Political Correctness and Intellectual Laziness

At this time in America, there is very little respect for the intellectual. A large part of the reason is that the intellectuals have become lazy and created a monstrosity known as political correctness that censors any idea that can offend anyone – meaning, anything controversial – meaning, anything meaningful. In a democracy, bad ideas are meant to be met with better ideas rather than censorship; and failure to do so reflects intellectual laziness that is absolutely against what democracy – as well as the intellectual process – is meant to be about. And while Donald Trump is wrong on many fronts, he is right to take on political correctness as something incompatible with democracy.

If someone believes that blacks are inferior, or that women are stupid, or that Jews are evil, the solution is not censoring these ideas but refuting them. It just so happens that I have refutations to these beliefs, and I want people who actually want to see these wrongful ideas go away use them.

The people who see blacks as inferior like to point to the fact that for a long time Africa was a mess. In fact Africa's problems had nothing to do with any kind of racial inferiority and everything to do with history. The place was run by alien powers for centuries, and it took them time to figure out self-governance. Even so there have been success stories. Botswana went from being dirt-poor at the time of its independence to being an upper-middle income economy. And in the last decade and a half, some of the world's highest rates of economic growth were recorded by Angola, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

There is nothing inferior about Colin Powell. There is nothing inferior about Michael Jordan or Mohammad Ali. There is nothing inferior about Louis Armstrong or Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Wonder or Maya Angelou. There is nothing inferior about Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama and Martin Luther King.

Then there is the belief that women are stupid. Hillary Clinton for one is far from stupid. So are Sandy Lerner and Marie Curie. So are, as much as I hate their ideas, Ann Coulter and Catherine McKinnon. The men who believe that women are stupid get away with having those kinds of beliefs because they kill women who are smart, or put them into brutal marital situations where their intelligence gets seen as arrogance or vanity or narcissism or sociopathy or witchraft and viciously destroyed. Where they cannot do that, they have to accept women as intellectual equals, when in many cases the women they treat like dirt are not only their intellectual equals but their intellectual superiors.

As for the Jews, they have made vast contributions to the Western civilization. They have contributed hugely in science, in medicine, in culture and in economics. And the Jewish values of education, hard work and service to humanity are some of the noblest values that anyone has. Much of the work that they do does not bring them significant monetary reward but is of vast benefit to the Western civilization; and there are any number of white Anglo Saxon Protestant businessmen who make vast amounts of money out of work that was developed by the Jews.

Are there inferior blacks, stupid women and evil Jews? Of course there are. But there are also any number of inferior, stupid and evil WASP or Muslim or Hindu or Russian or Mediterranean men; and I for one have not noticed any greater presence of these traits in blacks or women or Jews than in these populations. Political correctness is not necessary to correct these fallacious beliefs. Use real intelligence. And that way do away both with censorship and artificial blindness that comes with political correctness and stupid, prejudicial beliefs that it seeks to suppress.