Heinlen once wrote that it is a good thing to rub blue dye into your skin with great solemnity if that is what the people demand. The implication is that it makes no difference to you. But that is wrong. It is a lie.
An example is the “gender fluid” who demand that “they” is the correct pronoun. And if you (as I did: the caffiene level was too low) mutter “That is neuter” you get yet another complaint sent to HR.
I very strongly disagree, so much so that I cannot tell if you are making a joke.
When you say the words “considered highly offensive” I cannot imagine anyone having any right to be offended at such a thing, nor any honest man taking such offense seriously.
Highly? Really?
To the contrary, it is highly offensive even to assert that an honest man should lie like a dog, a lie no one believes and no one can believe, merely to please the arbitrary whims of some petty tyrant trying to demean your soul and rob you of dignity.
The rule in English is that males and male objects are “he”, and persons whose sex is unknown or undetermined is also “he.” One says “he or she” only in a legal document where that degree of precision overwhelms the need for good grammar. Otherwise is it an error. “They” used in a singular merits horsehwipping.
A man who cuts off his penis and has false breasts implanted is not changing his sex, that is, his biological reality, but is attempting to change his social role: he is a man who wants to be treated with the honors and titles of a wife and mother. He also suffers from profound mental illness, so much so that he cuts off parts of his body.
But since the pronoun deals with the sex and not with social roles, he has no right to be offended if he is a “he”.
It is like being offended that A is A or being offended that twice two is four. If twice two were four, then there would be four lights. There are five lights!
More to the point, it is like being offended if a prole says Oceania was allied with Eastasia last year. Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!
Saying a he is a “he” is not what offends.
The political correction officer is playing a social dominance game with you.
HR, of course, comes from the pit. They want consensus, particularly if that consensus is around a lie. I’m more interested in truth, and beauty, and honour. I like things strong, not insipid. But I am from another age, when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
For a lie with social force behind it has a power. I’m still considering if Keoni is correct and we should all disconnect from this society.
Telling everyone to “Just Go Rogue” may make for some great storytelling (or TV ads), but it is a recipe… well… for many of the disorders that are growing in Western societies, not least social isolation, hedonism, and despair. It is a recipe, potentially, for civilizational disaster. Most rogues are bad people. Most people are not equipped, materially or psychologically, to go it alone. Most people benefit from going along to get along. Because we’re humans. Human culture, with its constitutive enforced norms, is an adaptation that should not be lightly messed with.
Still, we are convinced that the Consensus Raft is doomed. And this puts us would-be Social Cohesionists into a difficult spot. There is yet another pitfall in Going Against the Consensus: Dissident movements attract too many natural dissidents. Rogue-goers can increase their power by cooperating with other rogue-goers. The trouble is: they’re vastly more likely to be natural rogue-goers.
The sort of person who can sit there during the Asch conformity experiment and continue to spit out the correct answer time and again, even under immense social pressure to conform to the wrong one, is the exact same sort of person who can sit there and spout the incorrect answer, in defiance of that same pressure. It’s antisociality; and not the sort of stuff that social cohesion is made out of. Complicating matters further: Antisociality is correlated negatively with other desirable cognitive traits. There is a reason that naysayers of cultural norms are often dismissed breezily as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing troglodytes.
Faced with a consensus that, in the bright light of cold reason, is fatally flawed, would-be dissidents are handicapped now doubly: by their own weak and minority status, and by the attractiveness of their views disproportionately to naturally uncooperative people.
And this is why you must disavow your ambition. If you try to appease these people you will end up living without truth, beauty or honour. You will lose joy, The weaker brother, who wants to get along, needs his crew, his band, to encourage him to stand: to eat well, train well, and seek righteousness.
To ignore the diverstiy police and Human Resources. To avoid their propaganda.
To stop apopoligizing, stop explaining, and to act.
For perhaps that will save the West. Politeness will not.