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Yes.
Or, at least, political correctness shares at the group level many properties of the un-understandable primary delusion in an individual with psychotic illness.
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A primary delusion is something which arises without external cause, and is contrasted with a secondary delusion that explains something such as why a patient is hearing voices or having other strange experiences. (e.g. the secondary delusion that the patient is hearing voices inaudible to others because aliens are projecting them with x-rays, or the strange sensation under the skin is caused by an infestation of insects.)
The classic primary delusion is something like; "I saw the traffic lights turn green, and knew I was the son of God".
Comes from nowhere, without rational connection, and cannot be understood by the outsider.
But for the patient, the primary delusion then goes on to be elaborated as a 'master key' for understanding the world.
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But although un-understandable, the primary delusion does not come out of nowhere - it is usually the resolution of a period of time of delusional 'mood' or 'atmosphere' , of perplexity and suspicion - that "something is going on".
In this state everything is experienced (to quote Andrew Sims in Symptoms in the Mind page 125) "as sinister, portentous, uncanny, peculiar in an indefinable way. He knows that he is personally involved, but cannot tell how. He has a feeling of anticipation, sometimes even of excitement, that soon all the separate parts of his experience will fit together to reveal something immensely significant."
The primary delusion provides exactly that: "When the delusion becomes fully formed, he often appears to accept it with a feeling of relief from the previous unendurable tension of the atmosphere. "
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My understanding is that this delusional mood is itself a consequence of thought-disorder, of fragmentation of the train of thought such that reasoning is disrupted, ideas cannot be followed through: short periods of consecutive logic continually being derailed.
And my understanding of thought disorder is that it is a delirious, dreamlike state which comes and goes - so the patient experiences fragments of dream illogic interspersed with fragments of waking reason; fragmentary meanings which never get to add up.
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The analogy with political correctness is that PC is a primary delusion which derives from the perplexed atmosphere resulting from a fragmented and discontinuous mode of thinking - except that this is primarily at the social level rather than the individual level.
I regard PC as a combination of Marxist atheist materialist rationalism - the desire for social efficiency, for the sake of efficiency; but continually disrupted by the dreamlike illogic of primary process thinking, of id, of spontaneous instinctuality.
In other words, a mode of thinking in which Old Left Marxian or Fabian ultra-logical planning is continually disrupted by New Left, counter-cultural, utopian idealism; when hard-nosed bureaucracy experiences irruptions of un-bounded hippie fantasy; where cold rationalism alternates with warm-hearted wishful-thinking.
This is the perplexed delusional atmosphere characteristic of the ruling intellectual elite in the 1960s, the feeling of anticipation and excitement, that unendurable tension, from which the primary delusion of political correctness arose to fit together the separate parts of experience, revealing something immensely significant.
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So political correctness makes no more real world sense than a primary delusion in schizophrenia - and it is equally immune to reality-testing; but PC provides the same sense of relief, of resolution to the unendurable tensions of leftist politics.
PC makes psychological sense, not political sense. It can only partly be understood by logic, and only partly understood in terms of wishful fantasy - but is able in practice to fuse these two irreconcilable modes.
But so profound and totalizing a delusion is only possible due to the profound thought-disorder operative in modernity; a situation in which the ruling intellectual elite can neither abandon logic nor live wholly by it; neither abandon animistic fantasy nor live wholly by it - and are doomed to alternate wildly, unpredictably, uncontrollably between the two.
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