Political Correctness is Dogma

Dogma serves a purpose by simplifying reality through heuristics, but can also hold societies back. When the time is right, a society is best served by shedding the training wheels and facing reality head-on.

What is Dogma?

The relevant definitions of dogma center on its requirement to be believed with certainty. Also, dogma purports to rest on a simple guiding principle, but instead has many defined rules.

Dogma fights against those who question dogma.

Dogma creates cognitive biases in the minds of its believers.

Example

Religion can easily be placed into the dogma category.

People are willing to kill or die for Jesus Christ. This evidences a great degree of certainty in the truth of the Christian message.

Christianity is sometimes described as having a core guiding principle, such as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” but Christians aren’t free to interpret that line as they see fit. Instead they are required to follow hundreds or thousands of rules promulgated by the specific sect they belong to.

This can be seen in the Ten Commandments. It’s not just that you have to believe in Jesus, or “do unto others…”, but you also have to follow these ten specific rules. (And the many others added over time)

Also, the rationale behind these rules can never be the subject of serious debate. “These are the rules because God said so”. Those who say otherwise were once burned at the stake.

Religious people are more likely to adopt the opinions of their religious peers than non-religious folk. This can be seen as a cognitive bias.

That is dogma. Political correctness falls into this definition.

How Is PC Dogmatic?

PC might be seen as having a core principle. It has been variously articulated as “be respectful to others”, “support the little guy”, “don’t be offensive”, etc. To whatever extent this core principle represents PC dogma, it has little effect on outcomes.

Christians might believe “do unto others…” or “what would Jesus do?”, but those guiding concepts rarely inform their decisions. Instead, day-to-day judgments are made based on dogmatic rules like the ten commandments or the tenets of Kosher.

So what are the rules of PC dogma? There isn’t the same uniformity that can be ascribed to a specific sect of a religion, but the rules mostly fall into one of the following categories:

• Don’t use certain words
• Define offensiveness objectivly
• Grant favoritism based on ranking in oppression hierarchy
• Maintain a level of knowledge on certain issues
• Attribute noncompliance with PC dogma to malice

For more detail on these rules click here.

To see how rational these rules are click here.

Each of these rules is generally considered to be true by PC adherents, and there are strong sanctions against questioning the rationale behind these rules.

N.B. There are varied levels of commitment to PC dogma.

The foregoing is an outline of the dogmatic nature of Political Correctness which will be supplemented by upcoming posts. If there’s a specific aspect of this topic you would like to see addressed, please leave it in the comments.