The Problem with Political Correctness

You and I suffer from a habit of taking freedom of speech and freedom of thought for granted. The danger in that is, when we don’t realize that they are freedoms that can and often are supressed, we forget to stand up for them when allowance for those freedoms begins to deteriorate.

The significance of these freedoms dawned on me recently when I was listening to someone who was relaying what it was like to live in Czechoslovakia in the 80’s under soviet rule. He described a state in which conformity to the political establishment was so imposing that the regime employed secret police to make sure nobody was expressing or harboring the wrong political ideas.
This measure, of the secret police, was considered necessary because without it, people would tend to start believing what happens to appeal to them and, potentially, saying what they believe.

You didn’t know who was part of the secret police and who wasn’t. It could be your best friend, your neighbor, even a family member. What this meant was that you couldn’t fully… trust… anyone.
Now, Imagine a society in which you had to withhold yourself from everyone for fear that if you were truly yourself, the secret police might snatch you in the middle of the night for not conforming to the program. Where this really hit home for me was in the realization that all of the most intimate relationships that I enjoy wouldn’t be what they are in a society like that because I could never allow myself to be vulnerable enough with anyone else to achieve that kind of intimacy… not even with my own wife. I would constantly be suppressing my true self and I can’t think of many things more oppressive or evil than that. So it puts into perspective how important these freedoms are in allowing us to enjoy the vital human connections that we, in the west, exercise every day.

So, with that in mind, when anyone attempts to infringe upon freedom of thought or freedom of speech, even in the slightest, I get a little cranky.

This is what got me reflecting on political correctness. Now, I’m not trying to compare the severity of oppression that was experienced under Soviet rule with what we refer to as political correctness, but I also don’t think that the PC impositions can still be very insidious, especially when we mistake them as being harmless.

Democracy insists that there are valid concerns across the political spectrum and freedom of thought and freedom of speech are the cornerstones of that diversity. Without that diversity, it’s impossible to maintain a range of political choices to choose from and vote for. Without dialogue and diverse ideas, violence and oppression become normative. When you start insisting that certain political ideas are the correct ones and that others are not the correct ones, that essential diversity begins to deteriorate.

I understand and even sympathize with the instinct to try to say that certain ideas or ways of speaking are insensitive to others.
That’s a way of expressing your ideas and arguing your point that is compatible with democratic values, but simply because you believe something to be true, it doesn’t follow that you can impose those beliefs as the correct ones.

I don’t know if it’s worth pointing this out, but I’m going to anyways. Many people trace political correctness back to Mao Zedung who said, “Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul.” His oppressive regime murdered more people than anyone else in history with estimates as high as 75 million and it must have been easy for him to rationalize considering those 75 million people didn’t have souls according to his logic.

Instead of trying to establish what some would like to think of as correct political ideas and incorrect ones, why don’t we simply make the case that kindness and compassion are moral goods that we should all pursue. That will have the simultaneous effect of protecting our freedoms while also encouraging everyone to treat each other with dignity and respect.


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