Toronto school board declares war on ‘chief’ and all sense

The word thoughtcrime is a neologism used by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The word refers to any beliefs or doubts that oppose the ruling political party.

In recent times, it has been common among those that oppose to President Donald Trump to invoke Orwell’s novel 1 2 3.

But for all of President Trump’s distortion of the truth, it seems to me far more accurate to describe political correctness this way.

Political correctness insists that language is used therapeutically rather than descriptively.  It forbids words that it (arbitrarily) deems offensive, in the belief that avoiding such words will boost the self-esteem of the groups so treated.  There is absolutely no evidence that any group is even helped by this strategy of language, least of all the groups concerned, precisely because this use of language denies them adult agency and a commonality of human nature.

Worst of all, however, it introduces the idea of wordcrime.  Wordcrime is rooted in the antilogocentric project of literary theorists like Jacques Derrida, who follows the nominalist tradition of thought in denying that words can refer to the essence of anything.

By following the politically correct dictates of wordcrime, the Western world has denied itself of the common world of things in which understanding, truth, and reconciliation can take place.

Fraudulent practices like banning the word ‘chief’ because it might offend some native group is the sort of absurd practice that makes a mockery of the Toronto District School Board.

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