PC is Control, not Etiquette | Jeff Deist

let me just start by thanking all of you for coming I know it's a beautiful Saturday beautiful weather and I know you have a lot of family and work commitment so you took time away from today so we're honored and we're humbled that you would choose to spend a day with us I'm told we have about 19 states represented here today so we're happy to hear that we've got so much from Mexico as well we have 31 students here today on scholarship so thank you very much for supporting this we have and those 31 students represent 19 high schools universities and homeschooling groups so that's that's great to hear and I think you'll enjoy our topic today we decided instead of doing something more econ heavy like we're known for we talked about the Fed and that sort of thing a lot we thought we'd mix it up a little bit and talk about political correctness which is something I think is at the forefront of our country today and it's certainly a virus that infects and affects all of us so we have two great guests - Tom's Tom woods and Tom DiLorenzo who both done battle in the trenches of academia and I think are very well qualified to speak today about what's going on of course we have our founder and our chairman Lew Rockwell perhaps the one of the best-known anti-state intellectuals in the world today speaking as well I mentioned that you know you took time away from your families and it's beautiful weather today but I suspect I know why you did so because you understand it's that something very troubling is going on that political correctness represents looking very evil in our society and then we need to address it so I wanted to begin with was something I noticed recently I don't know how it was sent to me but I saw the filmmaker John Waters he's an Asian app sort of an avant-garde filmmaker from Baltimore I liked him kind of an intellectual type he made some some films that were famous in the 70s especially so he recently was asked to give a commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design and Island now you think most universities have become very left-wing and very PC well you can imagine an art in fashion design school okay fine you know the kids the kids are very left correct left and the baby boomer parents in attendance who presumably footed the bill for this you know we're all in thrall to John Waters so he comes up and he presides precedes to give the most politically correct speech you can imagine you know he's he's trying to show how kulia so he laces his commencement speech with profanity how original right and then he gets into these sixties cliches the most tired things imaginable about how these kids should you know join the system and and bring it down and this sort of thing and that they should go out in the world through X Y & Z and then of course of course he goes into the the obligatory stuff about and I want you to fight racism and sexism and homophobia which I'm sure are just absolutely burning issues on the streets of Providence Rhode Island you know what he ought to be telling these kids is God you went to an art school pray for a job you know he said you know if he wanted to be unpeaceful like metal fabrication or carpentry work or something where you could be artistic and make a living but he didn't say any of this and what struck me about it was throughout the whole commencement speech he is absolutely convinced that he is still a cultural rebel he's convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that there's some you know wasp power structure out there that said you're keepin art students held down from having you know their hair the way they wanted to be or saying it was just it was just absurd the lack of self-awareness and the lack of irony in this guy you know he he honestly does not understand that people who think and believe just like him control every institution in this country they control the state the control government they control academia they control media they control entertainment they control big business and he still imagines himself an outsider a rebel and I think PC is so prone to this tendency to this lack of self-awareness the flag irony and for us for people in this room who have a deeper respect but I find it delicious because provides a nice target for for ridicule and I think it's deserving of ridicule so as I mentioned we do a lot of Economics conferences you might think of the Mises Institute as an organization dedicated to economics but we're also an organization dedicated to making the most radical case for a free society and says PC is fundamentally at odds with academic freedom and political freedom I think it's actually a very good topic for our organization to address and and we have a bit of a pedigree an anti PC pedigree our namesake Mises himself of course fought tooth and nail both against the Marxist and Keynesian orthodoxy of his day but literally against national socialism he was forced to flee Austria and later flee Europe altogether come to the u.s. his apartment was ransacked by the Nazis and when he did arrive in the US in the 1950s he was denouncing the what he called pseudo progress pseudo progressives who controlled US universities by smearing laissez-faire advocates and keeping them out of academia by terming them reactionaries and of course Murray Rothbard who is a dear friend of Lew Rockwell helped create the Mises Institute Murray Rothbard was unfor the term PC even existed okay in his in his academic work his speeches his articles writing was fearless lianas and he was he was very much a modern makin he reveled in showing that the reality behind official explanations for things no matter how ugly that reality might be in the 1980s and 1990s he correctly saw that the then burgeoning culture of victimhood was actually neo Puritan in its roots and would have this corrosive effect on the American spirit so not coincidentally Murray's great protege Hans Hermann hapa was later purged by PC enforcers from his perch at UNLV and today of course professor Hafez is a Mises Institute senior fellow and also one of the most radical and unpeaceful in the world and so I would like to say that the Mises Institute has resistance to DNA excuse me resistance to PC who woven in our DNA so I thought that I would like to speak today a bit about what PC is and what it is not but first let's talk about what PC is not at least in its modern version and then later we can talk a bit about what we might do to fight against it so to begin with please understand that political correctness is not about being nice okay it's not simply a social issue it's not a subset of the culture wars it's not about politeness or inclusiveness or etiquette it's not about being respectful towards your fellow humans or but being sensitive or carrying or avoiding hurt feelings and unpleasant slurs it's not about any of these things despite of course what our progressive friends insist PC is is really about and as inside I'm not just singling out left progressives there are right progressives too right progressives are generally known as neoconservatives and they have the same they share the same goal as elect less left progressive that we're all sort of evolving towards this new man who is going to better serve the state so please don't feel I'm unduly picking on our on our progressive friends from the left but I'm sure you've heard this argument you know PC is about respect and inclusiveness they tell us yeah as though we need modern left in America the cultural enforcers to help us understand that we shouldn't call someone or that we shouldn't use the n-word or make hurtful comments about someone's physical appearance or encourage bullying if PC was about kindness and respect it wouldn't need to be imposed on us right after all we already have a mechanism in society for the social cohesion that PC is said to represent it's called manners and we already have specific individuals thankfully who are charged with ensuring that good manners are instilled in those individuals are called parents I'm sure some of you in this room can relate I struggle with that a daily basis has anybody here really believe that our PC culture aggressively secular dominated by empty pop music and derivative crass TV and music movies mindless social media produces virtually no important literature to speak of does anyone he really believed that our culture is nicer than that of our decidedly non-pc grandparents of course not PC the PC in the West is not nice and neither are its enforcers okay on the contrary PC is degraded and reshaped Western culture into something purposely ugly something insults the eye insults the ear and the mind and yet for all of its lack a personal restraint and emphasis on individual feelings PC culture is somehow decidedly sterile and conformist so no the PC world that we all live in today is not a nice one because PC is not about being nice so it's not about being nice or inclusive what exactly is PC well I'm going to take a stab bear with me I'm going to take a stab at a definition of it I'm going to define it as such political correctness is the conscious designed manipulation of language intended to change the way people speak right think feel and act all in furtherance of an agenda that's a mouthful I understand but if you put it all together I think PC is best understood as propaganda that's how I suggest we approach it and understand it but unlike ordinary propaganda which historically has been used by governments to to win favor for a particular campaign like a war effort PC is all encompassing right it seeks nothing less than to mold us to reshape us into modern versions of Marx's idea of an unalienable of his social pretensions and and humdrum social conventions so like all propaganda PC fundamentally is a lie right it's about refusing to deal with the underlying nature of reality and in fact attempting to alter that reality by legislative or social or cultural Fiat so in PCA is no longer a and just recently the after mentioned Hans hopper had a great quote about this he's talked about the Masters meaning are what I call the state linguistic complex he says the master stipulated aggression invasion murder and war are actually self-defense whereas self-defense is aggression invasion murder and war freedom is coercion and coercion is freedom saving an investment or consumption consumption to saving investment money is paper and paper is money taxes are voluntary payments and voluntarily penny prices are exploitative taxes contracts are no contracts no contracts or contracts producers or parasites and parasites are producers indeed what we can see here or otherwise sense does not exist and that which we cannot see here or otherwise sense does the normal is a normal black is white and white is black etc so in a PC world as Hoffman sees it metaphysics metaphysics is actually diverted and rerouted truth becomes malleable and just truth just serves a bigger purpose determine of course by our superiors so political correctness means suspending disbelief to advance an agenda that none of us asked for none of us voted for none of us ought in the marketplace and none of us want for our kids so PC is nothing new right when we try to struggle with where did this all come from it seems to a snuck up on us how do we get to the point where we can't even speak freely in our own country well PC and all of its various forms is nothing new Under the Sun I think we can safely assume that feudal chiefs and King and emperors and politicians have ever and always wanted to control the language and the thoughts and thus the actions of their subjects I think some version of thought police has always existed but it is interesting to consider because I think the better we understand political residence the better we fight it if success has a thousand fathers then so does modern political correctness and let's not kid ourselves about the degree to which it is successful we can judge that by the degree to which it's ingrained in the West so to understand its origins we might go back to the after mentioned Marx we might read or learn about the the historical Frankfurt School Marxist we might consider from the right the work of Leo Strauss for his impact on the this war hungry right-wing think-tank world that we have we might study the deceptive purposely deceptive sloganeering of Asolo Linsky Hillary's great mentor in effect we might read about or you might be interested to know that the the French philosopher Foucault talked about political correctness in the 60s but he talked about it he used the term political correctness as a criticism because he said so much of what Marxism was is not scientifically correct it's just based on dogma so if something's going to be politically correct it ought to be scientifically correct and then of course moving forward a bit to understand PC we might look at the new left that emerged in the 1970s particularly modern feminists and race obsessives who to their credit at least at the at the beginning of this term you oftentimes used it ironically amongst themselves and then if we move forward into the 1990s we might look to the emergent culture Wars of that period when Pat Buchanan had his famous speech at the Republican convention right wing writer Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book about PC and really gave it sort of a better shape in its holistic modern sense understanding pcs as a political legal cultural social psychological linguistic phenomenon but I'm going to make my own recommendation if you really want to understand the black art of PC propaganda let me suggest someone else to use one of its foremost practitioners a man named Edward Bernays now Bernays literally wrote the book on propaganda and it's softer incarnation of public relations remarkable man he's actually little discussed in the West today despite being I think the Godfather of modern spin and he he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and much like me says he was born in Austria in the late 19th centuries but unlike Mises he came to the US fortuitously for him as an infant about one year old and then proceeded to live on another astonishing hundred and three years until nineteen ninety five so the guy had something ticking inside him and one of his first Jobs was as a press agent for President Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information which was an agency designed to gin up popular support for World War one which was deeply unpopular at the time in the US especially among German Americans who didn't want to fight their fatherland and and among Irish Americans who weren't crazy about the idea of being allied with the English so Bernays is credited with coming up at this time that the phrase make the world safe for democracy and where that came back around for us in the Bush Gulf War that's for sure so after the war ends he asked himself you know could we apply similar techniques to the problems of peace this sounds like a neocon doesn't it for the problems of peace but by problems he met he meant selling stuff so he directed some hugely successful ad campaigns amongst some ivory soap he for the for I think the egg grower folks he directed a campaign recommending bacon and eggs for breakfast as a healthy thing which turned out to be true and he was a big promoter I did a big ad campaign for ballet that brought ballet more to the fore in New York City but his biggest success for which he's known was making smoking acceptable for American women see up until then smoking was seen as a dirty habit had some male habit right and women could even be arrested for smoking in certain public areas but that you know you get into the 20s and the flapper era and the old pre-war social modes are breaking down so at the behest of his client Lucky Strike Bernays arranged for a group of glamorous women to march in the 1929 New York Easter Parade and they were smoking in this parade what they called torches of freedom the kind of Randi and you know it it's glow on the end of your thing and so what you can imagine what happened after that these glamorous New York ladies smoking so the stigma quickly evaporated and Lucky Strike found itself with a whole new base of potential customers and ironically years later Bernays wife would die of lung cancer and and he would publicly profess regret at his role in glamorizing smoking but he he was proud and open of the term manufacturing consent this was a term coined by British surgeon and psychologist named Wilfred Trotter who wrote a book called instincts of the herd in peace in war in 1919 so Bernays really took this concept to heart you know the herd instinct entails the deep-seated psychological need that we all have to win approval of our social group and the herd overwhelms any other influence as social beings you know our need to fit in is paramount but however ingrained it might be in us in Bernays view the herd instinct cannot be trusted right the herd is irrational and dangerous it must be steered by wiser men in a thousand imperceptible ways into Bernays this was key they shouldn't know that they're being steered so to Bernays but what we call public relations was much deeper we think then PR today he didn't see himself as an ad man he saw himself as a creator a transcendent creator who shaped events and perceptions at all levels of society and this is his daughter Ann talking about him after he died he said the public's democratic judgment is not to be relied on they could easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing so they had to be guided from above this guidance was a sort of enlightened despotism despotism excuse me so this is his own daughter describing him but the techniques that Bernays employed are still very much being used today to shape political correctness now first he understood how all-powerful the word mind and the herd instinct really is you know despite our nature we all think we're special snowflakes right well to Bernays we're timorous and malleable creatures who desperately want to fit in and win acceptance so as a result humans naturally seek out a tribe whether it's familiar or social or religious or ethnic political and this actually raises a very important question for us as libertarians if there really is something deeply rooted in many many of our DNA that makes us gravitate towards collectivism you know as a tactical matter what does that all mean for us as libertarians we're trying to overcome something that's actually quite innate at least in many humans so second he understood the critical importance of using third party authority to promote causes or products right we see this all the time celebrities athletes models politicians wealthy elites these are the people from whom the herd takes its cues so whether they're endorsing transgender awareness or selling luxury automobiles when we see George Clooney or Kim Kardashian or in this this pains me or Robert DeNiro endorsing Hillary Clinton for president which all three have done it resonates with the hurt it does and third Bernays really understood the role that emotions play in our tastes and in our preferences it's not a particular candidate or a cigarette or a watch or a handbag that we really want when we see the commercial it's the emotional component of the ad the whole lifestyle it appears to to entail that affects us however subconsciously so I encourage you to read more about Edward Bernays if you're so inclined he's a fascinating man and I think you won't come away disappointed and you'll come away definitely with a much better understanding of PC causes and how they've managed to weave themselves into the fabric of our culture so let's talk a little bit about how we might fight back right that's that's always the question at libertarian conferences you know I've been I've sat through a million of them and it there's always something somewhat unsatisfying you know the speaker can never give you that level of specificity you're looking for like there is some 800 number you could call someone would come to your home with trunk full of ak-47s or something I don't know but what can we do as individual you know with finite amount of time and resources with obligations to our families to our loved ones to our jobs what can we do to reverse this growing tide of darkness well of course only you can assess your situation what might be best for you the best we can hope to do today is to inspire action on your part let me offer in closing a few modest suggestions first and this really can't be overstated I see this in Liberty minded people all the time is understand that we're in a fight it's a real fight it's not just rhetorical okay PC represents a war for our hearts our minds our souls and the other side understands this and so should you okay the fight is taking place on multiple fronts it's not just the state there's a whole complex of government at all levels academia media the business world churches synagogues nonprofits NGOs all of these forces are aligned against you and they're all pushing PC down our throats and the Obama team in the White House employs a huge group of social psychologists and that's all they do they work on engineering the herd that's their job and they help people like Hillary Clinton overcome cognitive dissonance right when Hillary Clinton rails against Wall Street wait aren't you and your grifter husband the biggest beneficiaries of Wall Street largesse in the history of humanity for most people out cause cognitive dissonance right enter social psychologists so these are experts folks okay we're being outgunned and outmanned now understand that the PC enforcers they're not asking you to accept there's not a debating you they're not they don't care about your vote okay they don't care whether they can win this at the ballot box don't care if they have to use extra legal means stroke of a pen executive order okay they're in it to win there are millions of progressives in the US who absolutely would criminalize speech that doesn't comport with their sense of social justice no kid yourself okay one poll recently suggested fifty-one percent of Democrats and one third of all Americans would absolutely favor criminalizing hate speech so-called hate speech to the other side is fighting deliberately and tactically so my single biggest piece of advice is realize you're in a fight then arm yourself equip yourself and fight back culturally this is a matter of life and death the second thing I might say tactically in closing is that realize that we still have tremendous freedom to act as bad as PC contamination might be at this point we still have an enormous amount of freedom and elbow room available to us and we still choose to seize you know where none of us here are Ludwig Mises fleeing the seize a few days ahead you know we still have tremendous resources at our disposal in a digital age we can communicate globally we can create communities about spoken anti PC voices we can still read and share the anti state the great anti state books and articles of our time we can still read real history we can still read the great unpeel it ireri classics and share them with our kids we can still homeschool those kids and we can still for the moment hold events like this one today so just as the state is is really largely an illusion it's based on maintaining maintaining its legitimacy in the eyes of the public we should ask ourselves you know if the PC wall is really closed in as tight as we think or is it us have we failed to grab all the room all the space that's still available to us and one way I might suggest grabbing that space is to use humor and ridicule against PC PC is absurd when you really get down to it it's absurd and most people sense this most people of goodwill do sense this still and so it's it as I mentioned with with John Waters its practitioners suffer from this comical lack of self-awareness and irony so use every tool at your disposal to expose PC in your personal relationships online your family your friends we should really steadfastly refuse to bow to it in our personal lives fight it wherever and whenever and however you can spread awareness of how we're being manipulated because that's really a first step now I'm not saying that this is necessarily easy you know bucking PC absolutely can hurt you the possible loss of one's job reputation friends even family is is serious but I don't think defeatism is called for and I think it makes us unworthy of our ancestors if we succumb to it now also realize that change can actually come very quickly we tend to think that these things of all were such a long period of time but never forget the society can change very rapidly in the wake of certain precipitating events and you know we certainly hope no great calamity befalls the u.s. economic disaster our currency collapse energy crisis corruption and entitlement payments civil unrest anything like that but we can't discount the possibility of these things happen happening and if they do I would suggest that PC is one of the modern adornments that would be among the first things to go okay only rich modern societies can afford this luxury of a mindset that doesn't comport with reality so that mindset might disintegrate very rapidly if conditions which is to say wealth phrase in the West I think men and women might start to realize that they need each other and complement each other if the welfare state breaks down hours and hours spent on mindless social media might give way to actually rebuilding those family and social connections that that matter very much when the chips are down and more productive pursuits like arts and crafts and languages and electronics and gardening and cooking and repair and program these things in hard times might replace diversions like tinder and Instagram and I think more traditional family structures multi-generational living etc might suddenly seem less oppressive in the face of great economic uncertainty and you know schools and universities might rediscover the value of teaching practical skills instead of whitewashed history and victimhood grievant studies one sexual preferences might no longer loom is large in the scheme of things and in in a poorer world and the rule of law might actually become once again something to be followed rather than just an abstraction that can be discarded at whim to further a social justice movement in the dye supposed privilege so in other words hard times just might make us rediscover the true meaning of Justice which is the granting of the earned hard time clients rediscover ourselves the spirited Americans described by AE Jeffcoat in his great book stubborn hard boiled optimists with a deep and abiding pioneer spirit rather than the soft whiny narcissists we become in this PC world of feelings and constant Brij so play the long game it might not be popular to say so but if we hang in there and do everything we can I'm convinced that the tide may just turn in our direction but we don't have a lot of time to spare ladies gentlemen if you think that the day is not coming soon when you might wake up on websites like Mises org new Rockwell comm are simply not available any longer or the day might come when those websites are not findable using search engines if you think that day is far off I suggest you think again you know the head Facebook creep Zuckerberg was just at a UN conference and he was overheard on a mic talking to Angela Merkel giving her every assurance that Facebook was working on it and what he meant by that was they were helping to tamp down criticisms by German Facebook users of what the German government was doing in response to this latest refugee crisis and Facebook actually came out with a statement a public press release Edward Bernays wasn't there to help so we are committed to working closely with the German government to find the best solution to this important issue so we all know what that might be it's chilling isn't it and I'm convinced that it's coming soon to a server near you unless we all get busy so let's get busy and thank you so much for your attention that's work you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 29,947

Rating: 4.9240265 out of 5

Keywords: PC, Politically Correct, Speech, Freedom Of Speech (Quotation Subject), Censorship (Quotation Subject), Etiquette (Quotation Subject), Politics, Ludwig Von Mises Institute (Organization), Jeff Deist

Id: sk1zkOynW8A

Length: 32min 23sec (1943 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/avaslash]

Jesus, this guy wants to pick a fight just because. Yeah the people in government are far more conscious of racism, sexism, and homophobia and that is a HUGE victory for the "rebels" of yesterday. And now this guy is saying that the rebels of today should fight that progress and regress us to a time when life was SHIT in the USA for anyone who wasn't caucasian? Because thats what hes doing. Yes the current PC culture has gone too far and is getting out of hand because it is encroaching on freedom of speech. So fight FOR freedom of speech, not against liberalism.

[u/eviltrollwizard]

"PC" bashing has become a circlejerk. I get it, people can go overboard not wanting to insult all the mass amounts of subcultures and what not out there but The majority of the problem is that people are used to insulting people without even knowing they are doing it. So it becomes uncomfortable to them to have to suddenly think about every single thing they say.

The main difference is that you shouldn't get upset when someone says something that another may take offence unless they are saying it as a way to actually repress someone.

I didn't think my grandmother was wildly out of line when she talked about the nice "chinaman" she met on vacation. You could clearly see that it was a matter of language and not her trying to insult or repress the person she was speaking about.

When I was growing up people in school (racists) called us "Kiayai". Which is a meaningless term but something from an old song. They used the term as a way to insult us to our faces. That shit doesn't fly.

If you can't tell the difference between these two instances that you are the problem.

[u/TehFrozenYogurt]

I bet Reddit's going to upvote this without even watching the video.