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Monday, November 22, 2021

THE AFTERMATH OF "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS" & GROUPTHINK

  

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James Raymond Fisher, Jr.

© November 22, 2021

 

Writers forever have been reminding us of our self-conscious narcissism.  No one more appropriately than British novelist D. H. Lawrence.  He writes in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929):

Never was any age more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling than our own . . . the radio and the cinema re mere counterfeit feeling all the time, the current press and literature the same.  People wallow in emotion, counterfeit emotion.  They lap it up, they live in and on it . . . and at times they get on very well with it all.  And then, more and more, they break.

We can see this is the case since what Eric Hoffer called the “terrible 60s” when everybody seemed to jump on the same bandwagon and call it being “politically correct”

As I have attempted to show in my writing, everything seemed to change after WWII: two-parent families dissolved with half ending in divorce; women had taken the place of fighting men in Europe and the Pacific in essential defense industries across the United States manufacturing fighting instruments of war; men were still men and women with no identity crisis for the changing roles; most at home and in the fighting fronts were Christians and believed in God without question, and nearly everyone attended church on Sunday be they Protestant or Catholic; Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter were not self-conscious but sacred holidays where no one had trouble saying prayers at Thanksgiving, or to wish others a “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter”; when a man and woman married, the priest or minister blessed the marriage of this “man and wife”;  men and women were not suspect if devout or never marrying; indeed, everything changed after the Second World War.

Readers familiar with my work know that I often speak of intuition and instinct, masculine and feminine brain, or I dismay at women trying to be like men, however, I never paid much mind to men wanting to be like women, although in the broadest sense, and I have dealt with this – the best minds are minds that use the bicameral mind or the right brain as well as the left brain.  I have also been distrustful of critical/analytical thinking (masculine mind) at the exclusion of creative/intuitive thinking (feminine mind) as they are complements to each other. 

Well, Christopher Booker in GROUP THINK is far more articulate than I am on the subject.  To wit:

Through those five extraordinary years of the Second World War, men and women rose to the challenge.  Men displayed the stern masculine values of duty, discipline, patriotism, responsibility, and respect for authority.   Men were not only masculine they were selfless, sensitive, and compassionate using their masculine strength to act firmly on behalf of others.  As Jungians would put it their outward manly strength was balanced by more selfless qualities of their inner feminine . . .

Masculine and feminine qualities are not confined to one sex.  Men and women have both masculine and feminine traits in their psychological make-up . . . A softer empathetic feeling and sensitivity towards others is seen in psychological terms as ‘feminine.’  Unless strength is balanced by feeling for others it makes people regardless of their gender, hard, insensitive, and self-centered . . . that part of our brain which tries to think rationally, concerned with order, structure and facts – what is described as ‘left-brain thinking – is in psychological terms ‘masculine.’  ‘Right-brain thinking’ is based on intuition and creative imagination, and is psychologically ‘feminine.’  Without the life-giving balance of intuitive understanding, the rational calculations of left-brain thinking can become so boxed in on itself as to lose touch with practical reality . . . [in The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire I refer to this as boxamania in today’s Western society]

These different aspects refer to men and women alike.  To become fully alive, mature, and responsible requires masculine and feminine traits to be in balance.  Men may naturally be more governed by the masculine side of their psyche, but this must be balanced by the inner feminine element which Jung called the anima, that is, the ability to feel for others and a sense of wider intuitive understanding.  That strength of mind and character which has typified women down through the ages enabled women to display this part of them in the Second World War . . .

After the ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties, the sexes were meant to have converged.  Men were supposed to become softer, gentler, more ‘feminized.’  In the new age of ‘equality and ‘women’s rights,’ those sterner masculine values of discipline, authority and order had come to be seen as oppressive, constricting, and life-denying instruments of domination . . . Women were supposed to become more assertive and independent, capable of competing equally with men on male terms . . . So many of those contradictions were to lead the groupthink of political correctness into bitter and divisive confusion.   

Booker sees other casualties of convergence being the loss of the former harmonious balance between men and women with the surfacing of the new dogma of political correctness.  Identity and gender imbalance now find boys wanting to be girls and girls wanting to be boys, along with the not-so-subtle collapse of conscience and empathic understanding.

He also points out the first rule of groupthink is that it is never properly rooted in reality; instead, equality between the sexes extends to a significant degree to no more than collective make-believe with positive masculinity in men and equal characteristic of women with little qualms about the loss of women femininity.  He writes:

What happened to society in those decades since the early Fifties was a picture of people no longer fully developed on either the masculine or the feminine side of their personality, caught in a state of psychological immaturity, ultimately centered on little more than the promptings of their own egos . . . which brings us back to the real underlying nature of political correctness . . . a division of the world into two groups with an instinct to feel sympathy for one of them as ‘victims’ . . . once this is taken over by groupthink, even the ‘victims’ themselves can sentimentalize about their plight, as can all those who rally to support them . . . emotional gratification is inseparable from groupthink: the need to express morally superior contempt for all those unfeeling self-centered ‘others’ who don’t understand, and therefore be dismissedly labeled as ‘sexists,’ ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘homophobes,’ trans-phobes,’ ‘fascists,’ or whatever scornful term seems appropriate where there is no longer a connection with reality . . . welding all those under its spell into a kind of collective egotism . . . this is the essence of what has come to be known as identity politics with those carried away with their own personal egos submerged in the collective  ego of their group which is inevitably divisive . . .

In THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE, I attempt to show we’ve been here before letting the reader survey the many centuries profiled to calibrate why we in the 21st century are seemingly so unhappy, so edgy, so strained, and a great deal confused.  Why do so many of us despise and hate each other when we never had so much and so much diversity.  If you question this assessment, ask yourself with the miracle of technology and the Internet, in the age of the ‘selfie’ with Facebook and Twitter, et al, taking over our identity and our mind, why have we allowed this?  It could be argued that the Internet has turned social media into anti-social media where huge numbers of people have had a chance, probably for the first time, to exercise their egos, both individually and collectively, not least with the license to broadcast to the world their intolerance and rage with ease previously unthinkable.

These children, by the accident of their birth, have been born in a time of collapsing civilization and exploding technology which they prefer to ignore comforted with their electronic devices.  But the future is not controlled by osmosis as challenges and reality disturb their situation.    

With real problems with real consequences, those of political correctness comically have no room for personal pronouns such as “he” and “she”; “we” and “they”; “him” and “her”; indeed, no room for such nouns as “boy” and “girl”; “good” and “evil”; “God” and “Lucifer”; but there is plenty of room for “hate” and “despise”; and for profanity for boys and yes girls as young as ten and twelve to sprinkle their conversation with the “f-word”; indeed, such popular television dramas such as “Yellowstone,” see everyone, including young ladies and young and old cowboys unable to communicate without the “f-word” dramatically expressed in their conversation.

GROUPTHINK has been the catalyst of political correctness from the hallow halls of our most prestigious universities to the slums that fester gangs in the streets of our cities and towns.  English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903 – 1990) once remarked:

When people cease to believe in God, they believe not in nothing but anything.        

This is the power and absurdity of GROUPTHINK.  But before you node your head in agreement, there is not one of us that is not also guilty of GROUPTHINK and therefore susceptible to political correctness.  Doctors, lawyers, and academics have their special inside track language and special collective identity, as do priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams; as do engineers, technologists, and people in trades.  The pressure to belong to our church, profession, community, indeed, to our ethnicity is the pressure of group persuasion.  We don’t buy a car, wash machine, television, computer, or the dress code we observe without checking with what is “in.”  We have essentially given up thinking for ourselves relying on what talking heads on television tell us what is real and what is not, failing to inform us that they promulgating specific information with a slant.  The evidence is compelling.  You can tell by talking to someone whether they listen to talking heads on CNN or FOX.  People are unlikely to read books or newspaper or magazine articles that are not consistent with their particular GROUPTHINK.

We see evidence of political correctness and GROUP THINK during the Christmas season when families have discontinued displaying Christmas trees and festive lights for fear of offending people other than those of Christian faith, indeed, being careful not to display baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in their front lawns as was common when I was a boy.  The absurdity of this is that we have always had people of other ethnicities in our community be they Jewish or Muslim, even in my hometown of 33,000 growing up in Iowa who had no objection to these Western traditions showing evidence instead that they quite enjoyed these displays. 

The irony is that the affluent of other ethnicities even today do not mine the homogeneity of the community.  It is the lower and more impoverished classes of these groups that seem to take offense, groups that self-segregate themselves in their own traditions and language failing because of lack of will or inclination to assimilate into the wider culture.   

Everything changed after the end of the Second World War with the 1950s introducing into America and American life a place this young country had never been before.

Americans experienced the unreality of the affluence of the 50s, got on board the train of GROUPTHINK in the crazy 60s, and from the 70s through the end of the 90s believed all the lies they told themselves about America’s exceptionalism with everyone wanting to think and believe, and value what Americans do, swiftly to move into the new century with the shock of a pandemic to accentuate their unreality, only to wonder if they still have the power to control their existence by getting off this GROUPTHINK train as they see in the distance they are approaching the horizon where NOWHERE LAND lies just beyond.      

       

 

 

 

 

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