Dialogue: We're coming out of the Dark Ages

By GARTH GEORGE

The chinks in the facade of the edifice of political correctness are turning into cracks, and the way things are going those cracks will soon become ruptures that will bring the whole sad, sorry, soul-destroying philosophy crashing down round the ears of its builders.

Political correctness is the refuge of people - and there are millions of them - who find it impossible to live in reality. So they have set up a system by which they can create their own reality, one in which they hope to feel comfortable but, strangely enough, never do.

There was a time when people who created their own reality were, quite properly, diagnosed as insane and locked away in asylums. But one of the first things the doctrine of PC did was get rid of asylums, so all these people have for years been running loose in the community, infecting untold numbers of others with their madness, which helps to explain why our mental health system has collapsed.

They have all developed rose-tinted glasses so nothing is ever black or white, but always a rosy shade of grey.

Yet they will sometimes tell you quite unashamedly that black is white and white is black.

They are terrified of acknowledging maleness and femaleness as separate and powerful entities, and have done everything they can to try to blur the differences in gender so that everyone can be seen as and treated as harmlessly androgynous.

They have no concept of truth and lies, right and wrong, good and evil, morality and immorality, but use all sorts of mental contortions - such as situational ethics - to justify the most outrageous behaviour.

They are inveterate people-pleasers, who never do or say anything that might offend anyone, and who are instantly hurt and confused if confronted with the truth - about themselves or anyone else.

They are never wrong. If something goes amiss and causes discomfort or distress to them or to someone they're close to, it is always someone else's fault, never theirs. They are perennial victims.

They have built their philosophy to a large extent on a totally erroneous belief that man (as in men and women) is inherently good. But the trouble is that reality persists and mankind remains the same as he always was - inherently predisposed to evil, otherwise called sin.

So all the efforts of the social engineers, whom PC has spawned by the hundreds of thousands and who really believe that we are in control of our world and our destinies, have so far come to naught and have, in fact, made mankind's abiding problems infinitely worse.

And because many of them have for so long infested our schools in the guise of teachers, it will probably be generations before all the effects of this PC poison will be eradicated.

Nevertheless, the evidence the decline and fall of PC has been all about us for a year or two now. But lately it has taken on a new impetus, which can be traced mainly to a quantum shift in the nature of politicians and politics in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world.

The end of the reign of one of the princes of PC - President William Jefferson Clinton - and his replacement by a real, down-to-earth Christian man in President George W. Bush as leader of the world's most powerful nation is one.

Another is the determination of the Australian Prime Minister John Howard to stand up to the "human rights" weirdos, who probably invented PC, and forbid illegal immigrants to land on Australian soil, and to support generously and enthusiastically with men and material the US in its war on terrorism.

In New Zealand, the elevation of two Christian men who live in the real world - Bill English to the leadership of the Opposition and John Banks to the mayoralty of Auckland - gives hope that our politicians and politics will soon, too, undergo a seachange - as usual a few years after America's.

But already there are promising signs. For instance, what a great encouragement it was to read in yesterday's Herald letter after letter from men prepared to declare their pride in their manhood and their fatherhood and to pour scorn on the silly woman who suggested that Father's Day should be a "day of shame" because some men are paedophiles.

In the meantime, the calm, dispassionate but determined pursuit of the war on terrorism, triggered by the horror of September 11, will - no matter how long it takes and how many lives are lost - in years to come be seen as a turning point in the affairs of men, right up there with the Renaissance that brought the world out of the Dark Ages.

Those men and women who live in the real world will know what I mean.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz