Tuesday 21 December 2010

Why cannot political correctness defend itself?

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Political correctness cannot defend itself - it is continually doing things (like encouraging sustained mass immigration, destroying military and police capability, damaging economic growth, and bureaucratically controlling the media) which make its own extinction inevitable. 

But why?

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There are several reasons. 

One is the dishonesty and wishful thinking that is intrinsic to PC: the way that it confuses imagination for reality (believing that if you can imagine it - it really can be). 

But deeper than this is that for PC there is nothing to defend - no 'self' to defend.

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Political correctness regards any current state as contingent and transitional and evolutionary; such that humans are an accidental product of history (and evolution) with no essence, continually changing. 

This is seen most starkly in transhumanism; whereby humans are regarded as wholly 'plastic' entities. 

The baseline reality - explicitly in transhumanism but implicitly for PC - is human gratification.

So that when humans become miserable due to societal changes, there are two possibilities: change the society or change the humans.

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Since everything changes, is changeable and can be changed; there is no essence of anything to defend: nowhere to draw a line or to take a stand: no reason to take a stand.

No nation, civilization, society nor persons. Only processes.

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For transhumanism, the focus is on changing humans - the focus is technical: by drugs, by implants, genetic engineering etc. 

For PC the focus is on changing society to make humans happy - but there is also a very strong focus on changing human minds; not so much by technology applied to the human organism, but by technology applied to the human mind: by totalizing propaganda - to the point of thought-control - the complete exclusion of contradictory expression.

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So, for political correctness, there is always a belief in the fall-back position that if society goes against the aspirations of political correctness, then PC propaganda can change human minds, which are regarded as radically plastic, such that people still believe in PC reality despite whatever may appear to contradict it.

If the real-reality is that society has become progressively taken-over by non-PC forces that have been encouraged by PC, then the virtual-reality world can be made primary.

Real-reality will be ignored and suppressed and PC virtual-reality will fill people's minds.

This step has, of course, been reached in several communist societies in the past and in current existence - as depicted in a favourite Brezhnev era Russian joke:

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Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev were stuck in a railway train.

A porter came to speak: 

"Bad news, Comrades, the train won’t move! The passengers are getting restless".

Lenin said: "Take the railway staff and subject them to a full Marxist education, that will do the trick".

The porter returned: 

"Bad news, Comrades, the train will still not move, the passengers are getting angry".

Stalin said: 

"Take the driver, fireman and guard and shoot them as an example to the others, that will do the trick".

The porter returned: 

"Bad news, Comrades, the train still won’t move, the passengers are starting to fight".

Brezhnev said: 

"Paint the windows black and tell the passengers that the train is moving".

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Under political correctness we are now well advanced into the stage of Paint the windows black and tell the passengers that the train is moving.

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And it works: the 'down the memory hole' phenomenon is only one extreme example of the phenomenon which includes selective reporting, selective emphasis, and slanderous insinuation and invention.

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Also very important to PC is fiction and 'faction' (a combination of facts and fiction: i.e. nearly-all supposedly true movies, drama, reportage and TV). 

It is basic undergraduate psychology teaching that the human mind retains knowledge but forgets the provenance of knowledge.

Much of what we think we 'know' about things was actually derived from politically correct fiction, movies, soaps, art, pseudo-documentary and so on.

This is, indeed, the mainstay of PC propaganda. We are shown a blend of facts, fiction and fantasy, but we remember it all as facts.

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Indeed, it has been shown that you can tell somebody a falsehood, and tell them explicitly that it is indeed a falsehood, yet the person are more likely than random to remember the falsehood but not the fact that it was false - so they remember explicit falsehoods as if they were facts. That is how memory works.

So a person can be set to learn some facts - some labelled true some labelled false - including the falsehood that the tallest mountain in the world is in Pakistan.

Then when that person is examined a few days later with a true-false test, they are more likely than chance to answer that the tallest mountain in the world is in Pakistan.

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This phenomenon is going on all the time and is probably the most powerful form of indirect PC propaganda. 

Hundreds of violently shocking movies and TV programs about fictional racist militant white supremacist organizations leaves behind in millions of minds the 'knowledge' that RMWSOs are a real and significant feature of modern societies: people remember the (false) fact, but do not remember the fictional/ fantasy provenance of the information.

A blend of mostly facts with a few falsehoods in a memorable fantasy is therefore the most effective propaganda.

Human memory remembers the whole thing as factual, and does not discriminate between true and fictional elements.

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But what PC neglects is that this level of thought control is only possible with a huge and pervasive mass media, such that the vast and universal diet of daily novelty actually drives-out natural human and community memories (a situation which was not possible in the Communist societies, where media was vestigial, and people retained a knowledge of real-reality based on personal experience).

PC defends nothing - not even its key instrument of social control. It sees no problems, it feels omnipotent. PC is built-upon blindness to real-reality and arrogance concerning the power of virtual-reality: and the greater the achieved success of PC the greater its blindness and arrogance.

At its moment of greatest triumph PC will be destroyed by unseen and ignored counter-forces

(Just as pacifism would only be safe in a world of 100 percent devout pacifists, and a single aggressor group could take-over all pacifist groups; so PC could only be safe in a 100 percent world of devout PC - and we are even-further away from that than we are from a world of pacifists.)

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When PC destroys the growth in size and pervasiveness and attention-grabbing qualities of the mass media - as it surely will - when the media is taken-over by bureaucracy and made less efficient and less effective; when the media becomes more overtly PC; when it becomes centrally-regulated and censored of all non-PC elements; when the media comes under the control of intolerant non-PC groups that are favoured by PC - then political correctness will of course lose its ability to influence the population: will lose the ability to convince the population that 'the train is moving.'

Media-derived virtual-reality will melt-away, experienced real-reality will reassert itself.

And that will be an end of PC. 

  




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