Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Fjordman Gets Political Correctness Wrong

By Nicholas Stix

…My conclusion is that we live in a society where the ideal is not merely Reason Alone but Thought Alone; we are supposed to create an entire society and physical reality purely by thought, which should result in perfect, cosmic, universal justice and equality for all. Anything and everything that impedes with our ability to create this reality must be banned as “irrational” or “hate.” If God and religion prevent us from creating what we want then God and religion must be removed; the theory of evolution can take care of that for us. However, we must be careful not to follow this theory to its logical conclusion because then biology instead of God would inhibit our ability to create perfect equality between men and women and between humans of all races. In short, we must ban reality.

This is in essence what Political Correctness is all about: Banning any discussion of reality so we can create a perfect world based on Thought Alone. In a strange sense this could ironically be seen as the final culmination of millennia of Western use of reason until we finally succeeded in creating a society based on Reason Alone. Although I cannot pinpoint exactly how I suspect you could successfully argue that there is a form of Platonism underlying this mental construct. After all, in Plato’s world the perfect, unchanging Ideas were physically separated from observed reality. In a way this is exactly what the modern West has created.

The dream of a perfect world of absolute equality may be a beautiful dream but it is a dream, based on many different false beliefs. It will quickly turn into a very real nightmare if you try to implement it. Among the largest of these false beliefs is the idea that man is naturally good and a perfectly rational being. I am personally not ready to embrace the opposite claim either, that man is by nature evil or sinful. My preferred view is that man is flawed and imperfect, yet that is quite sufficient to show that you can never create a perfect society with universal justice, just like you cannot create a perfect building using imperfect building materials.


Fjordman, “The Cult of Reason – The Dark Side of the Enlightenment,” The Brussels Journal.


With all due respect, Fjordman has it wrong. Political correctness is not about creating a perfect world, or about equality. Those are just talking points, framing devices, diversion tactics. PC is about power—the power to lie, the more outrageously, the better; to steal all of a nation’s wealth; to imprison the innocent, and to murder, murder, murder, at will!

But PC does not mean the same thing to everyone. To a white communist, PC means using blacks and Hispanics (because he considers them hopeless dunces) to steal all of the assets from, and then murder all non-communist whites.

To a black supremacist, PC means using white communists and Hispanics (because he considers them hopeless) to steal all of the assets from, and then murder all non-communist whites, then all Hispanics, and then all communist whites. And then he will finish off all black opponents. (The “Obama” difference is that he would airlift in scores of millions of black Africans, in order to rapidly change America’s racial balance.)

To a Hispanic supremacist, PC means … (change the names from before), with the added strategy of bringing in all of Latin America to overwhelm America’s historic people.

Fjordman makes the same error that many philosophers (e.g., Larry Auster) do: They assume that their opponents are philosophical, too.

A tip o’ the hat to Ol’ Remus and the Woodpile Report.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

greetings Nicholas. I'm a long tme reader. If you are not familiar with it, a book by Richard Weaver, called Ideas Have Consequences would be well worth your while. He traces western man's descent into irrationality and an "envious fever", a phrase from Shakespeare. He dates the transition from the shift to Nominalism in the generation of Occam. Among many many great lines he refers, in 1947 no less, to "modern mans' growing incapcity for logic". He was writing in the same year as Orwell. Highly recomended.
YOu are quite right about the ultimate lowalties of the various PC factions. "if this be madness, there must be method in it". Yes, and the method is ingroup power.
all for now, God bless and keep you and yours, JCMurphy

Lawrence Auster said...

If, as Mr. Stix does, we reduce the dominant ideology of our age (whatever we may call it, PC or leftism or liberalism) to nothing but a drive for power, we have not understood it. This is obvious from the fact that not all liberals are after power. Mr. Stix's theory cannot explain the beliefs of the ordinary member of liberal society who has no power and is not seeking power but supports the PC ideology because he thinks it's right. Why does he think it's right? Mr. Stix not only has no answer to that question, he opposes any answer to that question, by dismissing all possible answers as "philosophy."

It's the same with Steve Sailer's reductionist explanation of liberalism as a desire for status. What about all the people who are not concerned about status but support liberalism because they think it's right? Sailer has no answer. Since he thinks liberalism is not based on any understanding of the world but is just based the desire for status, he has no arguments against people who think liberalism is true and right. And he renders his intellectual followers incapable of arguing against people who think liberalism is true and right.

Of course the left seeks power, and the left must be opposed on the level of power. But to reduce the left to nothing but a drive for power is to abandon any attempt to understand—and to persuade people of the falsity of—the dominant ideology of our age.

Lawrence Auster said...

In short, Mr. Stix rejects political science. Political science means the attempt to arrive at a true account of the structure of political society, political movements, and political beliefs. It is true that our opponents are not philosophers or political scientists, and that they do not approach their own ideas on the level of political science. They do, however, have reasons for what they believe, even if they do not always articulate them; and if we are to have any hope not only of defeating the false world view of liberalism but replacing it with truth, those reasons need to be brought out and exposed.

Robert said...

Mr. Stix,
It is so much easier to post a response here than at Mr. Auster's blog.
Cheers!

jesse helms think-alike said...

I like your line of thinking. Liberalism, Political Correctness Communism, Socialisim, Marxism, Environemntalism are different name for the same thing. That is: the ideology of the enemies of our civilization. After the last liberal is gone there will be plenty of time to analyze their motives. I don't question the motives of people like Fjordman or Auster, their heart is in the right place. However, at this time it better for defenders of Western Civilization to regard everyone who is a partisan or beneficiary of this ideology categorically, as an enemy.

Paul DeReno said...

Auster does not take into account the very small number of PC wingnuts there are in the US. They reside mainly in the Universities, the very wealthy urban sectors, and the global political class (GPC).

Much of the GPC probably knows it's lying and is doing so for reasons of attaining power described by Stix. The rest of the PC elites are HIGHLY status conscious and identify with the political class as constituents, motivated by Sailerian reasons. Outside of those, there are precious few PC fanatics. However, Auster does have a point regarding things like gay marriage, for which there is something like 33% support (and perhaps closer to 45% among whites). Most of these whites are skeptical of homosexuality in general, but cannot reason past the simplistic "they should have equal rights to marriage" principle.

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