Bruce will undoubtedly have a better formulation for this, but:
People seek an end to risk, doubt and fear.
As a result, they desire UNIFORMITY and an absence of tension between objects and potential outcomes.
The only way to achieve this is pacifism, uniformity, conformity, and universal speech and behavior codes that limit the ability of the strong to correct the weak.
If you read Nietzsche and the last chapter of "Ulysses" into that, you're on the right track; however, this has also been expressed not only in Christian mysticism but also in Greek, Pagan and Hindu sources. It is a truth of existence itself.
Political correctness is just the latest tower of Babel. We all want to be one, so each of us feels safe, and the result is that we all go down together.
11 May 2011 at 16:06
Daniel said...
Mr. Charlton,
I see your point, but this seems a bit muddy to me. Your point seems to be that PC mitigates against good government, and there I agree.
But who ever said that a world government has to actually work well? If world government ends up looking like the Transportation Security Administration in the United States, where surly uniformed black people harass and belittle old ladies and children alike, grope and take naked pictures of people, preventing orderly air travel and driving up the price of flying, disallowing bottles of water and tubes of toothpaste for no real reason, well then... isn't that about what we would expect?
If you mean to say that PC government doesn't really govern in the classic sense, I agree. But "government" in the term "world government" is just a holdover from quainter times. What it really means is world totalitarian power structure. Just because life would be miserable and intolerable under such a situation doesn't mean it can't happen. "1984" shows this well, I think.
I suppose your general point stands that too much of this kind of thing could just result in collapse, and we may indeed be much closer to collapse than anyone would like to think. But merely asserting that PC government is awful, totalitarian, and backwards does not prove that it's impossible. In fact, from where I sit, PC government seems to be thriving nicely. Good government, on the other hand...
12 May 2011 at 03:39
*
From Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works by Hieromonk Damascene - pp 696-8.
"Today (in 1982), some New Age circles speak of "The Plan" for a "New World Order," which would include a universal credit system, a universal tax, a global police force, and an international authority that would control the world's food supply and transportation systems. In this Utopian scheme, wars, disease, hunger, pollution, and poverty will end. All forms of discrimination will cease, and people's allegiance to tribe or nation will be replaced by a planetary consciousness." (...)
"Never has there been more talk of “peace and security” than today. One of the chief organs of the U.N. is the Security Council, and organizations for “world peace” are everywhere. It men do achieve finally a semblance of “peace and security,” it would seem to contemporary man to be a state like heaven on earth – a millennium. The practical way to do this is to unite all governments under one. For the first time in history such a ideal becomes a possible goal of practical politics – a world ruler is conceivable now. For the first time, the Antichrist becomes an historical possibility." (...)
"With the establishment of the European Union, the creation of the Euro currency, the control of former Eastern-bloc countries by Western financial interests, the advances towards a cashless society, the formation of an international criminal tribunal by the United Nations and NATO, we see what appear to be the forerunners of such a one-world system. Some of these developments are not necessarily evil by themselves. Taken together, however, they help to set up a global apparatus which can make way for the rising religion of the future."
***
The Western elites have long since embraced the idea of a New World Order, global government, dissolution of national boundaries and so on.
The rationale is hedonic: prosperity and peace..
And if not prosperity, then at least peace...
And if not peace, then at least pacifism.
*
Political correctness is the 'religion' of such folk - or rather the spirituality, or if not that then the perspective on life and the human condition.
PC is (presumably) supposed to synergize with global government - the ethical system of multiculturalism and diversity combining with a mixed word without border - all under the 'benign' leadership of democratically elected... and so on.
*
When Fr Seraphim Rose died in 1982 it certainly looked as if world government was the trend - and since then there has certainly been an expansion of global bureaucracies.
Yet the reality is that governments - both national and international - have lost control.
Stripped of the means of effective government by political correctness; national and international governments are mostly Brezhnev-style corrupt bureaucracies - engaged in a propaganda of denying reality (by means of replacing experience with virtual reality via the mass media) and simply relabelling what happens as desirable - re-interpreting trends asif they were beneficial to the cause of global peace and prosperity.
*
So the real trends are now running against global governance by the Western elites, and the proponents of a New World Order are reduced to aspirational statements and cheer-leading chaos (in order to justify their salaries and status).
Instead of an actual world government, we have a bunch of grafting charlatans pretending to be a world government.
*
What went wrong for them? What happened to their dreams of power?
Political correctness: that's what happened.
*
PC is the Achilles Heel of the would-be international Leftist dictatorship.
*
Even as PC justifies the global elite in their takeover of all and everything, at the same time all and everything is being ever-more-rapidly subverted by the chaos caused by PC - perhaps above all the truly massive demographic transformation and population movement which the world is experiencing.
Vast population growth in undeveloped countries, decline in developed countries and international migrations of populations - such as we are experiencing are 1. approved of by PC, 2. uncontrollable by PC-approved mechanisms, and 3. utterly destructive of governance.
PC can do nothing about all this (except prevent the subject being mentioned, the problem being analyzed, or action being taken) and responds by approving-of, pointing out the potential benefits of ... whatever happens.
*
(What - you haven't heard about the impending and unstoppable demographic cataclysm? I am not surprised. It is no accident. Rest assured that the ruling elite have no plans to do anything about it.)
*
So rather than world government, we have a world bureaucracy and a world mass media engaging in depicting in virtual reality what they want to happen, rather than what is happening; and - when this fails to convince - in the creative re-labeling of 'apparent' chaos, violence and impoverishment as actually nascent order, peace and prosperity.
Merely broken eggs en route to a vast and delicious global omelet.
*
When Fr Seraphim Rose died in 1982, who would have thought it!
International dictatorship sabotaged by its own scruples!
Maybe PC is not such a bad thing after all - insofar as chaos is preferable to totalitarianism.
"The New World Order and political correctness"
3 Comments -
PC is a doomsday machine: beyond control, beyond reason.
It seems unstoppable, until the chaos is complete.
Still: No cause for alarm...
11 May 2011 at 07:49
Bruce will undoubtedly have a better formulation for this, but:
People seek an end to risk, doubt and fear.
As a result, they desire UNIFORMITY and an absence of tension between objects and potential outcomes.
The only way to achieve this is pacifism, uniformity, conformity, and universal speech and behavior codes that limit the ability of the strong to correct the weak.
If you read Nietzsche and the last chapter of "Ulysses" into that, you're on the right track; however, this has also been expressed not only in Christian mysticism but also in Greek, Pagan and Hindu sources. It is a truth of existence itself.
Political correctness is just the latest tower of Babel. We all want to be one, so each of us feels safe, and the result is that we all go down together.
11 May 2011 at 16:06
Mr. Charlton,
I see your point, but this seems a bit muddy to me. Your point seems to be that PC mitigates against good government, and there I agree.
But who ever said that a world government has to actually work well? If world government ends up looking like the Transportation Security Administration in the United States, where surly uniformed black people harass and belittle old ladies and children alike, grope and take naked pictures of people, preventing orderly air travel and driving up the price of flying, disallowing bottles of water and tubes of toothpaste for no real reason, well then... isn't that about what we would expect?
If you mean to say that PC government doesn't really govern in the classic sense, I agree. But "government" in the term "world government" is just a holdover from quainter times. What it really means is world totalitarian power structure. Just because life would be miserable and intolerable under such a situation doesn't mean it can't happen. "1984" shows this well, I think.
I suppose your general point stands that too much of this kind of thing could just result in collapse, and we may indeed be much closer to collapse than anyone would like to think. But merely asserting that PC government is awful, totalitarian, and backwards does not prove that it's impossible. In fact, from where I sit, PC government seems to be thriving nicely. Good government, on the other hand...
12 May 2011 at 03:39