Don't you ask yourself how something like "political correctness" ends up being like a tumor on the back of western culture? Let's begin!
An Innocuous Concept
Political Correctness - the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against.
By the definition, the concept is quite reasonable. Who wants to offend people? The vast majority naturally tries to avoid language that is perceived offensive by other people. You don't see someone entering a meeting and beginning to insult people left and right like a maniac without a reason. Virtually no one is "politically incorrect" even if they don't know about the concept.
Malignant Tumor of Culture
There are two problems with the concept as follows:
- It is broadly defined
- It sounds like common sense
If it's defined so broadly, the interpretations could be endless. It is not specified if you do this with malintent or just by not knowing what is offensive to others. It presumes that you can know everything that is offensive to others. It gives power to people that want to use guilt in order to profit. No limit on the number of offenses that you can invent. In the end, as people accept that this concept is valid, the number of offended people increase and increase until everyone is offended by everything because this is how you get what you want in the world.
The fact that it sounds like common sense is also dangerous. This type of common sense idea is accepted by people without thinking about it and only later rejected after a reasoned analysis. This makes the idea catch fast on a huge number of people and lose power slowly by constant attack of its validity.
I use the tumor metaphor to show this kind of behavior for the spread and behavior of this idea. Like a tumor, it's part of the organism/culture, it looks harmless, it spreads easily, the organism does not react in the beginning, only after the tumor has spread and puts the whole culture at risk it starts to react.
Weaponised language
It's one more problem and it's not with the definition. It is with people. The intention of people that use the concept. Sadly, the intention of people that invented the term is not to rid the world of offensive language or empathy for offended people. This front falls quickly when one asks: No one cares about what white man are offended by? The answer is definitely not. Even if you say, ok, ok, we are talking about minorities, whites are a majority in white countries. Let's see if whites, that are a minority in other countries on the globe, have problems. You don't get anything out of the PC people about this.
This is just a justification. A weapon made out of words to shut down debate on certain issues that can't be won in a reasoned manner. My way or the highway with a nice common sense face.
I think that they've exaggerated, seeing how powerful this weapon was in the past, and blew away the cover.
I agree! Freedom of speech is more important than sheltering peoples' feelings. I have followed and upvoted you and I look forward to reading more of your content. I hope you will give my stuff a view :)
great post...couldn't agree more..nicely done