Thursday 2 December 2010

Political correctness is anarchistic, not socialistic

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The difference between socialism and anarchism is that for socialists economics is primary while for anarchists power is primary.

By this definition, political correctness is essentially an anarchist ideology, while communism (from which it evolved) was essentially a socialistic ideology.

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The primary aim of communism is/ was to redistribute money (wealth, income, whatever).

The primary aim of anarchism, and of PC, is to redistribute power.

Political correctness redistributes power in various ways - some of these are indeed economic, since wealth leads to power: economic power is a form of power.

So PC allocates salaries, subsidies, taxes, tax-exemptions, selectively enforces economic rules, and so on.

But PC also redistributes power in other forms: it allocates privileges (legal and administrative) and positions, assigns duties, generates images (positive and negative), regulates propaganda and advertising, gerrymanders voting (ie. shapes constituencies to benefit PC-favoured groups), regulates media depictions in terms of relative and absolute frequency and whether positive and negative. And so on.

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In practice, PC (because it is an ideology of the ruling elite) in the first place takes power from the middling people and allocates it to bottom people - from the moderately-powerful to the least powerful; subtracts power from PC-disfavoured groups (whites, men, economically-productive people, the native-born, tax and rates-payers etc.) and adds power to favoured groups.

Political correctness perceives this process as being a just re-allocation from selfish, undeserving exploiters to miserable, vulnerable victims.

Since this process is a matter of raising-up the lowest using the money of the middle, it is a matter of being 'generous' using other-people's-money; and is therefore - at the first level of analysis - an extreme form of hypocrisy and moral grand-standing.

And, for the most part, that is precisely what PC is: the appropriation of moral approbation by  elite bureaucrats who coercively extract resources from their enemies and reward their supporters.

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But at the highest level of politically correct aspiration and devoutness, the elite among the PC sincerely intend to take this process through to completion. They sincerely intend to destroy their own class, as well as the middle class.

Naturally, this intention is kept under wraps; not broadcast to the mass of PC careerists; but it is surely there.

The elite within PC intend to redistribute their own power.

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In the short term the PC elite need to take all power to themselves, partly in order to begin the process of redistribution of power, but most importantly so that they can convert their personal power into impersonal power.

Those who sincerely want an egalitarian distribution of power cannot simply replace themselves with another class of redistributors, because humans are intrinsically selfish and corruptible.

This would soon lead to a recapitulation of power inequalities, as always happened under communism. The Marxist idea of replacing the bourgeoisie with the proletariat only replaced the personnel in charge of the state, only inverted the power structure - but it did not create an equal distribution of power.

The PC elite therefore intend to disempower themselves, intend to redistribute their power permanently.

This means not installing people or classes into power. Instead the PC elite intend to replace themselves with abstract systems of redistribution.

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The PC elite intend to replace their own personal and inevitably selfish power with abstract power, in a nutshell to replace people with committees, to replace individual discretion with algorithmic regulations and votes, irreversibly to install redistributive procedural bureaucracy as the permanent form of ruling power.

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Once procedural bureaucracy is irreversibly installed, thenceforth society will experience a continual redistribution and equalization of power imposed by an all-seeing, all-measuring, all-powerful system.

And the system will not depend on its personnel; indeed the ideal ruling system would be immune to influence by its administering personnel, unaffected by change in personnel, the system would use the personnel - not vice versa.

It would perhaps be something like rule by a computer - or maybe rule by 'The Borg' from Star Trek: the Next Generation: that is to say, rule by a group mind - an entity in which the individual is immersed, and which selfishness is therefore impossible.

From this perspective the ubiquity of voting (as the only method for generating authority) is merely a primitive step on the road to decision by the group mind.

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So political correctness is the evolutionary child of anarchism, the product of a New Left focus on the distribution of power replacing the Old Left perception of economics as the primary social reality.

And - interestingly enough, ironically enough; PC is of course a totalitarian ideology which aspires to annihilate individual agency.

A totalitarian and anti-human bureaucracy was not-at-all what early anarchists were hoping-for.

Nonetheless, it is what they are getting...

So, anarchism has evolved from extreme libertarian individualism to the dissolution of the individual in the group mind...

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Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.

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