Where does Political Correctness (PC) come from? Whom does it serve? What is its purpose? Is PC some policy designed to reduce social offensiveness in some contexts, and why? Or is it some group’s attempt to frame, restrict, tamper with or molest the people’s ability to express themselves? Or is it, as suggested by Edna Andrews, an attempt to control thoughts as language represents thought, because moderate conceptions of the relation between language and thought are sufficient to support the “reasonable deduction of cultural change via linguistic change,” or yet, as Hutton reported, political correctness is one of the brilliant tools developed in the mid-1980s, to demolish American liberalism?
Is anyone suggesting that racist language promotes racism, or sexist language promotes sexism, or yet that when people are precluded from using certain words, they will change their way of thinking or feeling?
Is anyone suggesting that when some closet queer or other bigot uses the word “fag” to make believe that he is very much against such a lifestyle or choice, which he is in fact dying to embrace, will change his thinking if he is forced to use instead the word “homersexual?”
Is anyone suggesting that if some redneck is suddenly obligated to call someone he usually refers to as a nigger, “an African American man,” he will suddenly consider that racism is a belief of the past and that racial discrimination has disappeared?
Is anyone suggesting that if the exploiter decides that “white trash” must now be referred to as "Caucasian culturally-disadvantaged," the latter will suddenly move out of their mobile homes into modular manufactured homes and live happier ever after?
Who are they kidding? A racist will be a racist, a bigot will be a bigot, and a sexist pig will remain a sexist pig. The problem with PC, is that it advocates that people should hide behind the curtain of hypocrisy PC creates.
On the other hand, the advantage of letting people express themselves honestly or offensively if they so choose, is that we’ll know what people really think and where they stand; why is honesty frowned upon? Why is it becoming less and less acceptable in our society? Ever heard the sarcastic “Tell me what you really think!” or “This guy has no filters!”? as if it was something outrageous… One would think that everyone would or should want people who say what they think, what they feel without filters.
I don’t want to live in a society whose members are forced to adjust their thoughts and how they express themselves to what the exploiter has decided is appropriate, in the name of PC or any other bullshit.
Why are more and more people being, or fake being offended by words? Where is this over-sob-sensibility to words coming from? Toughen up people, de-sanitize your thought process, obliterate the manipulators from your mind, expand your own thinking power, preclude the manipulators from tempering with your beliefs or molesting your intellect, and start getting offended by what is really offensive (don’t get me started with that topic), rather than letting the exploiter distract you with PC.
D.H. Lawrence best described the impact words should have, on intelligently sincere individuals: “the real individual has second thoughts and says: Am I really shocked? Do I really feel outraged and indignant?—and the answer of any individual who has ever got so far as to ask himself the question, sincerely, is bound to be: No, I am not shocked, not outraged nor indignant. I know the word and take it for what it is, and I am not going to be jockeyed into making a mountain out of a molehill, not for all the law in the world.”
In conclusion, almost a century before the exploiter excreted its concept of political correctness; D.H. Lawrence had pinned down the problem and described it so much better than I ever could: “The mass is forever vulgar because it can’t distinguish between its own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter. The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside, by the trickster, and never from the inside by its own sincerity. The mob is always obscene, because it’s always second hand.”
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