David Cook - Laughing at Political Correctness: How many lightbulbs does it take to change a liberal?

Pride goeth before a fallbut more frequently each morning after arising.

Proverbs, et al.

D eplorable and Proudwhat kind of chapter title is that? Deplorable sounds well, deplorable! Deplorable and proud sounds absolutely despicable! Well, sounds can deceive. Forty years of work in exploring and expanding the vision perception of patients has thoroughly convinced me of the superiority of vision over other senses. Think about it. If Mother Nature were to rebuild us from scratch, forgetting a sense or two, would you prefer she gave you the eye or the finger? When it comes to perception, equality is strictly shunned. Vision rules the perceptual roost.

Historians agree. The father of Greek history, Herodotus, wisely wrote, Men trust their ears less than their eyes. And well they should. In the words of Italian Renaissance historian and political philosopher Niccol Machiavelli, Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Still, Machiavelli recognized the potential aberrations of Political correctness (PC) does what it can to reinforce this optical aberration of appearances over thought, hoping that appearances can overwhelm thought. Machiavelli might as well have called his little book PC for Princes.

Some have even suggested that Machiavelli himself was deplorable and proud, performing open-heart surgery on politics to reveal the famous malignancy, the ends justify the means. He never said that of course. What he wrote was in the actions of all men one judges by the result. This advice provides the foundation for PC. If instead of championing equal protection under (and from) the law, we believe that segregation is inherently bad and that integration is inherently good, then the result of increasing the numbers of the integrated allows a favorable judgment on affirmative action and reverse discrimination even if they conflict with the concept of the same rule of law for all.

Under the rule of law, you see, we are all equal; that is, the identical law applies to one and all; we all get the same fine for the same speeding ticket. Under the rule of PC, laws treat some more equally than others. Because some minute percentage of Americans stem from forgotten ancestors who, by todays standards, misbehaved,in reality existsexemplifies the political philosophy of Niccol Machiavelli.

If you believe that the logic of PC is not sound, but noise, join me. Instead of listening to the creed of the New Moral Majority (NMM), use your eyes. Machiavelli would agree; a picture is worth a thousand lies. Visualize, juggle the images in your mind, as we paint the deplorable picture of what PC forbids us to hear and how it legislates for us whom we must come in touch with.

Existing outside of time, God prefers truth to probability. Blind to transcendence, science prefers probability to God. Only the scientific-minded lived with an 85 percent chance of sunshine, clouds, or Hillary on election day. Then November 8, 2016, arrived to shake history free from the illusion of probability. The probability of Hillarys success plummeted into truthzero.

As we look back, is it logical that Trump really had a 15 percent chance of victory one day and a 100 percent chance of victory the next? Did the truth change on election day, or is the distance between yesterdays probability and todays truth but a measure of human fallibility and prejudice?

Science assures us that the bullet, aimed according to the laws of physics, will hit the bulls-eye. Period. When blundering into human consciousness, however, the aim of science falters. Instead of a bulls-eye, science settles for a bell curve. Soon, prejudice becomes the bell curve blinding us to the curves of the belle. Thus, the probabilities of the New York Times blinded many to Hillarys bottle blondness. Such is the penalty for placing prejudice before perception.

Although scientists use probability to turn prejudice into a science if not an art form, we are all prejudiced. Its how we see. Having taught thousands of souls to use their eyes for school and sports, let me assure you: seeing is something we do, not something that happens to us. Despite the gospel of the same basic science class that taught us that there were nine planets, we are not slaves of the light rebounding from the neural trapeze nets at the backs of our eyes. Rather we see according to the prejudices learned during the dance of our eyes with former exploration and action. Such prejudice washes the windows to the soul. We see what habit has taught us to expect, what life has taught us to value.

Without such prejudice, we are blind. The vision of infants, for instance, is free from this prejudice, but then infants cant see poopespecially during that period when their parents find themselves seeing little else. Prejudice, however, has its liabilities. We create illusions when we export to new surroundings vision learned by actions in former surroundings: the straight sticks we held on dry land magically bend as they pierce water; the proximity of rainbows defies confirmation from the swiftest chase.

Is the glass half empty or half full? The prejudice of our perceptions reflects our souls as truly as a mirror. Those with full hearts see the glass as half full; those with empty heads see the glass as half empty. In a world in which deplorability and PC are but two ends of the same spectrum, we are deemed deplorable if our full hearts applaud the full half of the glass. Nature, proclaiming her natural rights, however, always stacks the empty half of the glass on top. Mimicking nature, PC edits language to allow only the emptiest words to the top of the debate.

Yes, PC is big on natural rights. According to the Declaration of Independence, Natures God, the Creator provided the Laws of Nature, not to mention self-evident and inalienable rights. Amusingly, those who continue to dream up the greatest number of natural, inalienable rightsthe inalienable right to eat without a need to work, the natural right to victimize others to pay for the health and child care consequences of our victimless crimescant wait to get God expelled from the courthouse and public park. When it comes to rights, ignoring God is dicey. Unless we are mixing metaphors, the rights of spiritual beings are created by their Creator, not Nature. Mother Nature selects, she does not create. If we can reduce divine law to the laws of physics, whats to prevent us from reducing human rights to the rights of molecules?

Toss out faith in God and whats left? Choose your faith. Faith in probability? Faith in passion? Faith in rhetorical reason? Faith in groupthink? Faith in Machiavellian pragmatism? Faith in politics? And so, we hear the chorus, It is most probable that It just feels right. The reason is sound. Everybody thinks so. It worked at least for now (at least for me). And, Our political action committee won! Such are the less-than-certain justifications providing the foundation of our rights in a secular society. Like a house built on sand, our imagined natural rights wait to be washed away with each discovery or whim changing the fashions of science or philosophy. To experience natural rights, try swimming in a tsunami.

These metaphors of natural human rights may be sophisticated if not downright deplorable. No matter. In a world of relative morality, deplorability is in the dictionary of the beholder. My health coach finds chocolate to be deplorable. As I finish my ice cream cone and lick the last of the chocolate from my fingers, I find deplorable is beautiful.

Language evolves. Once science borrowed atoms from the Greeks as uncuttable! Today, science gaily cuts the exact same uncuttable