Sunday, December 07, 2008
The Logic of the PC MC Paradigm
I noticed I mentioned the irrational logic of the PC MC paradigm in my previous essay, Mumbai and the PC MC Cookbook, but failed to make it explicit.
In that previous essay, I articulated four interlocking axioms that together form and explain one particular paradox of PC MC—namely, the paradox that the more violent Muslims become, the more they are protected and respected by PC MC.
For our purposes, we may conflate axioms 3 and 4, and consider only the following three axioms:
1. A conscious fear of the West going down the “slippery slope” toward genocide against Muslims or, short of that, perpetrating any variety of collective mistreatment and/or crimes against Muslims.
2. An unconscious fear of Islamic violence.
3. An excessive self-criticism of the West combined with an excessive approbation of Islam.
The precise crux of the logical aspect of this paradox is contained in the interaction of #1 and #2:
Unconsciously, the PC MC mind knows that Muslims are irrationally and dangerously prone to violence. The PC MC mind knows this from current terrorism combined with a historical memory of Islamic violence against the West for the last 1,300 years. This knowledge, however, remains suppressed in the subconscious.
The PC MC mind also harbors a profoundly held and irrationally excessive principle against mistreating non-Western peoples—a principle that has become incoherently conflated and confused with an irrationally excessive self-criticism of Western “imperialism” and of post-imperialist globalism. In addition, this has been energized by a transferral of the “never again” mentality inherited from the Western response to the Holocaust, from Jews onto Muslims, consequently arousing the fear that the West will repeat that horror by going down the “slippery slope” toward collectively mistreating Muslims, leading inexorably to genocide against them.
Here is the logical mechanism: whenever Muslims behave in accordance with the PC MC fear of Islamic violence, it triggers a semi-conscious sense that the West must react to this violence and defend itself—and this, in turn, immediately triggers the fear that the West will inevitably over-react and begin the process of going down the “slippery slope” toward genocide. What, in the rational mind, would lead to a rational attitude and policy of self-defense against a unique threat of international violence, becomes semi-consciously interdicted before it has a chance of arriving at its rational conclusion, out of the irrational fear that the West, if it reacts at all, will inevitably over-react.
A reminder: This logical mechanism of axioms #1 and #2 would not have the mainstream traction throughout the West that it currently enjoys, were not axiom #3 (and axiom #4) firmly entrenched in the sociopolitical mind of the West. The immediate transformation in the PC MC mind of justified reaction to Islamic violence into an unjustified over-reaction to Islamic violence, is based upon the rigidly held posture that any negative reaction by the West in response to non-Western and/or non-white pathology must inevitably entail any one or combination of the following uniquely Western sins: “racism”, “imperialism” and “fascism”.
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