So those marking ideas as low status in their social context learn to easily switch to speaking in broad terms about the status of the ideas in question in larger social context, where the low status they’ve assigned the idea does not apply, in order to argue that those who object to their status assignations are whining about nothing. Additionally, it’s human nature to be jealous of the status of others and dismissive of your own. This fact is used to discredit all uses of the word, effectively using uncontroversially low status ideas to discredit the terminology that could otherwise be used to defend more controversially low status ideas. The set of ideas that lack status in a given context is typically larger than the set of ideas that unjustly lack that status, so a lot of stupid ideas get defended using those words. People who hold those views and don’t like the resulting status loss in that context invent terms like political correctness, scientism, close mindedness, etc, by which they mean an inappropriate denial of status to the ideas they hold. People use social pressure to mark certain positions as being without status in the relevant contexts. It takes national political interests to summarize all of the individual tribal circle drawing and suggest that this is some organized liberal movement to end debate. I think I am better inoculated against the process as a result of the experience. I observe that most students get over it - and I did. I assume that social scientists have fully explored this kind of dynamic. I don’t see this underlying dynamic as a terrible thing. by those who are excluded (and care about it). A person doesn’t get to be in the group if he or she expresses skepticism of the Truth. Groups form that have somehow agreed that certain ideas are Truth. I watch this happen every year, on a smaller scale, on campus. This lead to a group of young, dedicated, active people who spent too much time talking to each other and not enough time considering alternate points of view. The movement suffered terribly from a social process of excluding people who were skeptical of certain tenants. Fortunately, they were on the non-violent side. My parents were part of the internal debate as the weather underground split from the SDS. I define political correctness (when it means anything substantive) as close to a synonym for “groupthink.” The term is thrown around as rhetoric all the time.
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