Bruce G. Charlton - Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness

Political correctness (PC) is the dominant ideology of the Western intellectual world PC is what the West has instead of a religion.

PC is a thing of the political Left in its origins and central constituency, yet has in recent decades been embraced by the mainstream political Right and Centre. Political correctness therefore represents the triumph of the Left.

Nonetheless, political correctness very obviously violates both common sense and logic, and is destructive of all that is good, beautiful and true.

So, at one and the same time, PC is marginal and mainstream, ridiculous and mandatory; crazy and normal.

This book explains how something so bizarre and wicked could become so ubiquitous and unremarkable.

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Political correctness obviously dominates its core territory of politics, public administration (the civil service), law, education and (especially!) the mass media. But PC also substantially shapes everything else: foreign policy, the military, policing, the economy, health services, and personal life: the mating game, friendships and even family life.

Therefore political correctness is objectively totalitarian. That is to say comprehensively coercive of body and spirit, against human agency: anti-the soul.

Just as with the cruder totalitarianism of the mid-twentieth century, PC has created a population that lives in fear: fear of being denounced and losing everything fear of committing (or indeed merely being accused-of) a thought crime or uttering a hate fact for which there is no defence; fear of the sanctions which range from social ostracism, through loss of job, financial penalties, up to directed mob violence and imprisonment.

Consequently the mass of people, especially those of status with power and influence have learned and internalized the constraints of political correctness, so that it is now something inside us, as well as pressing upon us. The shabbiness, lies and wickedness of PC permeate our very thought processes.

As if in illustration, this book has no specific examples of political correctness.

The reader must provide relevant instances from personal experience and unofficial knowledge.

Anyone unable to do this will be unmoved by my arguments.

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So, political correctness is the ruling ideology of the West, and it is everywhere, so it cannot be attacked or overthrown without attacking and overthrowing pretty much everything. Political correctness is therefore de facto irrefutable, immovable, expansile in tendency... and yet, of course, as we all recognize, PC is self-destroying: achievement of its aims is common-sensically incompatible with its own survival.

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Am I therefore suggesting that Western civilization is doomed? Yes, very probably it is doomed.

Can anything be done to prevent this, anything political perhaps? No I dont think so.

So why am I bothering to write a book about it?

The answer is simple, but will strike most of my target audience of secular intellectuals as bizarre at best, nonsense at worst: the answer is so that some individuals may escape the general corruption and save their souls.

Because, PC is more than anything else destructive of the soul proceeds, indeed, from the denial of the soul.