The Puritan plan was to have the King of England be the Pope, to combine the secular and spiritual power, and when that failed, to establish a utopia in the New World. The Church says there is no paradise before Doomsday. The Church says Man cannot save himself without the grace of Christ. The Puritans say some men are born elect, and cannot be damned, and others are born depraved, and cannot be saved. So to create utopia, all that is required is to give all spiritual and temporal power to the Elect, the elite, the enlightened. Does that sound familiar?
I am emphasizing the spiritual roots of Political Correctness to support the argument that PC is fundamentally a religious movement, a faith tradition, a cult, and not a political movement except in a trivial sense.
Like all faiths, the cult has certain articles of faith. Like all heresies, this cult takes the main propositions of the traditional historic Christian faith for granted, and these are its only source of strength and only source of appeal. The concern for the poor, the widow, the downtrodden, the belief of the brotherhood hence the equality of all men, all this comes from Christian thought: there are no corresponding doctrines to these among the Stoics or Aristotelians or Neoplatonists, and the opposite is preached by those who follow Confucius or those who believe in Karma and in the caste system.
Like all heresies, this cult rejects vehemently other propositions of the Christian faith, and anathematizes them not just as bad opinions, but as an evil to be vilified in absolute terms.
Unlike other heresies, the cult rejects God and the supernatural altogether, and presents itself as if it is not a heresy, not a cult, not a religion, and not based on faith.
It claims to be based on iron-clad scientific reasoning of the latest and most intellectually sound and objective sort.
Please stop laughing or I will never finish.
One of the articles of faith of this religion is that it is not a religion and that their conclusions are the product of clear and logical thinking, or perhaps the product of pellucid clarity of pure motives and high-minded compassion, and that to disagree with the articles of faith is a sign, not of lack of faith, but a lack of intelligence, education, or compassion.
They think they are smarter than us.
These undereducated boobs who cannot follow a syllogism of three steps, who do not speak a word of Greek or Latin, who do not know the difference between Arianism and Aryanism, who have never read The Origin Of Species or Das Kapital or The Republic and who do not even know the intellectual parentage of all their ideas, these vaunting cretins whose arguments consist of nothing but tiresome talking points recited by rote and flaccid ad hominem, whose opinions are based on fashion, they, of all people, think they are smarter than the rest of the world.
Yes, you can go ahead and laugh at that one. I’ll wait.
It is merely a fact that no Politically Correct policy has ever had the outcome planned. These are not stopped clocks who are correct twice a day: the PC cultists always, always, always, side with whatever is the most evil, illogical, destructive, nihilistic, perverted, and foolish measure in any debate or decision of policy. PC ruins everything it touches.
Instead of providing an endless list of PC schemes, ideas and policies that have failed, since they all fail, I will issue a general challenge to any reader who wishes to dispute the obvious to list the PC success stories. List one. A single example will overturn the universal affirmative. Knock yourself out.
You will find that the candidates on the list are one of two things:
First, the cultists will claim credit for something they opposed, such as the Civil Rights Movement, which was a Republican movement, spearheaded by a Christian minister named King, aided by Nixon, voted into effect by a Republican majority, to overcome Democrats who stood in schoolhouse doors or turned firehoses on peaceful protestors or lynched blacks. Meanwhile the NRA was arming blacks with handguns, Saturday Night Specials, that the Democrats tried, often with success, to remove.
Second, once the true depth of the evil is undeniable, the cultists will deny something that they once supported, such as Stalin’s Soviet Union, (of which Lincoln Steffens said “I have seen the future—and it works”), was really actually honest Injun a truly true example of the true faith after all. It was not REALLY socialist. They did not really try hard enough. They did not spill enough blood. We need to try again and try harder.
These two factors acting in concert create what I call the Unreality Principle. The Unreality Principle is the principle that whatever is truth is called not true and whatever is not true is called true. It does not matter what the topic is. The point is to break the mind of its ability to focus on rational thought.
This conditioning of the brain to flinch away from reason and embrace unreason is done by making the unreality principle the paramount moral and ethical principle in the cult. It is the principle that trumps all others.
So the first article of faith of Political Correctness, the one from which it takes its name, is that to think or speak what is factually correct, that is, whatever is really real, is morally wrong if it harms the party or the cause.
Moral righteousness consists of thinking and speaking falsehoods and nonsense-words that are factually incorrect but politically correct, that is, by slogans, jeering, noise, commotion, jingles, hullaballoo, alarums, and cacophony which aid the party or the cause.
And it is only moderately meritorious to speak small falsehoods, (such as blaming the failure of the Soviet Union on the need of the idealistic revolutionaries to arm themselves against the vicious attacks from the capitalist West), but truly meritorious, because it is a true sign of deep faith that resists all fact and ignores all logic, to tell truly huge, outrageous, utterly unbelievable lies, (such as saying all opposition to Obama is racist, or saying the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was not Socialist, or saying Capitalism produces poverty, or saying the only truth is that there is no truth, or saying that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist).
Those who take up the pen to argue against this endless drip of nonsense are often baffled by the fact that the PC cultist, when discussing any other matter aside from one of his articles of faith, is capable of humanity, wit, logic, and seems like a normal human being. But once on one of the subjects where this mental disease has taken hold, the cultist will and must say things no one is stupid enough to believe but which no one is dishonest enough to lie about: lies on the level of saying his head is a pumpkin, things a child would not believe.
These cultists are not monsters. Why, then, do they say things that anyone can see are utter evil, utter nonsense, utter folly?
What makes kindly gray-haired old grandmas who act like humans at all other times suddenly curse the United States for opposing the spread of International Communism to South America, and unable to believe that the Communist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, but instead think a Right-wing conspiracy or an evil redneck city in Texas is to blame?
One might as well ask why Eve and Adam, our first parents, favored of Heaven so highly, and blessed with endless life and lordship over the gardens of paradise, thought that disobedience to God would get them some greater good, such as equality with God, a good that God whether through cruelty or unfairness wished to deny them.
The cultists will tell you their motive. Their motive is kindness. They want to help.
The cultists are shocked by the unhappiness and unfairness of human life on earth.
But that is not what makes them cultists. Christians are also shocked by the unhappiness and unfairness of human life on earth, and they explain that shock by reference to the Fall of Man, and seek the solution of the world’s pain in a supernatural power from beyond the world, seeing all men’s devising must fail.
What makes otherwise rational men into PC-cultists is that they do not believe in the Fall of Man; they believe in the Interrupted Perfection of Man.
They believe perfection of paradise is within arm’s reach, perhaps less than 25 years a
way, but that the achievement of this eschaton is thwarted by the folly and inertia of the uneducated masses, and by the sinister conspiracy of the malign vested interests favored by the current world-system.
This conclusion is not as bizarre as first seems. The Politically Correct cultists see that reason and decency and honesty have not solved that unfairness nor alleviated that unhappiness. Therefore, (so their reasoning goes), reason and decency and honesty, also called factual correctness, are worthless.
Reason and decency and honesty seem to the cultists to deny to them some greater good that reality has always denied them. It is the same logic Eve used when reaching for the apple. They want to be gods, or, what is the next best thing, the fathers of the New Man who is destined to occupy the shining towers of Utopia.
Ergo, the cultist concludes that if factual correctness and loyalty to truth has always failed throughout all history to produce perfect utopia, then political correctness and loyalty to falsehood and outrageous lies must serve in its place.
This thought is like an addictive drug, a drug that gives pleasure only the first time it is used, and thereafter only produces pain if it is withdrawn. After the first euphoric days of the Movement, the cultist quickly finds he cannot get what he wants.
He does not conclude from this that utopia is a self-contradictory and appallingly stupid and Escheresquely impossible idea. He merely feels frustration.
Then he finds a scapegoat for his frustration, usually some harmless bystander, perhaps a Jew, perhaps an Investment Banker, perhaps the Pope, perhaps his father, and blames him.
This scapegoating does not necessarily involve a conspiracy theory of history, but it must have the mood and savor of a conspiracy theory: it must assume action in concert of many groups widely dispersed through time and space, whether that group is called Capitalists or the Patriarchy or The Establishment or The Man or what have you.
If the cultist is frustrated, and if the frustration cannot be admitted honestly to be because of the foolishness of his goals, then the frustration of his goals must be blamed on an opponent, an oppressor, a conspiracy, a group of wrong-thinking people who have some base and vile motive for maintaining all the injustice and unfairness of the world. The wrong-thinking people are sadists, who thwart the utopia because and only because they want people to be unhappy. The wrong-thinking people are witches on whom all bad harvests are to be blamed.
With the freedom from facts and logic which is the core of Cultist thinking comes a number of defense mechanisms too numerous to list here. I will mention only two.
The first mechanism is placing ideology over logic. Because logic is not a priority, the cult does not demand uniformity of belief even on the core doctrine. The cult has a number of propositions or special interests it serves, and loyalty to any one of them makes you a cult member, so you get the benefit of unearned sensations of moral superiority and self-congratulation on your kindness, even while other members of the cult are carrying on to do the opposite of whatever you support.
Your loyalty is still to them, and you attack anyone who attacks them. That is the bargain.
This is why some PC Cultists can even admit that communism is mad, bad and evil, but they also must think McCarthy and Reagan are even worse. Some cultists can think that Islamic terrorists are bad, but the price is that they have to think that criticism or mockery of Islam is even worse. That is why Gay activists and Islamic terrorists can agree to attack their mutual foe, Christendom, despite their mutual hatred for each other.
The second mechanism is placing ideology over honesty. Whenever the lies become too obvious, the cult denies itself, changes its name, and the shadow takes another form and grows again. It cannot call itself Liberalism once it becomes too obvious that the cult yearns with semi-sexual lust for totalitarianism, and seeks totalitarian control over all media, all communication, all thought. It cannot call itself Progressive once it is clear that the progress is toward the edge of a cliff. They cannot even call themselves Left once it is clear they have no relation to the left-seated liberal delegates in the French assembly. They cannot call themselves socialist once everyone sees what socialism does to the economy, to human honesty, to self-reliance, to manhood, to humanity. They cannot call themselves communists once it is clear they have no intention of sharing all property in common, but instead bestow villas and mansions to the elite party members as their share but slums or Siberians gulags to underlings as their share. This is why the cult keeps changing its name.
There is no center to the cult. There is no Pope in charge of this antichurch of antihuman belief. It is a loose collection of gibberish whose elements have nothing in common with each other except for the psychological effect on the cultists. They get to feel good about themselves as morally superior while thinking they are saving the earth while doing everything imaginable to sink more and more deeply into moral depravity, infanticide, euthanasia, sexual perversion, theft, half-lies and whole lies, revolutions, riots, violence, wars.
The cult offers complete freedom from morality and reason while also offering to them the palms and laurels and coronets granted to the saints and saviors and beauty queens.
Everything is permitted to cultists because the cult enemy, the witches or wrong-thinking people, have no rights and merit no respect, no, not even the respect due an honorable opponent, or due a man honestly mistaken.
It goes without saying that if utopia were possible, anything done to achieve utopia would be permissible; and likewise any opposition to utopia would be an evil so monstrous as to be beyond explanation. That is why the cultists are not just appalled by opposition to their featherbrained and bloodthirsty schemes, their desire to loot and lie and give the guillotine work to do, they are honestly baffled by it.
The same reason that utopia, by being so valuable permits any sacrifice needed to build it, and makes all opposition into devils and madmen, so too does an emergency permit large sacrifices allegedly for the duration and silences all opposition as being impermissible given the limited time and the severity of the emergency.
This is why the cultists are always shouting at the top of their lungs.
This is why the best health care system in history, with little or nothing wrong with it, which, perhaps, to be made even better, could have used a few minor tweaks, is described as a crisis demanding immediate action.
A crisis is like a miniature utopia, in that the severity allows foolish actions, like passing a law without reading it first. And any objection to solving the crisis can be denounced as being prompted by an evil desire to prolong or deepen the crisis, a wrongheadedness and willful blindness to the looming severity of the coming disaster.
The end of the world is always immanent for the Cult. The stakes are always all or nothing, world salvation or world damnation. Nothing can be discussed calmly.
Nothing can be discussed calmly for the same reason there is no loyal opposition nor honorable rivals: everything opposed to the cult must be described as absolutely bad and evil in all ways.
(Even science fiction writers, like yours truly, who speak against the cult cannot simply be making an innocent mistake, they must be both uneducated and untalented in the writing of science fiction. Correct political opinion seems also to grant all talents and all graces.)
The only way to escape being accused of being a wrong-thinking person is to denounce other wrong-thinking persons with the vehemence and correct formula of speech to show that one believes the cultists. The formulae change from decade to decade and year to year—Colored to Black to Afroamerican to African American to whatever—so that no one can be a cultist without paying close attention to the cult and its fashions.
And, like the Gnostics before them, the cult has an inner and an outer circle. The inner circle are the ones who half-believe their own lies, and the outer circle are the ones who the inner circle deceives and misleads.
And this is one of the best defenses of the cult: the outer circle members like the sensatio
n of belonging to a group, and like the flattery of speeches and stories and movies telling them, over and over, that they are smarter than average, more compassionate than average, and that the witches and wrong-thinking persons are to blame for all the crop failures and everything else wrong with their lives.
Did you get fired from your job? When all things are controlled by the state, no more unjust firings will happen. Did your boyfriend break up with you? Once feminism is taught to one and all, an era of mutual understanding and equality will grow, where men will no longer be unfair to women. Do you have a longing for something hard to name? This is because the witches are keeping you from your true heritage.
The Jews are to blame for the Fatherland losing the Great War. The White Man is to blame for my poverty. He makes more than me. He is handsomer than me. He is happy and I am not. Vote for me, and I will stop the witches from cursing the climate and creating a hole in the ozone layer. By November, the Utopia should be up and working. But I need more power over your lives because I am an elite expert and wiser and more compassionate than you, and I will stop the wrong-thinking people, who are all-powerful witches.
And on and on and on. It is a formula that explains all failures and promises all success and shifts blame to the wrong-thinking people, and the beauty of the cult is that facts never, ever get in the way.
That is the strategic overview of the Cult belief of Political Correctness.
What has this to do with science fiction?
Nothing. The Cult is totalitarian. It does not want to control merely your beliefs about God and angels or your beliefs about race relations or your beliefs about the proper forms of law and government or your beliefs about questions of capital and labor or your beliefs about relations between the sexes or your beliefs about the relations between man and his environment or your beliefs about your diet and your smoking habits. They want to control your beliefs on purely scientific questions, such as the role of human activity in relation to global temperatures over the next century, or the average intelligence quotients of various racial groups.