Political Correctness 2: Lemmings!

In nature, there's a simple principle which states that taking survival risks, and surviving, is a signal of strength. It attracts mating partners, and raises the individual's status among their peers. Why? Because if you can take a survival risk and survive, then it shows you have good survival skills, and implicitly shows that you can protect your companions in their hour of need.

These survival risks take different forms. Young human males try everything from driving too fast to picking fights with groups of strangers. Gazelles jump about when a lion chases them, revving up like cartoon characters before taking off. This is a signal that tells the lion, "If I can afford to do this instead of just legging it straight away, then you really don't want to bother chasing me, because I'm one speedy little pup." Peacocks grow ridiculously big plumages which are, franky, a pure hindrance; an actual disability. They're proving that even with all this baggage, they can still survive, fight and dominate.

The baggage then becomes a signal of dominance, and a desirable status symbol in its own right.

Societies do this, too. Leaders do it. In the West, the survival risk that our society takes is to sanctify the notion of the society's obligations towards the individual. We uphold these rights in ridiculous ways, shafting our own collective good for the emotional satisfaction of feeling strong and worthy as a society. Political correctness becomes a desirable status symbol in its own right, like the peacock's plumage, and becomes divorced from its true purpose. The PC brigade are the standard-bearers for self-destructive posturing. They're political and social lemmings, and they're trying to chase the rest of us straight over the cliff.

We tell each other that we're such a secure and dominant society that we can afford to pay £1 million of public money for the legal defence of two people who killed their baby son horrifically. We can afford to spend untold millions defending terrorists who've fessed up. The more vile they are, and the more they admit to being vile, the more gently we treat them, as a way of displaying our strength as a society.

Excessive political correctness and litigiousness go hand in hand, obliging us all to look at each other through narrow, suspicious eyes, detecting wrongdoing wherever we can, inflating our sensitivities. It sends out a very toxic signal: that there is no safety in togetherness, or in giving - only in selfishness, and in taking. JFK would spin in his grave.

This is lethal, because we're in a situation where Western nations' default policy is to take a small national survival risk in every possible situation. And small risks add up. This is what rampant politcal correctness does. A nation is simply a group of people, and if they collectively decide that they're each, individually, more important than the group, well, they're going to have problems. And their first problem is a grotesque misunderstanding of social mathematics.

It's also lethal psychologically, for the individual. The mentality of selfishness states that we ourselves have nothing of value intrinsically, nothing to give; the only worthwhile things in life are external to us, somewhere over our shoulder. We become convinced that if we have nothing to give, then we are nothing, and can only be defined by accumulating shiny objects.

So political correctness has a lot to answer for. At the end of the day, it separates us from ourselves by encouraging us to treat society as one big sugar daddy. And where does this sugar daddy get his money from? From us. You see why the maths doesn't work?

I know, that's a pretty long rap-sheet for something most of us think of as just a minor irritation, but I stand by the charge. Political correctness, left unchecked, is as dangerous as terrorism. We're leaving the back door to our common sense wide open, and a lot of lunatics have taken up residence.

If political correctness has any excuse for existing at all, then surely it's to uphold the idea that the group shouldn't persecute the individual for being different. That's not the same thing as deliberately sacrificing the group's interests in favour of the individual.

What is the logical conclusion of this? Am I the only one who thinks we're all going to sink into the quicksand of our own moral vanity? If we carry on like this, we're going to tear ourselves apart with a gigantic tug of war, pulling in millions of different directions, each chasing our own imaginary Eden.

The winner, of course, will get to display a magnificent plumage; but he'd better bring a mirror, because there'll be no-one left to impress.