Greetings Ham,
How could you place me between Arlo and Platt under the subject of PC
Madness? I'd rather be sitting in a dentist's chair.
Thanks for the Happy Mother's Day wish!
Marsha
At 12:29 PM 5/9/2009, you wrote:
Willblake, Arlo, Marsha, Platt and All --
I don't know what Joseph Campbell's musings on religion and
mythology have to do with political correctness, so I'm going with a
new thread title.
No doubt you will regard my take on PC as hypocritical and
naive. But if you will bear with me I'll show you why this form of
thought control is detrimental to value sensibility in general and
to a value-based
philosophy, such as the MoQ, in particular.
When USA finalist Carrie Prejean was asked about her position on
same sex marriage by one of the judges, she candidly replied: "We
live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or
opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I
think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a
woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was
raised." It was an honest answer to a trick question from an openly
gay inquisitor who had his own political agenda. The next day that
judge excoriated Miss California for her response, calling her a
"dumb bitch", and she was forthwith disqualified for the crown.
Gentlemen, that's "political correctness" gone mad.
Another version of PC is the use of language to alter the public's
concepton of social policy, such as the label "affirmative action"
in place of "minority preference", or "overseas contingency
operation" instead of "global war on terrorism". If you've read
Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" you'll recognize this kind of verbal
obfuscation as a propaganda device to promote "Doublethink". Words
definitely change the way we think, and with an insidious choice of
words a politician can persuade the public that war is peace or that
evil is goodness. Joseph Goebbels made effective use of Doublethink
in his support of Hitler's campaign for power in Nazi Germany.
In "The Historical Roots of 'Political Correctness'," Raymond Raehn
wrote: "America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs,
attitudes and values that .seeks to impose a uniformity of thought
and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in
nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical
inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution."
In fact, political correctness is the postmodern world's form of
thought control. What it does is blind
the public's discriminative sense of value in an attempt to justify
a political agenda, such as "social equality" or governmental
redistribution of wealth.
The reason Doublethink works as a method of thought control is
lucidly explained in a short essay I discovered last week by the
author of an Australian quarterly. Here's a seminal excerpt from that essay:
"A common response to modern moral confusion is to blame the decline
of religion, which no doubt has weakened the hold of traditional
morality. But it is a mistake to think that morality, to be valid,
must rest on unquestionable foundations.
"Another view of morality sees it as consisting of conventions or
rules of conduct that have evolved to make social co-operation
possible. Perhaps we cannot prove that the rule of keeping promises
is absolutely morally right but we know that if we break it then the
benefits we all receive from society are much reduced. This
conservative notion of morality is relativist in that it recognises
that different conventions suit different societies, but it's also
true that most societies share some basic, necessary rules, like
truth telling and rights to property.
"The trouble is that, for many people, good behaviour is not enough;
they want morality to do the job that religion used to do, by
teaching them how to save their souls. Nowadays, we are encouraged
to judge people's moral credentials in terms of how "concerned" and
"caring" they are rather than whether they can be relied on to
fulfil their humble duties. But professions of contempt for "mere"
rules and conventions, and sentimental emphasis on good intentions
and motives rather than actual conduct and outcomes, can mask a lot
of moral vanity and fecklessness.
"Doublethink in public debate is a reflection of the moral
confusions and doubts that afflict modern Western society. Exposing
it is the first step towards bringing people back into contact with
their own true values."
-- [Michael James: Intolerable Level of Doublethink, from
'The Thinking Man's CDROM']
For anyone interested, I'll be running the entire essay in my Values
Page column all next week. Check it out at
www.essentialism.net/balance.htm starting Sunday, May 10.
Happy Mother's Day,
Ham
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