Suffocating political correctness is the way the world worked before the enlightenment. By Daniel Greenfield.
Western civilization depends on the existence of objective truths. And not just any objective truths. All societies believe in something, but our civilization is unique in forming intellectual systems for discovering truths, objectively determining their validity, and building institutions around them. That is the genius of western civilization.
America took this genius to its apex with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, taking government out of the realm of mysticism, away from specialists, and turning it over to the people, guided not by class and title, but by pursuing their own interests with character and virtue.
But government grew, and truth was put back in its political cage:
The Left began its civilizational assault by spreading mistrust in the independence of the individual and the worth of institutions through conspiracy theories about class, gender and then race. It undermined confidence in meritocracy and individual initiative to build support for a takeover of institutions through violent revolution and political agitation so that those institutions would pursue its political goals. …
Science has since been reinvented as a social criticism conspiracy theory to focus on the environmental apocalypses supposedly caused by capitalism and industry. …
The measure of objectivity is that facts and truths can be verified regardless of worldview. The Left denies the validity of an apolitical objectivity while insisting that its beliefs are objectively true.
The media traded objective journalism for political narratives, and yet insists that any objective person would recognize that its narratives are true. …
Without enough truth, we all suffer:
Societies require objective truths, objective standards, and objective institutions to function. When these are politicized, no one believes in the truth, standards of conduct collapse, and the institutions that keep a society going are no longer trusted. …
Politicized universities cease educating, and begin indoctrinating, leading to massive mistrust and hostility that cuts off academia from the country at large. Cultural industries exchange the assertion of common values for their own political values. And much of the public tunes out the entertainment industry leading to the collapse of a common culture. Radicals elected to higher office pursue their agendas without regard to the law until the structure of the administrative state becomes the enemy.
That zombie apocalypse arrived in the sixties. America has been increasingly overrun by it since.
Our politicized institutions don’t work.
The schools and colleges don’t actually educate anyone. As the rot moves outward from the cultural studies to the scientific ones, our medical and technological prowess will collapse along with the rest. The modern tech pioneers are already often college dropouts. Our last burst of technological progress was built by defectors from academia even as it was being incubated in its universities.
Does anyone seriously believe that the diversity assault on STEM and objective scientific methodology will lead to any future technological revolutions emerging from the universities?
The only parts of government that work to any degree are those where heroic individualism is still possible, the military, emergency services, and some elected offices, because of individuals risking everything to do the right thing. The system, the leadership, and the daily protocols in all these areas are hopelessly broken and in the case of a serious disaster pose an existential threat to our survival. …
The left placed a losing bet on our behalf:
The Left bet our entire civilization on its vision of how things should be. …
The more the system controls everyday life through its institutions, the fewer people trust the system and its institutions. Individuals become untrustworthy, communities collapse into neighborhoods of suspicious strangers, and the very notions of truth, honesty, and integrity become laughably naïve delusions.
This is, in one form or another, how life is lived in much of the world. America was better. It can be again. The virtuous society has fallen leaving pockets of virtuous communities and individuals.
Back to the future. The modern, enlightened world is dying.
