John C. Wright recommends Bruce Charlton’s Thought Prison, about modern Political Correctness, or Progressivism, but believes that defining PC is tantamount to destroying it:
That is precisely why PC folk take such steps to obscure their meaning, goals, and means. That is why they will not be ‘labeled’ and why they dismiss those of us who label them as thinking in a way that is ‘too black and white’ i.e. too simplistic. Their thinking is to say ‘black is white’ i.e. inversion, paradox, falsehood.
When you say nonsense clearly, it has no persuasive force: you raise a smile rather than raise an army. But when you utter nonsense obscurely, ah, then you are like unto a spirit of the kingdom of darkness, and no one can see you, no one grapple you, no one smite you with his sword. The mission of PC is sabotage, not melee: and saboteurs do not like banners and uniforms to identify them no more than PC likes definitions, labels, reason.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, you need but call them by their right name to watch them rip themselves in half in fury.
The modernists of PC gained their predominance by persuading people not that PC was true (for they do not believe it true) but that it is nice, and that we, to be nice, must also pretend to be nice. Any opposition of the undefined niceness is defined as not nice.
Their gains were rapid, but it took them a century or more to gain them, and, by the nature of PC, the gains cannot be permanent. Let their losses begin today, and now, even if it takes ten centuries, or longer. I need but convince one mind to turn away from political correctness toward factual correctness, and their armies are forever one man shy. He need but convince two, and so forth. They did not win all at one dramatic stroke, nor shall we.
(Hat tip to Kalim Kassam.)
Yes, defining and understanding PC does indeed destroy it. But I don’t think political correctness needs that to destroy it. to understand PC is to know it will destroy itself; however, the longer it lasts the more damage it will do — damage to human souls, I mean.
The problem with PC is not that it will destroy peace, prosperity and comfort — although it will indeed do that. So will many other forces.
The problem is that PC is evil — inherently and literally evil in the sense of actively destructive of The Good: destructive of Truth, Beauty and Virtue.
If you do not believe in evil — or transcendental Goods — then there really are no objective grounds for opposing PC. It would be more expedient to go along with it and make the best you can from it — which is of course what the intellectual elites have done en masse, since they do not believe in evil.