A world ruled by political correctness

So, imagine a dystopian world ruled by political correctness.

All works of fiction we currently have are outlawed for a myriad of reasons, ranging from Twilight being outlawed for "it's demeaning portrayal of members of Native American racial group and celebration of pedophilia" to Lord of the Rings being outlawed for "it's celebration of violence and male masculinity, it's racist undertones, it's use of religious imagery to offend atheists" to How the Grinch Stole Christmas being outlawed for "celebration of animal abuse." The Bible is also outlawed, because of course it is!

Yeah, in this world all sanctioned works of fiction have characters which are basically clones of each other, Mary Sue's run rampant, nothing is used that might offend people of any group, religions are now state controlled, private groups of any kind are now state controlled, official handbooks on all the different cultures of the world are mandatory, but these handbooks are also edited so that they do not offend anyone!

This results in political incorrectness becoming an underground movement. Comic cons are part of underground movement, and feature readings of books and showing of movies that are illegal. There are underground religious congregations, underground bashing of religions, underground gay pride parades, I could go on.

What could we see happen in such a world?

Sounds like Fahrenheit 451, also with echoes of Equilibrium, and the idea of 'official' literature, written by the state, is very Nineteen Eighty-Four.

edited 28th Oct '16 7:25:19 AM by Ulysses21

That could fall into Author Tract territory very easily. It could work, but you'd have to be careful that you don't confuse Political Correctness Gone Mad with genuine desire to be culturally sensitive.

I think a good way to go would be emphasizing the disproportionate response to the material in question. It's one thing to say "this is kinda tasteless" and another thing to jump to intense censorship. Just...don't make it seem like this dystopia is a natural progression of trying to be inclusive, because that would have really ugly implications.

Individuality Is Illegal, then, and everything is written as though a Simple English Wiki page.

Here's the problem, though: if you have a world where the input is strictly controlled, what's causing the output to deviate so radically? And why wasn't that part of the original equation for ruling with political correctness? The underground stuff is going to be tremendously boring by modern IRL standards, is what I'm saying, so what makes this a world we'd want to contemplate?

This is a world where the most radically underground comic is going to be The Family Circus, because the family is Catholic. Aside from being a tongue-in-cheek spoof, what would such a contemplation accomplish that Anthem hasn't already?

edited 28th Oct '16 11:28:18 PM by DeusDenuo

Tumblr as applied to national politics. (That joke's probably outdated by now, but I still make pokemon jokes about evolution. Come at me, bro.)

What could we see happen in such a world? To my mind, that's not the right question. Gonna go all philosophical on you.

Stories aren't based on the world they take place in. Worlds are just places where stories happen. Sometimes the stories are affected by the world.

The Lord of the Rings is not a Middle Earth story, it's a story that takes place in Middle Earth.

So to my mind, the question should not be "What could we see happen in such a world?" The question(s) should be "What do I want to see happen in such a world? How will this world affect the story I want to tell?"

Because the answer to the first question is "Anything and/or everything we care to place in it."

edited 1st Nov '16 9:48:38 PM by Eagal

Definitely emphasize how disproportionate the censorship is. Make it a world of Stepford Smilers where the most exciting story is a slowburn coffee shop AU where nothing bad happens. Because in this world, bad things happening to characters could be highly problematic because they would present obstacles.

Make it a highly futuristic world where freedom and creativity is dead, Brave New World vat grown babies. Because any world that allows parenthood could have them influence the characters.

Make it a society about to crack, because Dystopia Is Hard and one so intensely ruled by extreme PCness would logically not be able to hold up for so long because too many questions would arise.

And finally, make the distinction from PC nature that is helpful and one that is overly sensitive. Make it so that not all things that get hit with the PC hammer are things people would want to deal with.

edited 14th Nov '16 3:54:39 PM by EchoingSilence

Well, first of all, you're not going to be having conventions for anything if they have to go underground. You'll have small meetings in locations that are frequently moved, places with a lot of escape hatches like they had during Prohibition, and so on. These places will allow small groups of people, not thousands that tend to come to conventions for anything.

Also, political correctness is basically about respecting other cultures. About not going out of your way to offend people with the obvious, ugly slurs and disrespect to people as groups and individuals. You should, perhaps, understand what political correctness is beyond "not supposed to insult people". Your entire post shows you have no basic understand of what it is beyond not being allowed to say literally everything that comes to mind.

Also, if there are state controlled religions, why is the Bible outlawed? This is contradictory and not well thought out on your part. If you want state controlled religion, you need to think about what religion that is. In such situation it is highly unlikely any country would have more than one, since that allows for dissent.

"Lord of the Rings being outlawed for "it's celebration of violence and male masculinity, it's racist undertones, it's use of religious imagery to offend atheists" " - I don't know which version of Lord of the Rings this is, since even the movies have tender scenes between male characters, has Faramir giving his Not So Different speech over a dead Haradrim youth, and ... what religious imagery? I'd give you religious themes but if this dystopia is going to ban things for overly sensitive reasons, I think it would be better if those reasons were accurate. Otherwise you're in danger of going full Strawman Author Tract regarding political correctness.

Speaking of which, I'd reiterate what others above have said: be careful not to confuse overplay the Political Correctness Gone Mad element and potentially strawman all Political Correctness to be of the 'gone mad' variety. There's a difference between the former (outright censorship like students banning free speech from campuses in the form of speakers and papers they disagree with) and the latter (trying to respect and show sensitivity to people who are different to you by not doing/saying things that are known to tick them off).

You're also going to need consistent rules about what is censored and what is not. And censoring some things because they're insensitive to some group could be insensitive in itself because it's valued by another group. Are you going to eg censor things that aren't PC for a vegan/vegetarian AND censor things that aren't PC to an avid meat-eater? In a sense, you're going to have to pick sides to a certain degree. It might even be easier in terms of world-building (but oh-so-much-harder in trying to avoid the appearance of an Author Tract) to choose a RL political position and align all censorship to that position's views.

Rampant political correctness, and indeed most liberal extremism, tends to fall apart once taken to the logical conclusion. Take third wave feminism, for example. Pornography effectively tore the movement in half has some believed that pornography degraded and objectivized women while others believe that it empowered women. The was no way of proving this either way so the schism never got patched and remains to this day, crippling the movement.

There are other issues such as what do you call a man with dark skin? Black? Negro? African-American? Person of Color? The entire thing boils down to the movement self-destructing under unclear goals and endless bickering over unenforcible rules.

Because it's not supposed to be law, it's about making decisions about what you think is polite and what makes the world better or worse in small ways. In a free society, people are allowed to argue about things which are inherently nuanced and not set in stone. Feminism is not a monolith because the idea is not to force people to behave in a certain way, but because the idea is to find a way to allow all people to be treated equally within society, with an emphasis on removing baked-in inequities which disproportionally disadvantage certain groups (mainly women), and as you might imagine, while certain premises may be agreed upon, how different people want to go about it is going to be different.

While there are authoritarian socialist movements which seek "equality" through the purging of undesirable elements—see Mao's Combat Liberalism—the fact of the matter is that criticising something, even if you're being a total asshole about it, is not the same thing as desiring censorship and state brutality. To the contrary, the ideal of most left-wing movements is to allow all people to be free to pursue their dreams and live good and happy lives without being kicked around by some state-sanctioned idea of what people "should" be like. In practice, this is messier, and there are plenty of people who behave quite hypocritically while espousing what should be very positive ideas—Marxism, in particular, seems prone to a certain puritanical streak and lack of self-reflection, maybe because of the "scientific" element—but let's not pretend that these people are somehow even close to as dangerous to civil liberties as the alternative.

Infighting is characteristic of most groups with very strong convictions and little interest in compromises or strongmen, incidentally. Look at how many Protestant sects there are.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. The entire premise of the thread was that political correctness goes so far that it infringes on free speech, isn't it?