Against: Is there a place for political corectness?

Political correctness, the reign of nonsense that is invading our societies and destroying our universities, today masquerades as the one true morality to which we must all adhere; its disguises – equal rights, justice, and compassion – are tenets portrayed as common goals to which we must all aim. In this era, of safe spaces, infinite pronouns, and suppression of opinion and independent thought. Anyone who dares to speak up is derided as an evil defender of the oppressive Western patriarchy.

Who decides? Where are the boundaries? Where does it end? Such questions are often posed against PC, but they often fail to address the real malevolence of the doctrine and the impoverishment of possibilities and human potential it threatens. It is no longer enough to simply say that PC has gone mad.

The doctrine is fuelled by hatred. Its post-modern-Marxist ‘social justice warriors’ view the world through the lens of oppressor and oppressed. They seek to destroy the unjust pyramids of power that constitute polities. This is an appalling way to look at the world. History - centuries of disease, war, and struggle - has produced the societies in which we live today. Equality of opportunity, democracy, human rights, and common law – phenomena for which we should be grateful.

Instead, Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), with their proclivity for seeing the cause of all human misery and failure in the institutions of society, want to tear it all down. Perhaps because they themselves have failed under capitalism, so they want to reduce everyone to their level and their morality of timidity. Wouldn’t it be great, they say, if there were certain things which can’t be said; certain things which everyone accepted – if, in short, we all agreed with each other.

By this estimate one might say that the totalitarian states of the twentieth century were the most politically correct polities in history: in Nazi Germany everyone shared a common mode of thought; everyone agreed with each other. Anyone with an iota of self-respect will find this idea emetic. There is no such thing as a common good: the term contradicts itself.

SJWs want to trap everyone in a simplified, artificial, neatly concocted world of automatons. Their fear of competition means they deride any exceptional claim or privilege, and all rights: if we were all equal no one would need rights. They, the victimised, the weak and passive, become bitter and resentful. They invent a rationalisation that says they are the good (they must be in the right since they are the suffering). All traits of weakness are good; agreeableness is the highest virtue. Similarly, opposite traits, independence, conscientiousness, aggressiveness, are evil. Anything desirable in competitive economies is stigmatised; humans are reduced to contemptible dotheads.

And their alternative: that tremendous ideology of equality and compassion – socialism, the doctrine of ‘free societies.’ Socialism that has proved to be murderous and tyrannical beyond belief. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China proved that in the most devastating possible manner. But the socialists of today say: “that wasn’t real socialism.” Were the tens of millions killed not enough? How many more millions need to die for socialism to be falsified? That we have learnt anything from those egregious regimes is ambiguous. Socialism, too, is not about sympathy for the poor or the suffering; it’s about hating the rich. Indeed, socialism continues to infect universities, where the doctrine spreads in its cult-like, tribal manner. Any student with even right of centre views is an outcast whose views are averse to what is expected.

All value systems advance their claim to universality; each serves a purpose. Socialism, and PC itself, claim to be about care for the suffering, but they are, apart from hatred, about a demand for power. Its army is targeting Western civilisation, the oppressive patriarchy, and will attempt to restructure it by revolution. Anything that’s a hierarchy, structures essential for every species on Earth, will be destroyed. The result: history repeated.