Tribalism and Addiction, the Enabling Progressive, and Politically Correct Dominion:

[I dedicate this, too, to Hazmat, of the Pudding Folk, and David, of the Squishy Puffs, as well as anybody else who represents the Softness of the Times:]

 

Perhaps you’ve known someone who was an addict. If you have, you know that it’s an awkward place to be the friend of one, and it presents you with a difficult dilemma.

 

On the one hand, you can intervene, you can insist “sobriety is better”, as an absolute, for you would never wish for anyone to live with all the problems which accompany addiction, in addition to the problem of addiction in itself. If someone does not want to change, you *make* that person want to change, for you are well aware that he is not the only soul at stake, and, even if he had the right to throw his life away, he would *not* have the right to harm the lives of others who inevitably suffer on behalf of his affliction.

 

Yet temptation tantalizes all. The righteous path is not without alternatives, and the alternative to intervention is enabling. If you are sober, there are pleasures which you never may enjoy, for they all come at the expense of horrid pains. Yet, if you empathize with someone who enjoys those pleasures, then you can enjoy them secondhand, and you won’t have to be around when pain does come. You’d live vicariously through this person, all the while reminded that you are superior in health, yet you would never think to demonstrate or even to acknowledge this superiority. Not only would you make the other feel inferior and alien to you by doing so, but you would also feel inferior to your own image, for acknowledging that it is better to be healthy would expose all of your own afflictions, by no means as great as those of your addicted friend, yet great enough that you no longer can subsist in the illusion that you’re better off while seeming kind.

 

Unfortunately, this is not a problem which applies exclusively to personal relations and afflictions. Rather, it’s this form of subtle, self-deceiving exploitation which is operating on a massive scale in modern politics, especially regarding primitive and civilized societies.

 

Let us rip off a couple bandages:

 

1. Liberal “political correctness” is a Western concept.

 

There are no societies which are “politically correct” who are not Westernized. The tribal way of life is “ethnocentric” and conservative to the extreme, devoid of private rights and freedoms, bound in rigid roles and inequalities, unscientific, technologically regressive, superstitious, and assured of their own righteousness.

 

This is not just a myth invented by the European, (who is not so clever of a storyteller any longer) for it was the European who, acknowledging these tendencies within his own society, became “politically correct” so as to undermine those very tendencies, the very sorts of tendencies which led to Fascism and genocide in European culture. It’s a fact, therefore – an undisputed fact – that when we are “politically correct” we are implying a superiority, not only to these tendencies, but to all people(s) who embody them.

 

Nor is it just a myth that these same tendencies exist. Political correctness has enabled us to illustrate and satirize those tendencies at home, exposing all of the barbarity of tribal thought when it expresses itself in the White Man.

 

Nor is this exclusive *to* the White Man, though. Korea and Japan, for instance, also are politically correct, though they’re not European, and they’re held to that same standard of political correctness, though some Polynesian villages are not. Yet what is indicated by this is not that Korea and Japan are merely “Westernized”; it is that they are *civilized*, and that is what we can’t – but must – admit.

 

Allegedly Zizek.

2.  Being civilized is real, and it is good, and it is better than to be barbaric.

 

Even if it’s relative, civility remains an absolute distinction. Ancient Athens may have been more civilized than many of their neighbours, and, while this is relative, in that the city-state was *not* as civilized as we are, nonetheless it’s absolutely true that they were more advanced, as we are more advanced than they were.

 

Progress is an absolute, and it is good, as many of one’s notions of the good derive from progress. Progress is the only force which can enable genuine discussion and debate, allowing for new values and new rubrics by which life can be improved and the improvement weighed. What we call “relative” is only possible because it’s founded on the absolute of social progress. Moral obligation is a universal; the particulars are mere expressions of this universal.

 

Nor does relativity imply equality. Equality is just the aspiration of the universal; we must treat all men “as equals” only insofar as we acknowledge that they’re bound by those same standards as are binding on us all. Nor is it possible for someone to “impose one’s righteousness” on someone else, for righteousness is everybody's proper plight.

 

Nor is a bias an excuse. We only can progress by moving past the biases inherent in the cultures we’ve inherited. Philosophers and scientists are not the products of their cultures, but the innovators who transformed and thus improved those cultures. Progress thus implies superiority, a clarity that’s relatively free from bias and, as such, is under no compulsion to enable such a bias in another, for a bias is no more than a particular which fails to serve the universal. 

Liberal political correctness is another form of trying to progress by challenging those biases. Yet it is ineffective in that, while it holds us to that standard, it does *not* hold others to that standard. Tribal man appears entitled to his biases, and we are “in no place to judge him”, just so long as we are not the tribal man. Yet all this serves to illustrate is that we feel superior to tribal man, for, were the roles reversed, then tribal man most certainly would judge of us.

 

While judging tribal man would illustrate the flaws in our culture, if we can pretend that he is equal, while exempting him from equal standards, we continue to appear superior. By claiming that we’re no more civilized than anybody else, we use civilization to the detriment of those who have yet to progress to our level. Being civilized is good, but, if we can pretend this state of being doesn’t matter or exist, we can ignore the obvious: that we’ve had too much of a good thing. We’re *too* civilized, and, if we do not think that we are civilized, it is because political correctness is a false humility which is a product of this excess. All of this conceals a crucial defect which the tribal man does not endure:

 

3. Tribal Culture has conviction, while politically correct society does not.

 

The addict may experience the lows the sober person does not have to suffer, yet the highs are likewise objects of great envy. The enabler finds a means by which to share the joys but not the sorrows of the addict. Similarly, we have found a means by which to take advantage of the tribal man’s affliction while absolving ourselves of any “White Man’s Burden” to alleviate his plight. Yet, just as the enabler uses the addiction of her friends to run from her own problems, so the civilized progressive uses his political correctness to avoid the problems of his own civilization.

 

We’ve established that “the tribal way of life is ‘ethnocentric’ and conservative to the extreme, devoid of private rights and freedoms, bound in rigid roles and inequalities, unscientific, technologically regressive, superstitious, and assured of their own righteousness.” Yet none of this itself is absolutely evil, as it only seems that way according to political correctness.

 

It is the progressive liberal who takes offence to accusations of this kind, and it is only for that reason that progressives grow indignant when the tribal man is thus accused. This indignation is, however, a self-serving sensibility, since it is the progressive who, condemning all these tendencies in members of his own society, insisting that such condemnation represents a moral universal, thus implies a secret condemnation of the selfsame tendencies in other cultures.

 

Neither will I claim, however, that this condemnation has no merit. If we waged a war to make political correctness absolute, it would be to the betterment of all, including us, for it would demonstrate that we no longer lack that which the tribal people have: they are “assured of their own righteousness”.

 

Just as political correctness is a Western concept, in itself the product of an excess in civilization, so too nihilism and despair are modern ailments which progress as we do. Tribal man has many gods, while Western man has none. The tribal culture acts with absolute conviction, even when it’s wrong, and in the face of overwhelming evidence. We have the overwhelming evidence, but we won’t act. As such, we fail on every front: we can’t enforce the values of a liberal society on everyone, for then we’d violate them; nor can we enjoy the vigour and vitality of our tribal roots and primal superstitions.

  

At this point, we’re facing the dilemma which I illustrated at the start. The most responsible and ethical, progressive course of action is as clear now as it was to Rudyard Kipling: we must intervene, not only for the good of tribal man, but for the good of all humanity.

 

Temptation tantalizes all, however. How much easier it is to let the tribal man remain a tribal man, protected, by a massive modern military, from those wars and those diseases which would force him to embrace a higher form of life, as our scientists and great philosophers have given us.

 

The Empire that came before us claimed to want to civilize the tribal man for his own good, yet used him for its own. We have perpetuated exploitation of this kind, but we no longer have the decency to claim it’s for the Greater Good.

 

The more we do this, the less we believe in Good of any kind. We fetishize the primitive, appropriate his forms and market them, then wear a tiki mask of self-recrimination. We are more invested in political correctness than in salvaging the work of our elders. This, in turn, then aggravates demand for more appropriation.

 

Codependency is cyclical. The addict does not rise from his addiction, since his betters keep him down. That’s well and good if he attempts to rise by wrongful means, as was the case for Chuck and Jimmy, but it’s toxic – literally – when the addict has the right intent but his superior is drunk with power, as with Walt and Jesse. As a consequence, the better does not have to work at treating his own ailments, but he lives at the expense of his inferior, pretending they are equal partners, flattering the lesser’s ego for the sake of his own profit. Yet, so long as the superior does not attend to his own ailments, he has greater need to use the lesser. So long as the Master does not learn, as Hegel pointed out, he needs the Slave, and so the Master-Slave relationship remains a problem.

 

Let’s not flatter ourselves. Political correctness is imperial dominion, but by another name, a name it’s chosen for itself, a name it’s made its project to enforce. It takes advantage of those cultures it pretends to value while exempting them from all the benefits of progress. By so doing, it ensures that our culture crumbles.

 

Why don't YOU then stop drunk driving? Do go on; we'll wait here.

The result is that we’re caught within a cycle. We are well aware of all the evils of the World, but we feel powerless in pushing any form of Good. It’s not that we’re afraid of being proven wrong; it’s just that recognizing that we’re right implies a Burden.

 

Our elders may have caused a lot of pain in the pursuit of this same Burden. Yet the lack of reverence we feel for them is little more than one of their enduring injuries. If truly we can reconcile with tribal culture, let us honour our deities, as tribal man would.

 

**[({R.G.)}]**

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