Political correctness is rightly considered to be a vague term. However, this by no means warrants anyone to infer that it doesn’t exist and sway our lives to an enormous extent. The very point of deeming something inexistent by pointing out that it is vaguely defined is a tell-tale sign of the real root of what we call “Political Correctness.”
Namely, the idea that morality is purely a matter of strictly systematized application of language stems from the age old principle of what philosophers call nominalism, the doctrine that assumes that cognitive process is nothing but the apprehension and conceptualization of sense data.
While this process is at work in everyday experience, nominalists omit one extremely important – in fact essential – element inherent in human knowledge, namely: that things themselves have essences or “natures” which mold our notions about them.
By denying the necessary, or indeed: any, intrinsic substantial nature to beings, nominalism empowers it’s adherents to define and redefine them at will.
This is a true meaning of so-called “Occam’s razor”, a method named after a Medieval English Franciscan philosopher William of Occam, stating that, in paraphrase, “any multiplications of beings unnecessary to satisfactory explanation is false”.
Of course, nominalists are not prone to examine their own assumptions and they take for granted that what we see, hear, touch, smell or taste is all there is to know, not taking into account that very principles they profess cannot be based on this, because they are meant to apply to all conceivable instances.
If all knowledge is a cognition of perceivable individuals – of manifold chaos with no intrinsic unity – how can then anything be applied to all conceivable instances?
It can’t.
In the series of podcasts we hereby present, the political correctness is defined as an instance of extreme moral nominalism. Namely, there’s a one characteristic feature of nominalist minded people: while denying anything remotely spiritual in this world, they at the same time tend to deny all substance – even the matter itself, while making their own notions about reality absolute.
It’s a kind of magical thinking where words are considered to have a power over reality.
This is by no means surprising, because real knowledge is based on concepts and not on sense experience and if we cannot rely on our notions, we can really rely on nothing at all. Things we perceive are in eternal flux and if there’s no unity in them, then there’s no stability which could provide us with certain knowledge.
Like averybody else, nominalists want to have certain principles and moral rules they can rely on. But given that they deny the possibility that world itself provides us with them, they venture to make them up themselves.
And when they succeed at imagining them, they have a compulsive need to impose them upon the world and other people, because that is the only way left open for them to make sense of it.
The things have to conform to the labels nominalists paste upon their surface.
Sounds familiar?
Gender quotas, humanitarian bombing, redefining oneself’s sex, humans merging with the machines, sanctioning of all things possibly offensive, safe spaces in Universities … being called a bigot because you accidentally looked at someone sideways?
If it is, then you are on the right track because you’re not living under the rock. Political correctness is an inherently totalitarian system of moral nominalism, where words and labels are everything, because all else is deemed unreal. It is an utmost and to date the most perfect system of essentially denying the very possibility of morality.
Therefore, it is an elaborate, well thought out, system of evil.
In this three-part podcast, we’ll explore how moral nominalism functions, why is it always accompanied with the compulsive need for strict legalization of it’s principles and how it in effect serves to destroy the language.
A nominalist cookbook
In the first part we explore why is PC so hard to define and why no knee-jerk reactions to it are really valid. While standard fare PC phenomena irritate the hell out of people, when interrogated as to why they get so irritated by, say: legal proscription of three or more different gender toilet labels, they are usually at the lack to give a satisfactory explanation of their dissent.
This is one of the main strengths of PC, namely that it’s adherents can use slurs, memes and emotionally charged rhetoric, while the only weapon at the disposal of it’s opponents is an act of analytical discernment which can be very demanding and never provides one with flashy phrases and one-sentence answers.
We propose that the reason for this is nominalist principle of reduction of reality to utterly simple, atomic, facts that can only be reflected in simple language. Thence follows the famous Occam’s razor dictum that only simple answers are the right ones.
So, for instance, there’s no use to suppose that 9/11 was an elaborate operation, perpetrated by whole network of vested interests, because the idea that it was perpetrated by few amateur pilots of Arabian descent is much simpler and therefore true.
On the other hand, this approach allows promulgators and adherents of PC enormous freedom in defining their concepts which need not relate to anything but “atomic facts” of reality. We illustrate this point by example of Richard Dawkins and his statement that “there’s nothing morally reprehensible in eating human roadkill”.
As nominalism takes into consideration only atomic facts “roadkill” and “eating”, while “human” is only a subjective qualification on the same level as “animal”, there’s no difference in cooking and eating the dead animal and dead human.
All this stems from inability of nominalists to affirm existence of anything that is not based on simplest sense perceptions. And human nature, which is the thing forcing us to essentially discern animal from human, is something you cannot perceive by senses.
The result is that political correctness becomes moral system completely detached from moral reality which seeks to make itself absolute. In order to do that PC individuals are forced to seek it’s legalization, i.e. to turn their ever expanding principles into laws.
