hilosophers tell us we can never know the true nature of the world. It is a central
tenet in Buddhist psychology as well as modern neuroscience: we interact not with the
world itself, but with a model of it that we construct in our minds.
That's why politics is so philosophically interesting. The political world is a place where appearance is reality. Politics is a form of applied metaphysics.
(This is not to be confused with these guys, who are apparently into Quantum Fractal Scaling Sciences, whatever that is, and something called Sacred Geometry. That sounds a lot like pyramid power to me, but if so it has little to do with metaphysics.)
In politics, when the appearance changes, it automatically changes political reality. That is why, for example, our SJWs and the Snowflake Battalions try to deny biology. It's why activists scramble over each other trying to find just the right terms to frame their side of the debate. It's why they try to force us to use their ridiculous made-up words. It is why those who control the mainstream media have an advantage over those who are forced to rely on the samizdat to find the truth.
But the events over the past year—the election of Donald Trump in the USA and the migrant problem in Europe—have revealed something important that few people noticed, but was staring us right in the face the whole time: P.C. was not just a bunch of loony people pretending to believe in something.
Obama and the Left
PC is not just, as Obama tried to convince us, simply having good manners or trying to silence the opposition. Obama claimed that conservatives are being politically correct when they criticize Democrats for being insufficiently patriotic. Obama thinks PC is “hypersensitivity that ends up resulting in people not being able to express their opinions at all without someone suggesting they're a victim.”
Although Obama's recognition of the existence of PC is welcome, his comments reveal that he still does not really understand it. True, oversensitivity and taking offense at the slightest provocation can be based on PC. But it need not be. Criticizing one's opponents' actions is not PC, either. Criticizing Obama for his actions against Israel at the UN, for example, is not PC. Complaining about a college professor who advocates white genocide, as despicable as his ideas are, is not PC.
PC is not just some pejorative we fling at the opposition, in the way that liberals call their opponents racist, homophobic, islamophobic, and sexist. PC is a real thing: it's an attempt to change reality by changing one's own or someone else's perceptions of reality. It is a way of forcing people to pretend to believe what they know to be false. Suggesting that people say silly made-up words like ‘xir’ and ‘xe’ is not in itself PC. But forcing students to use them to further one's political goals is PC. In this case the colleges are forcing students to pretend that the ever-changing number of fake ‘genders’ are real and must therefore be acknowledged and celebrated.
Redstate and NRO
Trump's election broke the back of PC by revealing to us how far it had infiltrated the Right. The Republican website Redstate sank into obscurity after it disinvited him for saying the phrase “blood coming out of her whatever.” National Review, once regarded as a leader of intellectual conservatism, devoted an entire issue to articles attacking Trump. The conservative establishment unleashed their attack dogs against the lower-class rural whites who they thought supported him. They did this not because of what he did, but because of what he said.
They were effective because the base held them in such high regard. In the end they failed. But by taking the stand they did, they taught us that our adversary is not just the left, but the elites and the establishment. So ironically their opposition to Trump helped get him elected.
A similar dynamic took place in Europe: virtually the entire media and establishment were united against the people. As in America, the elites tried to undermine the public's survival on every front: demographically, politically, and economically. The nationalist right was on its back, demonized and ruthlessly attacked. And then Merkel blew it by going too far. She pushed it past a tipping point: now it has become clear that either the EU must be disbanded (or at least radically reformed) or European civilization is doomed.
Although the Left manufactures and lives by PC, these events revealed to America and the world that the true division in politics was never between left and right, but between the political establishment—the elites—and the people. It was a valuable lesson. We suspected much of this already—it was the basis for the Tea Party—but we would not have understood the extent of it if not for Donald Trump. Even if the most dire predictions about him should come to pass, his election will have been a success.
The election of Donald Trump isn't the end of PC, but it has shocked many people back to reality. This is good; people cannot live indefinitely in a pretend world. But those marinated in PC still resist facing the fact that the real world does not conform to their fantasies and that it will not change just because they could, for a time, force others to pretend.
Title changed dec 29, 2016; last edited dec 29, 2016 7:33 am
