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It is my contention that political correctness is (more or less) communism plus 'original sin'.
The 'original sin' element for PC is humanity's innate selfishness.
PC responds by embracing abstract systematic bureaucracy to replace individual decision-making in all important areas.
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For the Pure Altruist, altruism is not a moral choice but an objective act of allocation.
The ultimate act of altruism is therefore for the altruistic individual to remove all elements of personal choice, credit and virtue out of altruism, so that altruism does not depend on contingent human factors.
PC strives to promote and embrace an abstract system of altruism which forces everybody to be altruistic including himself; which forces him to suffer and perhaps die for objective altruism.
For PC altruism ought not to be a choice; altruism ought to be explicitly and impartially imposed by rules, regulations and laws.
The only moral choice in PC is whether to submit willingly to abstract altruistic systems, or whether (selfishly) to resist them.
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The ideal for PC (as for most idealistic secular people) is 'pure altruism': that is, altruism untainted by an personal benefit whatsoever.
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A Christian martyr dies as a witness for his faith; he dies in order that others might attain salvation.
Yet the martyr also is rewarded richly for his witness, by a place in heaven.
(The reward for witnessing to heaven is a place in heaven).
(Indeed, many Saints are Saints precisely because they are martyrs - http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/stschurch.htm )
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To the politically correct, Christian martyrs are selfish (not altruistic) and they are deluded.
To the PC, Christian martyrs are selfish because they are acting for their own reward, and they are deluded because the reward does not exist.
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A PC martyrs dies as a witness to his faith; he dies in order that others may be happier or may suffer less.
The PC martyr has no reward, because death is oblivion.
(The reward for witnessing to PC is annihilation.)
And the oblivion is real and absolute, because PC is this-worldly, and because PC is engaged in national altruism up to and beyond the point of cultural annihilation.
So for the PC there will not even be a possibility that the martyr will be remembered and revered, because he has chosen not merely personal annihilation but embraced cultural annihilation - specifically the destruction of the culture that supports PC.
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This is what I mean my PC being motivated by Pure Altruism.
Pure Altruism is the altruism of an atheist who chooses death and embraces cultural destruction, rather than sell-out or abandon his PC principles.
PC idealism is altruism at any cost; and the greater the cost, the greater the evidence of sincerity.
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To its adherents political correctness therefore feels like a higher ideal than Christianity, because PC is Purely Altruistic, and altruism (helping others at cost to oneself) is the highest conceivable value in the secular world.
Christian martyr's are (assumed to be) rewarded with a place in heaven; while PC martyr's are consigned to oblivion.
PC martyr's therefore do not benefit at all from what they do, they suffer purely for the sake of others.
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More exactly, PC martyr's suffer purely for the sake of what they themselves conceive to be the happiness of others (although the others might not agree).
But what a futile act is PC martyrdom! To die for what you believe to be the happiness of others? - for the freedom to choose gratifying lifestyles!
So PC martyrdom really is Pure Altruism: pure to the point of utter absurdity.
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For political correctness, to be moral is to be absurd, to be self-sacrificing, to sacrifice anything and everything which has made you what you are.
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For PC, the ideal aspiration is to climb a ladder to a higher level of abstraction where one constructs and imposes a system of Pure Altruistic morality, then to kick away the ladder
(so that nobody else may ever ascend the ladder to tamper with the perfect system)
- and in kicking away the ladder, to fall to one's doom, to fall into a furnace of personal and cultural annihilation.
That's what I call martyrdom.
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What PC martyrs are there? Are there any specific ones you're thinking about?
ReplyDeleteLoved your series on PC, thanks for all the interesting reading.
/Martin
I can think of several - but I don't intend to name them here.
ReplyDeleteWhile Christians are proud of being Christian and martyrs may be officially canonized as such; those who are the most PC tend to deny the reality of PC - so calling someone a PC martyr would be an aggressive act, and offensive to living friends and relations.
Indeed, it is interesting that PC is so little recognized, so often denied, hence un-understood.
There has surely never been so large and powerful an ideology which refused to name or define itself. Therein lies much of its power.
Of course, the implicit goal of PC is such an horrific totalitarian dystopia that those PC idealists who recognize where things are tending understandably refrain from describing it...
I wonder if you could explain the "kicking away the ladder" metaphor a bit.
ReplyDeleteThe PC elite need to 'ascend the ladder' (to the apex of society) and take 'all' discretionary power to themselves, in order to create the kind of totalitarian (all monitoring, all controlling) procedural bureaucracy which is needed in order to make men behave well; then they need to kick away the ladder, so that nobody else can ever again ascend to this level of discretionary power (because if they did so, they might tamper-with the procedural bureaucracy).
ReplyDeleteThat is what I meant, at any rate. But I can see that kicking away the ladder is not enough: the ladder would also need to be destroyed, along with all knowledge of how to make ladders, and the PC leadership would need to kill themselves without handing on their special knowledge.
Perhaps they might set fire to the ladder, then jump to their doom?