
- Nihilism — the paradox of that the meaning of life is that it has no meaning
In every case, each one of these seven bad ideas not only is useless as a picture of reality, it contradicts itself in what can only be called an insolent fashion: flipping the bird at reason, logic, and common sense.
Left Wing, Right Wing, Buffalo Wing
Our current system of political labels is bunk.
The traditional Left-to-Right spectrum goes from violent Marxists on the Far Left, to Fabians and Euro-socialists on the Near Left.
In the middle, called Moderate, are moderate socialists and ‘mixed economy’ types who believe in a moderate amount of tyranny and rather moderate liberty. They believe arbitrary despotism can coexist with limited government. They believe that charismatic dictators using the laws to play favorites and grant exemption to political allies can coexist and cooperate with the rule of law. The Moderates believe in freedom and the free market except when it does not suit them, whereupon they call for Caesar to intervene. Wage and price controls, Keynesian bullshit, rationing and shortages, and minute regulation via unelected and anonymous bureaucrats are the hallmarks of the Moderate.
Next, on the Near Right, allegedly live that tribe of chimera, so often talked about in left-wing circles but rarely seen (until, ironically, Leftists gain power) who attempt to use government power to make sweetheart deals with big business, to indulge in corporate welfare, crony capitalism, and so on. This is a welfare state run for the benefit of the rich. Let me coin the term Plutocratic Socialist to describe this.
I realize that the term Plutocratic Socialist sounds like a paradox, but it is not. Technically speaking, welfare for the rich is rightly called socialism, since it holds all property to be available for looting by the state, that is, all property is common property, and it is a plutocracy since the state is run by and for the benefit of the big-government-big-money elite.
Whether the businessmen are corrupting the politicians by bribing them or the politicians are extorting loot from the businessmen is a moot point: the group enjoys a homogeny of outlook and a mutuality of interest.
The only real world example of a state run this way, before Obama’s America, before the nationalization of motor car industry, the school loan industry, the mortgage industry, and the medical insurance industry, was, it should come as no surprise, Mussolini’s Italy. Technically, this form of government is called fascism, but that word has long since be etiolated of any real meaning, so I use it cautiously. One thing it is not, is a free market system.
To the far Right resides a violent form of fascism. This breed of fascist are all in favor of socialism, from public insurance to public education to wage and price controls to the subjugation of all trade and industry to military discipline, but who want to use these alleged benefits of socialist control for the nation, rather than for the proletarian. They are known at National Socialist, or Nazis.
Got that? The political spectrum left to right is: Stalinist socialist, Fabian socialist, halfhearted-socialist, fascist socialist and national socialist.
The Windrose of Reality
In our last episode, we saw that the traditional Left-to-Right and Radical-to-Conservative spectrum is confusing and dishonest. It is confusing because it defines all political positions based on their degree of opposition to sick Leftist utopian daydreams, and dishonest because it lumps all opponents to daydreaming together, totalitarians and monarchists and semi-anarchists alike, regardless of the motive for the opposition, regardless of whichever of many varied (and often antithetical) political theories the partisan might prefer to sick utopia.
The real difference is the Right believes that we can agree to disagree. The Left doesn’t agree to that.
http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/11/12/politics/replace-political-labels-with-the-windrose-of-reality/
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.
November 19, 2014 @ 1:06 am
