Yesterday I described how childhood abuse creates an impossible contradiction for a child. He is faced with the choice of believing what an authority, who they love and depend on, tells him is reality ("I am doing this because I love you and its for your own good") versus his own immature perceptions of reality (this feels abusive and is hateful.) The resolution often requires the child to split his awareness of parts of reality and this "vertical splitting of the ego" becomes a stable structure throughout his life. Political Correctness creates the same kind of discontinuity in our conscious appreciation of reality.
Political Correctness has its roots in Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. I am hardly an expert in this area but it seems that the Deconstructionists took a small piece of reality, that all of us construct our sense of reality through our own subjectivity, and made it the primary determinant of reality, ie since we are all subjective, there can be no such thing as objective reality. In other words, the world of consensus reality is a construct and if we change how we view the world, we will change the construct.[Among the other evil offspring of this philosophy, we would have to include moral relativism and other (rationalized) excuses for inaction in the face of evil.]
The idea of a mutable sense of reality was especially attractive to the left, who desperately wanted to change the world but were having difficulty everywhere they were in control in actually effecting their Utopian programs and perfecting their subjects.
Enter radical feminism. The radical feminists were not content to battle for equal rights for women in the work place. They were intent on overturning the entire pre-existing paradigm. In response to a perceived anomie among many women who felt marginalized and neglected, the philosophers and polemicists of feminism began to construct an intellectual edifice designed to support the premise that women needed to throw off their chains of oppression (adopted from the left's dialectic) by the white male power structure, and begin to live independently of their men. It was a short step from the idea that women didn't need men to protect them and take care of them, to the idea that women not only didn't need men, but were better off without them, and were, in fact, superior to them. This stood traditional roles on their heads. Men were not just oppressors but were unnecessary.
Traditional roles for the genders have the virtue of fundamentally agreeing with biology. Women are the only ones who can create new life, and by virtue of the large brains we are blessed with, the pregnancy lasts a long time, and the child is dependent for a very long time (until 13 or 14 in traditional societies and, as it sometimes seems, until ~30 in contemporary American society). The combination necessitates the women's dependence on her mate. Indeed, in most traditional cultures today, a woman and her children who haves lost their mate and father, are at an extraordinary disadvantage. Even in the wealthy West, single mothers tend to live in poverty and raise children at a disadvantage in most arenas. This is just one of the serious consequences of real-world testing of the tenets of Political Correctness.
As I have described, when the child emerges form the mother-child dyad, they are for the first time forced to confront an external reality that is at best indifferent to him. Without a father, in a state of nature, children will struggle to survive and thrive. In order to justify jettisoning the father (all "oppressive" males) therefore, the radical feminist had a problem. If fathers are necessary, in reality, then the only way to justify destroying the function that they serve is to change reality to make that function no longer necessary. This, then, became the bedrock of Political Correctness.
If the world as it exists does not conform to the world as it should be, and the work of changing the world seems too difficult, then simply change your perceptions of the world, and reality will follow.
Tomorrow, I will describe some of the psychodynamics that lie underneath the need of some women to deny the mutual dependence between men and women.
Continue with PC & Defects in Reality Testing: "Words Matter"
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