Thursday 4 October 2018

I wish people would stop being surprised and outraged about political correctness...

What is the point in compiling, detailing and trying specifically to combat the never ending, ever-worsening examples of the sheer, delusional insanity of political correctness?

Surely, after what you must know of, from personal experience and via trusted sources, about (say) three of these witch-hunts; then you must know they are a not-going-away reality?

And surely, people must have reached that point... what, ten, twenty years ago? 

In 2010 when I was writing my first book on political correctness - Thought Prison (2011) - I refrained from providing examples of PC madness (although I knew, from direct personal 'insider' experience, of several) because it was long-since time to move-on...

We now know (don't we?) that political correctness, Social Justice Warriors, the the New Left or Cultural Left (whatever you want to call it) is not a temporary blip, it is not a pendulum swing to be corrected soon, it is not going away!

Unless and when it will go away, because of a massive cultural transformation; and this massive cultural transformation must be religious.

The transformation need not (perhaps probably, on present trends, will not) be Christian; but it will absolutely certainly 100% NOT be secular, nationalist, common-sensical, materialist-economic, or from a desire to preserve Culture.

We know (don't we, surely?) that none of these are powerful enough (here and now) to achieve the transformation needed.

And the transformation must be a transformation - sensible tweaks and adjustments will only make matters worse, because any temporary benefits in efficiency or productivity will surely go to those in-power (the Global Establishment and their puppets); and they will use the resources to fuel yet more, and more-rapid, PC. 

We also ought to know that a collapse of The System will not, of itself, be enough to end the totalitarian tyranny...  Although it may render The West open to more rapid and complete religious colonisation from elsewhere (if any such is viable).

Unless the hearts and minds of people change, the End Times will become obvious to those with eyes to see; and will proceed irreversibly to the end of all things on a timetable we do not and cannot know.

Currently, that seems by far the most likely scenario - but the only hope of its being delayed is if people stop being fixated upon the daily incidents of mass politics, disengage from fake participation in media events; and focus on the deep, religious causes and cures of our situation.

Because our real situation is religious, not political; spiritual not material; about damnation not suffering. 

My mantra remains what it was in 2011: Choose your religion: because TINA (There Is No Alternative).


11 comments:

TheDoctorofOdoIsland said...

"What is the point in compiling, detailing and trying specifically to combat the never ending, ever-worsening examples of the sheer, delusional insanity of political correctness?"

I genuinely and seriously believe that without vigorous, daily counter intelligence against the lies of the mass media, people would be conditioned to accept those lies as reality. I don't believe any significant portion of the population would be uneffected or chose to disengage. I think to stop cataloguing and combating political correctness insanity would result in across the board acceptance of PC insanity as truth by virtually everyone, and guarantee complete self-chosen damnation of everyone in western society, with zero possibility of spiritual awakening after that point.

- Carter Craft

Bruce Charlton said...

@Carter - I don't understand why you are talking about this in terms of 'would' - what you describe as what would happen if... has been everyday reality for a long time. I say this by multiple direct personal experience, not by media hearsay.

You need to take a step back - because whatever it is that people have been doing to do vigorous daily counter-intelligence etc, it certainly hasn't been working; and you need to evaluate whether it is - in fact - making matters worse. Worse because such moment-by-moment engagement with the mainstream agenda is exactly what *they* want people to do; instead of what actually needs to be done.

TheDoctorofOdoIsland said...

"You need to take a step back - because whatever it is that people have been doing to do vigorous daily counter-intelligence etc, it certainly hasn't been working"
What you do on this blog isn't significantly different from that. You acknowledge the evil of the pervasive pc mass media and explain why it is bad and why change is needed. Certainly you feel this is justified.
- Carter Craft

Michael Dyer said...

I certainly see your point, part of the problem is that conservatism (in it's broadest, sloppiest, Chestertonian, "received wisdom of mankind" sense), basically decided it would stop being what it should be, an appendage to Christianity.

Instead we thought we could use reason without God against imagination and expect to win. We even surrendered emotion "They have emotion, we have facts".

So in short, we're suckers, chumps. We surrendered all ground that actual inspires and motivates, decided that God was a tool to be used. Men without chests.

We consistently surrendered even when we didn't have to.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Carter - I hope I don't do that! - although I do sometimes lapse into topicality (But I generally delete those posts after a couple of days). My stance is - yes of coourse PC, yes of course it can't be fixed piecemeal... So what then?

@Michael - I think people generally do surrender nowadays, because for modern materialist Man there is only this sensory-perceptible mortal life, hence there is only expediency of various timsecales - and short term expediency is much surer than the long view.

Yet just few generations ago it was quite common for all sorts of ordinary and also higher status people to take a religious stand of conscience, and suffer materially immediately and severely for doing so. Past generations were much Much more courageous than we are - because their perspective of life was larger (including life beyond biological death), and their timescale of life much longer for the same reason.

Furthermore they had a moral reason for doing/ not-doing things that went further and deeper than modern utilitarianism - which is the ethic of doing what supposedly makes people probably-happier.

My conviction is that the root of our problems lies in our fundamental (metaphysical) assumptions about the nature of reality - until they are exposed, acknowledged and rejected then we are preimmunised against Christianity and the spiritual (beyond materialist) perspective.

Chiu ChunLing said...

Totalitarianism as such does not survive massive civilization collapse. Tyranny remains, and is rather more harshly experienced by its victims due to the lack of systemic wealth which allows for amelioration of the impacts of violence. But totalitarianism simple and the peculiar type of tyranny it imposes does not survive a general civilization collapse and never can.

Civilization collapse puts tyrants and people of faith and conscience on essentially equal ground, it abolishes the unequal playing field that totalitarianism facilitates.

It also removes the materialistic alternative to religious faith. Religion is natural to humans because, when placed under natural selective pressure, the lack of belief in a higher meaning to life results in an increased incidence of simply giving up and literally dying in the face of adversity. Atheism is essentially a luxury of civilized life, when survival margins are tight, it becomes a costly liability.

That said, we should not cheer the loss of civilization, but rather mourn the undermining of the virtue which made it possible. Faith in religion as a refuge from confronting the hardships of reality is not faith at all, mere schadenfreude at the plight of the unjust is too mean an emotion to be called virtue.

Faith in God, a firm commitment to justice, these must be real and living and felt impulses in our lives even while enjoying civilized life for them to have any real efficacy in responding to the loss of luxury. But such virtues are true strength, they will show their mettle when all else fails.

Christianity is such a virtue.

TheDoctorofOdoIsland said...

"I hope I don't do that!"

Well, you are on the internet, and even when you're not on the internet you're out and around people with phones, tvs, radios and being exposed to the mass media in some way. And if we respond to that constant exposure with something other than passive acceptance, certainly that is combating it.

Pure and total disengagement might be better, but it probably isn't something anyone will do.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CCL Your analysis clarifies that totalitarianism is a means to some end - the demonic powers are apparently making collapse more certain, yet also delaying it while/ so that totalitarianism can be extended - evn though the mechanisms of totalitatianism cannot survive collapse.

I suspect that they intend that - having lived under totalitarianism, with the characteristic set of metaphysical assumptions thoroughly inculcated, post-collapse people will indeed respond with *despair*; and attain self-chosen-damnation by that route.

Certainly the moral resources, the virtues, have been eroded very rapidly and become feeble over recent decades; because (given mainstream metaphysical assumptions) these no longer make sense to people.

It would surely be easier to induce self-loathing, Heaven-hating despair in a typical modern person than someone from a traditional society.

Chiu ChunLing said...

Lucifer fell by thinking himself better than God. Those who followed him accepted that premise for their own motives, but all of them did accept it. I'm not sure I want to bet too heavily on their having any kind of grand plan that is not just as fundamentally ignorant of reality.

Still, there is a great spiritual danger in refusing to read the writing on the wall till it is too late. Cheerfulness is a virtue, blind optimism is not.

Jumping to the other thread of discussion, I should say that perhaps it is past time for those who are going to comment on the outrages of our institutionalized decadence and social decline to adopt a humorous attitude about the inevitable idiocy of those still on board with all that. We should be making clear to people that rescuing from errors those who insist on choosing them is not our aim, our sympathies are reserved for those trying to escape the witch hunts rather than those continuing to debase them to new insanities.

Crudely put, what people of good will need more of is "us vs them". Both the immediate victims of abuses arising from political 'correctness' and the observers need to be told and to feel as lived reality our refusal to acknowledge the abusers as kith, even when they are kin.

Those continuing to side with such errors are making a choice, and if we would encourage them to make a different choice we must first make it clear that they are accountable for the choice they make. Even if we have not hope to sway them from their their embrace of error, the minimum duty of friendship is to not make common cause with enemies of those we would have call us friend.

This is a controversial thing to say outright. A couple of decades ago I myself had little taste for saying of Marxists all that simple honesty would demand. I recognized at the time, and I still acknowledge, that if one is to hold out hope for reconciliation short of outright war, civility and the presumption of good faith on both sides is necessary.

I do not hold out any such hope anymore, I regard it as active (misguided or not) service to wickedness to do so in the current circumstance.

Bruce Charlton said...

@CCL - Some good points here.

You are right that support is th emost valuable thing for those persecuted - some kind of 'I am on Your side' support. But one confusing thing about the people subjected to witch hunts is that many are themselves committed leftists; and therefore respond to persecution by grovelling and begging to be absolved. Such people resent support, because deep down they blame themselves for being persecuted.

An example is Larry Summers, who was deposed as President of Harvard for making factually correct remarks on women - he grovelled, lavishly bribed those who persecuted him - and was allowed to return to the fold. Clearly such a person should not be supported in their wickedness.

However, the mass media will sometimes lie and state that a person has 'apologised' when they have not (this happened with James Watson) - then we may end up blaming them unjustly for grovelling.

But not many have been woken from leftism even by themselves being persecuted - their unknown, unexamined metaphysical assumptions are too firmly in place to enable them to learn from the experience.

Chiu ChunLing said...

I question whether "deep down they blame themselves" for anything. The entire mindset of Marxism in all its forms is to always blame someone else.

However, having said that, I think that those on the left who are temporarily forced to grovel do blame those who show principled resistance to the tyranny of political correctness rather than abjectly surrendering. We certainly make it harder for them to receive sympathy for their craven apologies.

Something like, "we could be done with these pesky witch-hunts if not for all you witches running about!"

Which is true enough, witch hunts lose their popularity when people no longer believe there are witches about. Of course, then those who wish to hunt witches just need to redefine 'witch' so that they still have something to hunt. And they always will, because witch-hunting is not a means to any end, but an end in itself, the exercise of arbitrary power based on nothing but felt outrage it its own reward.