This is the third in a series of five articles by Stella Morabito this week on the way that political correctness is bullying conservative women into silence and how they can reclaim their rights to free expression.
When we consider how insidious political correctness is, the term sounds too euphemistic. It feels more like Orwellian thought policing. I’ve also referred to PC as propaganda compliance and coercive persuasion. It helps to bring the reality of PC into focus by understanding that all of these terms are connected.
Two emotions fuel the machine of political correctness. It’s mostly fear. But it’s also desire. Our fear of being rejected is powerful because being shunned is like social death. Just the threat of shunning often creates compliance. In a similar manner, our desire to be accepted and connected can cause us to self-censor or even to falsify what we really believe. Mindless obedience develops a bit later, when there are no family or friendship bonds in a person’s life that can compete with the interests of the PC agendas. Mindless obedience can also result simply through habit, which is why self-censorship is a particularly hazardous trap for conservative women.
Such habits, when ingrained, bring us to the next phase, which we might call “mass delusion.” Mass delusion has a way of settling in after the consolidation of mass compliance. That’s a Twilight Zone state of mental fog in which people are willing to have reality dictated to them instead of being able to discern reality through their own thought processes and civil discourse with others. Recently in the Federalist I wrote up a list of “Ten Key Ways to Break the Mass Delusion Machine.”
Saturation and suppression are the twin processes of the PC machine
The engine of the PC machine operates by two methods: saturation and suppression. First, a word about saturation. The outlets of communication – Hollywood, academia, and the media (I now use the acronym HAM) – are the means of totally drenching society and popular culture with PC narratives. The constant noise first serves to desensitise people, then to gather compliance from them. The more implausible the agenda item, the more HAM marinates our minds in the idea. One example today is the incessant repetition of the transgender narrative.
Suppression is the flip side of the PC coin. PC requires that civil discourse and debate be out of the question, because free inquiry is known to awaken reason and cause people to think actively. Active thinking competes with PC messages which tend to be fragile and often time-sensitive. So agents of PC tend ruthlessly to smear and shout down anyone who dares to question a PC agenda item. Suppression of competing language and thought is absolutely essential to the survival of the PC message. If you think of PC as bacteria, suppression would be the dark room and the culture required for the bacteria’s growth and replication.
The battle is one on one
Since the major communications outlets are currently controlled by the forces of PC, the only way forward is to commit ourselves to engaging others in our private lives and private relationships, or the hidden sphere. The late human rights advocate and Czech President Vaclav Havel wrote about the immense power within the hidden sphere. This website recently ran a post in which I discussed Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless.”
If you think it through, the autonomous and organic family unit is the ultimate nucleus of the hidden sphere. And those headed up by conservative women are especially powerful. Such units can spawn autonomous communities and produce children who then broadcast their virtues and goodwill throughout society. No wonder the family is the prime target of all power mongers today, as well as historically. No wonder the ultimate aim of PC is to separate us in order to better control us. And no wonder so much of the PC agenda focuses on abolishing marriage as a male-female institution, and then on sowing identity confusion through abolishing any distinction between male and female. Attentive mothers preside over the hidden sphere in ways not visible to most, but well noted by statists.
But we cannot simply retreat to our nests. Not if we care about the world our sons and our daughters – all children – will have to live in.
