Where is moral authority located for political correctness?

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Political correctness is internally consistent, but is based on false premises; or, at least, it is the premises which must be challenged and changed if PC is to be reversed.

The reason that this is unlikely is that the major premises of PC are merely the premises of mainstream modern secularism. In other words, politically correct discourse takes place within a nihilistic framework which denies (among other things) the reality of God, the soul, afterlife, transcendental goods (truth, beauty, virtue) and the supernatural.

Any apparent meaning or purpose in life are simply within life, and are purely subjective. 

The special quality of PC is that it retains a belief in what might be termed a secular version of Original Sin: the ultimate selfishness and corruptibility of human beings.

And, whereas communism believed that human beings were perfectible (a perfect society would, according to communism, yield perfect humans) - PC believes that humans are necessarily selfish and corruptible: that humans cannot be trusted, ever.

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This deep insight into human nature is the source from which political correctness draws its ideological strength; because it is true that humans are indeed necessarily selfish and corruptible.

Therefore political correctness is based upon a deeper perception of reality than its secular right opponents - who often try to argue that not-all-humans are 'that bad' or that humans as such are not-that-bad.

Well, actually, humans are that bad!  

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But that is not the end of the matter.

The big question is not to quibble over the fact that humans are fundamentally sinful, but what are the implications of the fact.

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That humans are sinful has been a truism of religious insight for as long as we have records.

There is nothing new about regarding humans as sinful - that is not a novelty of PC in any way shape or form.

But what is new about PC is what to do about the fact.

What is new about PC is the response to perceiving the sinfulness of humans.

Traditional religion, perceiving humanity to be sinful, located goodness in the non-material, transcendental or supernatural world. So that in Christianity, virtue was located in God.

But for PC there is no God; and therefore - having noticed or discovered that humans are (contra communism) sinful - PC tries to locate moral virtue in a material but non-human realm: the realm of abstract system.

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Here is an important difference between the majority of unreflective, careerist and opportunisticPC drones and the inner elite of self-aware, moral and devoutly-PC:

the careerist PC masses locate sin in right-wingers,

while the elite and devout PC recognize the sinfulness of all humans.

So the careerist PC masses seek a solution in replacing rulership of the sinful right with rulership of themselves (i.e. the virtuous left);

However, the deep and devout PC elite seek a solution not in replacing one gang of sinful humans with another; but in replacing all human agency in all circumstances - even their own.

The sincerely and truly-PC seek to subordinate everyone including themselves to abstract systems.

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This is not itself paradoxical: the PC elite seek to put-in-place abstract systems which will (among other things) destroy the PC elite; but this is a moral sacrifice that the PC elite are prepared to make.

And, since for secularism, there is no higher moral ideal than altruism (to benefit the general good at the cost of one's one individual good) then the PC elite perceive themselves to be the most moral of all people.

That burning abstract idealism even-unto-self-annihilation is, indeed, is the source of the immense pride, strength and resolution of the PC elite.

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For political correctness to be a moral discourse, it must locate moral authority; and it does not do so in individuals.

And PC cannot (by its assumptions) locate moral authority in God or any transcendent realm.

So where is moral authority for PC?

The answer is a negative, not a positive. The answer is that moral authority is located in the non-human, in the denial of the human, in the abstract.

It is not that political correctness favours any particular abstraction, because PC does not know the answer to the location of moral authority; but that the moral authority must be located in the non-individual abstract.

PC is therefore fundamentally oppositional.

PC knows what is wrong, but does not know what is right; it knows what needs destroying but not what should replace it.

So political correctness invariably demonstrates an inflexible and relentless tendency to destroy that which it opposes (which is, essentially, any possibility of individual human agency); but PC is all-but agnostic about what ought to be put into its place.

Indeed, PC is all but indifferent to what replaces individual power and choice; just so long as it is replaced.

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The replacement for individual agency is almost always one form of bureaucracy or another: committee decision, peer review, voting; algorithms, flow-charts, protocols, guidelines, quotas...

It doesn't really matter which of these or others because they are all more abstract and less personal than individual agency.

Abstraction and non-personality (even if not impersonality) are intrinsically superior to individual agency, always preferable.

Examples: Democracy (of whatever type or procedure, and no two examples are the same and most differ very widely indeed) is always and intrinsically superior to monarchy; peer review is always and intrinsically better than individual decision; committee leadership are always and intrinsically superior to any individual leadership (and all individuals, without exception, must always be ultimately subject to some committee).

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Political correctness is therefore intrinsically and necessarily oppositional and negative; it is necessarily and intrinsically motivated by negative emotions of hatred (for the careerist and opportunistic mass of the PC) and despair (for the devoutly PC).

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So political correctness is almost all-pervasive in modernity - it is not a weird or fringe belief, even in its extremes.

Public discourse therefore occurs only and always between the more-PC and the less-PC - but all moral secular discourse is PC.

The secular right is therefore fundamentally and necessarily PC in so far as it makes moral arguments - because it locates virtue in abstract systems. The disagreement between the libertarian right and the liberal left is merely a minor quibble over what kind of abstract system is preferable and how it is to be implemented.

Non-PC public discourse is ruled-out, forbidden; ignored or punished but never, never included.

We are all politically-correct now!

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Well, all are PC except a few people outside of public discourse and in other places outside of The West.

This is why PC cannot be defeated by any existing strand of public discourse - public discourse (right and left) is all fundamentally PC in its assumptions, and differs only in degree.

This is why there is no possibility of de-converting the PC elite - there is nobody to de-convert them! There are no countervailing trends.

PC can only be replaced, not reformed. 

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