Bruce Charlton’s concept of political correctness, or progressivism, starts from the notion that only the intelligent can truly internalize the abstractions of PC thought — but that doesn’t make PC thought right:
PC is atheistic and this worldly — but is trying to be good.
For PC the ultimate evil is selfishness — therefore the highest good it can conceive is unselfishness: i.e. altruism.
This worldly atruism is operationalized in terms of the allocation of ‘goods’ (money, power, status etc).
But PC sees humans as innately selfish — therefore the allocation of goods must be done impersonally — in practice, by rules and bureaucracies.
What governs the principles of PC? Reaction, rejection. The past is tainted. There must be a fresh start. The good is the opposite of what people used to believe. Hence moral inversion.
The fact that all this is anti-spontaneous, anti-natural, alien, scary — is actually taken as a sign of its virtuousness. The truly altruistic must sacrifice themselves.
The mass media is essential to this since it fills our minds everyday, continually displacing the past — so whatever is in the mass media is reality.
(Bruce Charlton, Mencius Moldbug, and others discuss the ambiguous relationship between Christianity and Progressivism over at Foseti‘s.)