Theos-Talk Archives (October 1996 Message tl00316)

kymsmith@micron.net wrote:
>
> It has been suggested the arguments regarding "Sexism" is unimportant in the
> Theosophical scheme of things.  Really?  How are we going to "help humanity"
> if every time we speak we unnecessarily offend a great number of them.
> Those who find "political correctness" tiresome are simply lazy.

	I do not find "political correctness" to be tiresome. I find it to be
reprehensible, and it should be anathema to anybody who seriously
belongs to an organization whose motto is "THERE IS NO RELIGION HIGHER
THAN TRUTH".

	How many honest politicians do you know? Does politics equate, in
general, with truth or lies? Then why the "political" in "political
correctness"?

	Let's take a look at the origin of the term, "political correcntess".
The Communist Party had a dualistic theory that our perceptions of
reality were entirely colored by our politics. If one thought that
people were starving to death or being falsely imprisoned in the Soviet
Union, it was not because these things were actually happening, it's
that one's politics were incorrect. Any member of the Communist Party
who made a statement that reality was different than the party line was
warned of being "politically incorrect".

	The term "political correctness" was again used in the early 1980's, to
refer to hypocritical rules on college campuses where it was considered
to be OK to say, for example, for a black professor to say that all
Caucasians should be killed. It was NOT OK, however, to for a
conservative student newspaper to quote the professor in criticism.
Somehow, some people took this concept of the wrongness of truth when
told about certain groups of people to be right (what George Orwell
called "doublethink").

	A more charitable definition of "political correctness" is taking the
lies we tell out of politeness, and considering them to be the truth.

	Face it, if you're interested in the truth, then it's either correct,
or incorrect. It's NEVER "politically correct".

	Bart Lidofsky