*
How could something so crazy and reality-immune as political correctness continue to dominate Western societies?
Surely it must contain self-correcting properties?
Surely it must adjust to negative feedback?
*
Well, yes and no.
Political correctness can make self-corrections in practice - but not in theory: it can make what Laurence Auster has called unprincipled exceptions.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html
These are the multitude of little corks of realistic thinking used to plug leaks in the PC edifice; the numerous band-aids used to staunch gaping wounds; and also the massive (and massively inefficient) national and supranational campaigns justified on grounds of basic human (or societal) survival.
*
War is the largest recent unprincipled exception; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wars pursued at the behest or with the acquiescence of the PC elite - and both clearly show the problem of unprincipled exceptions.
The traditional (common sense) reasons and motivations for wars (reasons such as defence, deterrence, domination) are immediately after the exception has begun, continually being undercut, and eventually are overwhelmed, by opposed PC thinking.
So from a traditional perspective the exception to PC very rapidly becomes subverted, then ineffective, then counter-productive; so the unprincipled exception ends by being used to support and propagate PC.
Instead of being taken as an example of how PC undermines basic human effectiveness, PC sabotage becomes (like Vietnam) transformed into a rationale for even greater PC lunacy.
*
But such self-corrections are encapsulated, irrational (even within the PC system, which is itself irrational) - they are at most small segments of either logical or common-sensical thinking - segments which are soon after, succeeded and overwhelmed by other opposed thinking styles - by unbounded aspirational thinking.
So the exceptions cannot be built-upon, indeed are undermined and destroyed soon after they have happened.
*
The unprincipled exceptions to PC are also (like PC in general) based not on real threats of hazard, but on the psychological state of the elite intellectuals - a psychological state that is psychotic. So, whether the cause of making exceptions to PC is a real threat is largely random.
Sometimes the threat lead to unprincipled behavior is real, sometimes it is imaginary: terrorism is a real threat which in principle could be solved; global warming is a fantasy threat which - even if true - is beyond the reach of human influence.
Both real and delusional 'threats' have led to unprincipled exceptions to PC behavior, but neither response is effective because neither is rational nor sustained.
The cause of unprincipled exceptions derives from the subjective drives of the intellectual elite, their mass manias, on the need to make intellectual elites feel moral and effective and noble.
*
Africa is an unprincipled exception: multiculturalism would demand that Western elites leave Africa alone (except for carefully non-invasive cultural tourism, perhaps) - yet Western materialism demands the unprincipled exception of aid and permanent international action on 'humane' grounds.
The total subjectivism of this process, that it is purely driven by the inner state of the intellectual elites, is shown by the immunity of the aid giving process to feedback - the vast evidence that aid does not work, that it makes things worse economically and socially, that it leads to endemic starvation - and that aid amounts to enabling robbing, raping and murdering gangster governments to replace their machetes with machine guns...
All this counts for nothing against the fact that giving aid to Africa and continually intervening in African governance makes Western elites feel good.
In the world of PC, feeling good about oneself counts as the bottom line.
*
The unprincipled exception is therefore for political correctness what original sin is for a Christian; it is a kind of inevitable compromise with the reactionary 'real world' - which damages the purity of PC and makes the intellectual elites feel bad about themselves.
As soon as the exception has been allowed, there exists as gnawing discomfort or disharmony, which seeks to heal itself (to atone) by destroying the exception, or by reframing it in ways which allow PC to be restored - for example by 'blaming' the exception on the stupidity, lies, greed and plain wickedness of the enemies of PC.
But in the mean time (i.e. so long as PC lasts - because its complete success would be followed so swiftly by its demise) PC is riddled with unprincipled exceptions.
*
This is (merely) another way of saying that the delusional state that is termed political correctness is based upon thought-disorder. That is, by non-rational thinking characterized by sequential segments of dreamlike fantasy and atomized logic; by unbounded wishful thinking alternating inevitably with bureaucratic procedure.
*
PC is not, fundamentally, reformable, it cannot respond to negative feedback except in a short-term, segmented, non-consecutive and irrational way - because to cure the thought disorder that creates and sustains PC would be to destroy PC.
*
