John Stuart Mill on political correctness

 John Stuart Mill on political correctness

Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. 

In a Biv society they become Iv-B, a hidden prejudice that chaotically changes many situation.

With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. 

Sometimes they can flare up but then hit a ceiling as they become too visible as V-Bi, I-O police can also become involved. usually it oscillates between this ceiling and a floor of minimum prejudice. 

And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. 

 Many Iv-B and Oy-R parts of sosciety are hidden like this, like B being driven underground as roots and Iv branches hidden behind V leaves. Because Iv-B and oy-R are chaotic they can represent logical thinking of cause and effect to give these opinions, often though they run up against the random thinking of V-Bi and Y-Ro. For example someone decides a race is inferior, then they are confronted with random genetic mixes of that race clearly superior to them. The two attitudes then are that a race might grow in roots and branches indicated one is superior, the other is that random mixes of genes can create superior people in any race.

A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep the general principles and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the thinking world. 

In the I-O marketplace of ideas there comes a balance between V-Bi political correctness often championed by Bi and Iv prejudice, often seen in the media as left versus right and policed by hate crime and libel laws.

The sort of men who can be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers for truth, whose arguments on all great subjects are meant for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves. Those who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their thoughts and interest to things which can be spoken of without venturing within the region of principles, that is, to small practical matters, which would come right of themselves, if but the minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged, and which will never be made effectually right until then: while that which would strengthen and enlarge men’s minds, free and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned.