Bruce Charlton’s Concept of Political Correctness

Sunday, February 6th, 2011

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.)

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