Chapter 8:16O The Politically Correct Movement

So for all its guilt-relieving benefits, the environmental movement still contained a condemning moral component: if we were not responsible with the environment, ‘good’, we were behaving immorally, ‘bad’. Moreover, nature, in its purity, exists in stark contrast to humans’ corrupted condition—hence our ruthlessness towards it in the first place.

At this stage in the march of upset yet another form of extreme pseudo idealism had to be manufactured where confrontation with the by now extremely confronting and depressing truth of the dilemma of the human condition could be totally sidestepped. What was required was a completely guilt-stripped dogma that was devoid of any need to confront and wrestle with the issue of soundness and Godliness; with whether you are a cooperative, social, integrative person; with the issue of your troubled self; with the morality issue of how men and women treat each other; and with the issue of whether or not you are being good to the environment. Upset had become so great that the need was to simply be ideal without question. This demand for a totally non-confronting form of relief from feeling ‘bad’ resulted in the establishment of the Politically Correct Movement, which has no other focus or requirement beyond simply choosing, from the two simplistic, fundamental, ‘political’ options in life—of being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’—to be ‘good’.

The politically correct culture was a pure form of freedom-denying dogma that fabricated, demanded and imposed ideality or ‘correctness’, specifically that of an undifferentiated world, which was in complete denial of the reality of the underlying issue of the existence of and reasons for humans’ variously embattled and upset states, and beyond that of the deeper question raised by those ‘non-ideal’ states of the issue of the human condition. For instance, it argued that the children’s nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep is racist and should instead be recited as ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’ (The Telegraph, 24 Jan. 2008).

Within the politically correct culture the need for relief from guilt was all-pervasive; the mind was constantly on the hunt for opportunities and ‘good causes’ through which to be ‘idealistic’ and achieve that rush of psychological relief of feeling that at last you are a ‘good’ rather than a ‘bad’ person. Wherever there was a victim of humanity’s battle, there was an opportunity to champion their cause and access that all-important relief. It was, as we will shortly see, a development that Christ described in much harsher terms when he said, ‘Wherever there is a carcass [the extremely upset], there the vultures [the false prophets, the merchants of delusion and escapism] will gather.’ But with the levels of upset in the world becoming so extreme, such relief-hunting became a huge industry, to the extent that we became, as the sociologist Frank Furedi recognised, ‘a society that celebrates victimhood rather than heroism’ (Culture of Fear, 1997, p.13 of 205). Yes, as one critic complained, ‘If you are a black vegetarian Muslim asylum-seeking one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you’ (‘Thought police muscle up in Britain’, The Australian, 21 Apr. 2009). Indeed, the deluded arrogance of the left-wing politically correct culture has been absolutely extraordinary; virtually every left-wing magazine or newspaper or broadcaster will go out of its way now to lead with a story and picture or footage about one of the just referred-to categories in order to ‘educate’ us all in ‘correct’ thinking!!

Again, while there was an ever increasing need for more dishonest, guilt-free forms of idealism through which to live, for humanity to arrive at this desperately insecure state where people were concerned only with finding relief from their own guilt through supporting the cause of those who were suffering or less fortunate was an extremely dangerous development because it meant the human race had, in effect, abandoned the ongoing battle to find the all-important liberating understanding of ourselves. This is not to say that in a critical battle, such as the one humanity has been involved in, showing care and compassion towards those who were suffering from the effects of the battle was not important. It was very important, because although we have all been involved in the upsetting battle, selflessness is still, as has been repeatedly emphasised, what binds wholes together; it is the glue within humanity’s army. However, while caring for those struggling to keep up was important, it was obviously more essential to support those on the frontline who were still carrying on the battle to ensure the war was ultimately won. In this light it can be seen how very dangerous and irresponsible the politically correct movement’s focus and insistence only on caring for the victims of the battle was.

In fact, while showing care and compassion to those suffering from the battle was (‘was’, because the battle to find understanding of the human condition is now over) certainly the responsibility of any healthy society, doing so merely to delude yourself and others that you are an upset-free, ideal person seriously discredited the whole notion and practice of consideration and kindness itself. Indeed, using idealism to delude yourself that you were good gave idealism such a bad name that no relatively sound, secure person wanted to be part of the left-wing political culture where such relief-hunting had become endemic; so much so that, in the end, there was no longer any authentic, trustable, credible, healthy, meaningful idealistic movement in society to counteract any excessively selfish and destructive right-wing behaviour—there were only moderate factions within the right-wing that the sane and rationally-behaved could join and support.

Yes, the whole democratic process that our society depended on for there to be effective progress and functionality was being destroyed by mad desperados—by a group of people who were misusing democracy to further their own selfish agenda of making themselves feel good, rather than for what democracy was designed to be: a tool to decide the best way to manage any particular course of action. How could you possibly have an effective discussion about where the right balance lay between selfishness and idealism if participants in that discussion were only interested in whether their direct participation would make them feel good and/​or whether the course of action chosen would ultimately make them feel good? The answer is you couldn’t. It was a derailed, ineffective, dysfunctional, highly imperfect, pointless—in fact, defunct—debate. It was like being in mid-ocean on a life-boat, desperately trying to find your way to the safety of land, when someone on-board decides to hijack and destroy the mission by capsizing the boat because they had become obsessed with wanting to cool off in the water. As has already been carefully explained, it was totally irresponsible, selfish—in fact, mad—behaviour. The human race was trying to save itself from destruction by finding knowledge, ultimately understanding of the human condition, but the extreme practitioners of pseudo idealism were only interested in making themselves feel good. Contrary to what their banners said, pseudo idealists no longer cared about the future of the world. Their conduct was completely selfish and not at all the selfless, idealistic behaviour they made it out to be and deluded themselves it was. Thank goodness the arrival of understanding of the human condition exposes this madness for what it really is, because it was only while it was not possible to explain humanity’s great heroic battle that it was possible to get away with such mad and obscene behaviour—‘Can’t you see our idealism is making the world a better place.’ What rubbish—such behaviour is nothing more than a selfish attempt to gain relief from and escape the agony of the human condition! People who are not overly upset, not overly soul-corrupted, are naturally concerned for other individuals, genders, ‘races’, cultures, the environment, etc, while those who are overly upset practitioners of pseudo idealism are merely pretending to be concerned for anyone and anything other than themselves in order to relieve themselves of their guilt. Instead of being the champions of selflessness they were, in fact, the champions of selfishness, the most selfish of people. Upset basically means self-preoccupation—you are preoccupied with expressing your anger, with satisfying your egocentricity and with maintaining your alienation. Later (in par. 1126), it will be described how Christ got to the underlying truth about relief-hunting pseudo idealists when he described them as having had their ‘love’ ‘grow cold’ (Bible, Matt. 24:12).

Humans have had to do what they had to do, side with idealism to delude themselves that they were ‘good’/​ideal, relieve themselves of the truth about their corrupted, extremely selfish condition, but in terms of humanity’s all-important journey to enlightenment, idealism was being extremely, horribly misused—and a particularly dysfunctional aspect of the misuse was the arrogant extent of pseudo idealists’ delusion that they were actually ideal, that they held the moral high ground. In the situation that has existed, where the reality of the upsetting battle to find knowledge couldn’t be explained, idealism—albeit the bastardised form of ‘victim-hunting-to-make-yourself-feel-good, politically correct’, pseudo idealism—certainly did have a field day mocking realism as evil. In the vacuum where the reason for humans’ upset, corrupted state was not able to be explained, the ‘intellectuals’/​‘liberal elites’/​‘chattering classes’/​‘left-wing trendy café society’/​‘chardonnay socialists’/​‘radical chic’/​‘Hollywood Left’/​‘CBS-New York Times, BBC-Guardian, ABC-The Sydney Morning Herald, TIME and National Geographic ‘left-wing rags’, etc, etc axis’/​‘high-minded do-gooders’/​‘rainbow extremists’/​‘strident bleeding hearts’/​‘feel good, warm inner glow, blissed out compassion junkies’/​‘virtue signallers’, ‘so delighted by displays of your own sensitivity, so certain you hold the moral high ground’, as the relief-hunting, pseudo idealistic left-wing have been variously referred to, conceitedly promenaded about with a holier-than-thou attitude, while the right-wing advocates of freedom (from the oppression of idealism in order to participate in the corrupting search for knowledge) were arrogantly and disdainfully vilified as morally bankrupt and contemptible. For example, the right-wing so-called ‘Tea Party’ that recently emerged in American politics was derided by the left-wing Democrats for being devoid of any sound arguments for their cause—they were accused of being nothing more than promoters of ‘fear, xenophobia, cryptofascism, creationism, inequality and ignorance’ (cartoon by Turner in The Irish Times that was re-printed in The Australian, 3 Nov. 2010). It is no wonder politics has become so polarised—to the point where the two sides, rather than providing humanity with a healthy equilibrium, have existed in totally opposed philosophical continents, and may as well have lived on separate planets. The deluded arrogance of the extremely dangerous dishonesty of the left became an insufferable, unbearable, overwhelming, terrifying, sickening force. Listing the freedom-stifling ‘keywords in PC’s history’ as ‘Identity, gender, gender-neutral, diverse, inclusive, patriarchy, workplace harassment, multiculturalism, dead white males, sexism, racism, organic, “privileged”, hate speech, speech codes, prayer in schools, affirmative action, respecting our differences, microaggressions, trigger warnings’, the ever-insightful Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel Henninger was the first commentator to my knowledge to point out that the extraordinary support for the hyper politically incorrect US Republican candidate for the 2016 Presidential elections, Donald Trump, is due to people’s ‘revolt’ against ‘years of political correctness they felt they’d been forced to choke down in silence’ (‘Donald Trump, Ben Carson and the revolt of the politically incorrect’, The Wall Street Journal, 8 Jan. 2016).

Again, the problem at base was the inability to explain the human condition. While it was easy to argue the case for the idealism of the left-wing, it was almost impossible to argue the case for the realism of the right-wing. How could you justify any selfishness or inequality; how could you defend behaviour that appeared in every way to be inhumane; how could you argue that not being ideally behaved was good? The answer is that until we could explain the paradox of the human condition we couldn’t—well not sufficiently. Writers like Ayn Rand did well to mount some sort of a case for right-wing free enterprise, but countering such efforts were the dogmatic ‘Capitalists are Pigs’ placards used in protests at G8 summits, and left-wing advocates like Michael Moore, the filmmaker and activist who, at the conclusion of his 2009 documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, smugly announced that ‘Capitalism is evil.’ But while Moore and ‘Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery…​[and, in decrying its effects on the environment, the] Bolivian President Evo Morales declared in 2009 “Either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies”’ (Pascal Bruckner, ‘The Ideology of Catastrophe’, The Wall Street Journal, 10 Apr. 2012), the truth is that it was not communism that kept the human race going towards its goal of ending the human condition and all the devastation that resulted from it, but capitalism. Without the relief, reward, distraction and sustenance of materialism/​material goods that the exchange of money or capital facilitated, humans would not have been able to cope with and carry on their upsetting, idealism-defying, heroic search for knowledge, ultimately self-knowledge.

Yes, with understanding of the human condition we can finally now explain that socialism/​communism, the pseudo idealistic dogmatic insistence that everyone be social and communal—live for society and the communal good rather than seek a degree of material relief and reward for yourself—ignored the reality of the upsetting battle that humans have had to wage to find understanding of themselves, of their less-than-ideal human condition. As was emphasised in chapter 3:9, with understanding of the human condition found what is revealed is that it was, in fact, the left-wing that was morally bankrupt, not the right! The truth was not as it appeared. In the Adam Stork analogy, upset, angry, egocentric and alienated Adam is the hero of the story not the villain; it was his condemning, ridiculing, upsetting idealistic opponent, which the extreme pseudo idealist came to represent, who was actually the villain and not the hero he deluded himself to be and insisted to others he was. Yes, while the right-wing tended to be selfish and corrupting of soul, it was still participating in humanity’s search for knowledge.

It should be mentioned that the overly upset were not only to be found on the side of left-wing pseudo idealism. Some people who were overly upset resisted taking up support of left-wing pseudo idealism because they didn’t want to be perceived as, or consider themselves to be, weak and cowardly for having abandoned the battle, and/​or because they were intuitively aware that too many had already done so, resulting in the now extremely high levels of delusion and dishonesty in the world that they didn’t want to contribute any further to. It should also be mentioned that there have been people who supported the political right’s promotion of the freedom needed to search for knowledge while adhering to fundamentalist misrepresentations of religious teachings that worked against that search. This dichotomy can be explained by the fact that while you could support right-wing policies without being particularly confronted by your own corrupted condition, supporting religion has been an unavoidably self-confronting practice, so while it has been possible for the more exhausted to support right-wing politics, it has not been as easy to be a supporter of religion unless it was in a literal, fundamentalist way, where, as was explained in ch. 8:16I, the emphasis could be shifted away from self-confronting honesty, introspection and interpretation of the deeper truths contained in the religion’s scriptures to simply worshipping the prophet as a more indirect way of glorifying and supporting the truth he stood for. The so-called ‘Bible Belt’ in southern USA, for instance, is notoriously right-wing but also notoriously fundamentalist, such as in its advocation of creationism and opposition to the teaching of evolution. They support individual freedom but not analysis of the human condition; they despise the dishonesty and weakness of the left-wing for holding that, for example, there is no such thing as truth, and so want to support the truthfulness contained in religion, but not so much that it becomes personally confronting.

At this point we need to continue our analysis of the progression that the development of even more guilt/​truth stripped forms of idealism to live through took, and look at what emerged after the development of the politically correct movement.