Political Correctness is Modern Totalitarianism + Tim Dean

Highly nuanced, so read through.

Political correctness is a reactionary response to the injustices, racism and phobias that occur within this world. It is the use of language, semantics and policies to avoid offence or disadvantage to members of society. In this manner, it makes sense that all members of society should be taught to be politically correct and therefore, help solve inherent systemic racial bias, no?

In this article, I will argue that political correctness is in and of itself a placebo, a futile attempt that in fact, leads to the very oppression that it seeks to dispel.

Allow me to begin by illustrating:

Suppose you are an employee at a law firm, and your boss wants you to come in on your day off even though you already told the fucker 2 months before that it was for your 1st Anniversary. Consider with this the power dynamic that you are already at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Now, imagine in this scenario you could have two possible bosses: 

• Boss A who exerts full brutal authority, pushes his weight around, inflicts punitive measures as punishment
• Boss B, who talks to you buddy-buddy, asks about how your girlfriend is doing and says shit like "We're all equal, we're all in this together" (that's why he makes $300k and you $50k)

In a way, it is far easier to rebel against Boss A who exerts brutal, traditional authoritarianism onto you compared to Boss B, where it feels almost impolite to protest and you feel obliged to take your day off. 

Consider another example:

You're a child, and let's say your Father is a traditional representation of authority and he wants you to visit your grandmother. What would he say? The Father would say "You must visit your grandmother, I do not care how you feel it is your duty to visit her". This is ok, because the Father is giving a clear order, and you have the second option of rebelling.

Now, imagine what would the so-called post-modern, non-authoritarian Father say. He would say something like "You know how much your grandmother loves you, but I'm not going to force you to visit her, so you should only go see her if you wish to visit her". I know this because I have experienced being a recipient and perpetrator of this kind of speech.

Every child knows that in the second message, beneath the silhouette of free choice there is a far stronger pressure. Basically, your father is saying that, not only must you visit her, but that you must also love doing it. He subtly coerces you to think that you must feel a certain way and in this sense, it is a far stronger order compared to the first. 

This is why Totalitarianism is not "I give you orders, you must comply", that is traditional authoritarianism taught to you in school, which in your mind prima facie is likely Nazi Germany. Leave that type of thinking behind, because current Totalitarianism is rather along the lines "I know better than what you want and it may appear I am forcing you to do something but really I am making you do it without fully realising". In this sense, modern Totalitarianism is far more sinister, as most of the time you don't even realise you are conforming to its whims.

The Myth of Race - Tim Dean on How we became human and why we need to change.

To understand what I am going to write later in this article, you must first and foremost understand how "race" was constructed, what underlies this notion and why it does not exist.

For some background context: Taxonomy was all the rage in 18th Century Europe. The explorers, merchants and missionaries from all across the globe brought back all manner of strange and exotic flora, fauna and animals which inspired scholars to begin cataloguing them. However, in the efforts to classify all forms of life into a neat schema, those same scholars would also begin to project their own conceptions and prejudices onto the world, and doing so would contribute to centuries of racism and injustice which still affect us today.

Carl Linnaeus known as the "Father of Modern Taxonomy" and the man responsible for naming our species homo sapiens (literally wise man) in his influential taxonomic tome Systema Naturae. In Systema, Linnaeus placed humans in the category of mammals, but he would also fatefully separate humanity into four varieties:

1. White Europeans Europaeus Albus
2. Red Americans, Americanus rubescens
3. Tawny Asians, Asiaticus fuscus
4. Black Africans, Africanus niger

All humans share 99.9% of genetic DNA. For starters, there is more genetic variation within any population than there is between populations. To demonstrate, there is more genetic variation among peoples within Africa than between Eurasia and Africa, meaning that if you consider everyone in Africa to be of the same race based on their genetic variation then you must agree that all people across Eurasia are of the same race. This is not to say there is no genetic variation between different populations such as the high prevalence of sickle cell anemia caused by sickle cell trait in populations with ancestors from Central or Western Africa, which lends protection against malaria endemic to the continent. However, there a very few genes unique to particular groups (<1%), far less than required to define a discrete subspecies. Therefore, since there is no "race", why do we continue to be hostile and wary of each other? Let me explain that it is because it has long been an efficient proxy to determine enemies and allies.

Evolution could not have developed a mental mechanism to categorise race, not because it doesn't exist, rather our ancestors would have never interacted with anyone that looked or acted any different to their own. Humans have evolved a high degree of sensitivity to visual cues that may signal alliance, and race is not one of these visual cues.

PNAS results demonstrate that when cues of alliance do not correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorise each other by race, and may cease doing so entirely. In this study, researchers presented test subjects with a series of photos of black and white people who had little difficulty remembering their age sex and race. The researchers then ran this experiment again with different subjects, but this time they showed pictures of black and white people dressed in the subject's favourite sports team or rival team. While they were able to remember the people's age and sex, they struggled to remember whether they were black or white. This suggests that markers or cues that signal alliance membership overwhelm cues or features that characterise race. 

In our highly diverse society, superficial physical markers such as skin are a reliable proxy for alliance membership where we are likely to run into thousands of strangers every day. What our brains are attempting to do is identify social in-group and out-group members, but because skin colour is biological, we have mistakenly believed that biology has something to do with the out-group composition.

Now that I have proven why race does not exist, allow me to get back to the main topic.

The nature of political correctness.

I am not doubting the sincerity of those who use political correctness in their speech. I am saying that the way they approach the problem is through putting the predominant issue at hand under check whilst allowing the true problem such as racism and sexism to survive in a more covered-up version.

Political correctness causes people to keep their true attitudes bottled up, making it difficult for them to gauge how many others shared their views. This makes many coy about voicing their attitudes in public and maintained the illusion that racism was rare in the general population (progressives tend to be chronically online and the loudest). All it takes is one crack or one person for this bottled-up attitude to come bursting forth, which is what precisely happened in December 2005. 

Australians were shocked as Anglo-Australian youths and Lebanese-Australians bathed in each other's blood at Cronulla Beach, culminating in the 2005 Cronulla Riots. However, the tinder was already there, all it took to trigger the simmering ethnic tensions was the endorsement of InfoWars Host Alex Jones who rejected political correctness and gave the so-called green light for hundreds of White nationalists to come pouring into the streets of Cronulla, much to the dismay of their targets.

Now, do you see why political correctness is so dangerous? All it takes is for an authority figure to give sanction to what people are really thinking for shit to happen.

On this note, let's take the extreme example of racist jokes. Of course, I am not advocating for them, they are oppressive, humiliating and so on, but they can be used progressively. It is not that you prohibit racist jokes per say, but you create an environment or establish a social change that you can tell the exact same joke without sounding racist. Why did I choose this example you ask? When you're with friends making "racist jokes" against each other, the jokes are intended to be a mockery of the racist stereotypes themselves and the people who are genuine racists, not disparaging. It is this small exchange of obscenities that allows you to gain true proximity and social connection in an otherwise lonely and different world. (these obscenities do not have to be racist in nature it is just an example e.g. women can mock misogynist stereotypes by telling these same jokes to or about each other.)

Take the politically correct example of talking to someone of another culture. It is easy to not be "racist" in a politically correct way by saying stuff like "Oh I love your food, I love your national identity, and so on". But this is bullshit, this is not real contact with one another. In my experience I can say for sure I have not genuinely connected with anyone in my years who has been politically correct by saying shit like "Mmm I love yum cha, dim sum and Siu Mai are my favourites ❤️🥰". This is politically correct masturbation at its finest and serves to form no real connection other than that through the expression of pre-existing cultural foods and norms.

The experiences and connections I do cherish happened to be the ones that were self-deprecating and politically incorrect in nature, especially in Primary School where my Indian/Bangladeshi friends would make curry jokes about each other and I would do the equivalent. It is humourous to me that people can expect to form social connections with each other by tentatively dancing around each other, unsure of how to act, cautious of making the slightest social error, lest the rage of ancestral heritage is wreaked upon them. These "small friendly obscenities" work because they cut straight through pretence and preconceived notions of identity, and this small "shock" if you will allow people to relate on a basic level. Therefore, in this way you resolve the tension of racism and can look to more important things rather than squabbling over identity politics.

Relating back to the first line, I do have a recommendation for politically correct people. Learn British and Japanese customs, semantics and language. Why specifically these two countries? Because Britain and Japan have been masters at reproducing the brutality of domination, despising the cultures they dominate, committing genocide and inducing famine but without being offensive, using the utmost speech and being elegant and kind to one another. This is the miracle of truly successful racism in which you reproduce all the prejudices but you do it very very softly in a "tolerant way". Therefore, the irony of political correctness is that it can also manifest in the most ruthless form of racism and oppression.

Moreover, the concept of "tolerance" is a false notion propagated by the cultural elite. Its issue is in the word itself: tolerance. When a North Shore Private School kid says "Let's be more tolerant of other cultures" what they are actually saying is "Let's put up with these ethnics, we have to live with them either way but let's keep them at a distance". 

Do you see how patronising this notion is? Allow me to analogise further. Say, for example, there's a spider in my house. I would "tolerate" the spider being in the living room, but if I see it come inside my bedroom I'm pulling out the Raid immediately. This is why tolerance is not what you think it is, it inherently depicts a vertical relationship of power. In comparison, respect/acceptance is representative of a horizontal relationship of power. Whenever someone says the word "tolerance" in their multicultural speech or whatever, it is inherently condescending to say group even if they do not realise it. Therefore, it is better to be accepting, to embrace identity and culture rather than to "tolerate it".

Thus I end on a couple of key points:

• There is a difference between forcing yourself to be tolerant and basic manners and compassion.  Those chronically online live in a reality filtered by social media (will write about this later)
• Being PC is like having a gun to your head, it is tolerance with no value, and can cause collateral damage.
• Race does not exist, skin colour is a false proxy and reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that allows us to detect cues for alliance membership. Biology has nothing to do with an out-group composition.
  
• Small obscene jokes about each other connect with people on a far more fundamental level than tentatively dancing around each other, censoring each word we say.
• Let's connect based on culture, rather than race.
• I am not saying you should be insulting each other all the time, proper manners and politeness are necessary. But the discouragement of anything politically incorrect as morally outrageous is the essence of domination.

Though this topic is likely irrelevant in terms of time, I felt it necessary to write about it as the first article for this site because it challenges our fundamental paradigm of how we perceive ourselves, other people and how we watch our words, which has not improved at all, and I do see Australia as America's culture minus 10 years.

Thanks,

kn.ch