Political correctness, Southern Baptism, and social peace

I have heard it said by a number of people that social peace is a supreme value. The problem in all cases has been how it has been attempted to achieve.

One recent attempt was known as political correctness: Shoving a party line down people's throats to make unacceptable a wide range of thoughts and feelings. This has been tried before, and the result was Yugoslavia. The people who hated each other had to pretend to be brothers, while the party line of Communism prevented them from saying what they actually thought and felt. Because of this the people were never able to work through the underlying conflicts or the actual reasons for these conflicts; and when the party line was no more, they went on to slaughter each other.

With political correctness - as with similar lines in such situations as Southern Baptism, which likewise makes unthinkable and unutterable not only many feelings and thoughts (such as anything that is either "not nice" or anti-Pat Robertson) but also the reality of people's lives (such as what many Southern Baptist men like to do to their wives and daughters) - the direct result has been a culture of insincerity. People are not allowed to say what they think and feel and instead feel obligated to only speak the party line. And insincerity is not, nor has it ever been, a path to a real or lasting peace.

In fact, living under political correctness, like living under Southern Baptism, is much similar to the experience of childhood sexual abuse. The real damage that comes from sexual abuse is not the violation itself, but rather the fact that it is committed and then covered up by an authority figure who commands absolute personal, emotional and intellectual loyalty. This results in the person's loyalty being a loyalty to a lie - a lie that is in direct contradiction to reality. The upshot is in the person being made to lose connectivity with her thoughts and feelings, which, being in contradiction to the parent's lie, are then branded as evil and that for this reason attract to the person throughout her life individuals and collectives who reinforce to her this message and treat her in a barbaric manner.

With political correctness, as with Southern Baptism, the loyalties of people are made to be loyalties to a pack of lies, while the truth is criminalized or pathologized. This creates not only cultures of insincerity, but cultures of people being torn from their minds. The upshot is people being prevented from accessing their actual thoughts and feelings enough to come up with real solutions.

The only way to actually make and keep peace is for the people to articulate their actual feelings, thoughts and concerns and negotiate with other parties - likewise having articulated their actual feelings, thoughts and concerns - on how they can work with each other to have these met in a framework that is satisfactory to both parties. The only peace that can be real or lasting is one that is based on the truth rather than on pretense - whether that pretense be that of political correctness, Southern Baptism, Yugoslavian Communism or Wahabbism. And while the path to such a thing can be dangerous, explosive and hard to bear, it is the only way to arrive at a real and lasting peace.