Drunkard's Progress and Mr Orwell

The Blemont Club looks at the immoral moralisers:

The hard part of living under the new morality is understanding what the rules actually are. Is it uncool to steal classified documents which may result in the death of hundreds of Afghans who’ve cooperated with NATO? Apparently not. Is it OK for Julian Assange to use his status as a “fugitive” to become a “babe magnet”? Why of course. Who ever said that being a fugitive meant not telling people who you were? You can be a fugitive only for public purposes and not to actually conceal your whereabouts. But it is apparently not ok not to use a condom in Sweden. This point of punctilo is apparently inviolable, and if it is not clear why to all of us, it is nevertheless evident to members of the relevant set.

Nothing so demonstrates plebeianism as the inability not to even know the rules. The real hallmark of membership in the new aristocracy is knowing all the etiquette without even having to ask — easy enough because they make the rules. What’s right is what Keith Olbermann and Lady Gaga say. Why? Well if you have to ask then  you must be immoral.  The new morality is above all the art of speaking in code and part of the power of political correctness springs precisely from its vagueness. The art of correct behavior today consists largely in sensing the prevailing fashion. It is a survival skill the Old Bolsheviks knew well. The important thing was to always to have opinions, but never to have opinions that were out of date.

None of this surprises me in the least.  Political Correctness was never about avoiding offence or increasing freedoms.  It was and is about nothing more or less than conformity and control.  We live in a world of busybodies and would-be totalitarians who dream of controlling our every utterance, thought, and feeling in the name of "tolerance".  We have inverted the concept of morality so that now the immoral (or at least the faddish) preach to the moral–or at least, those aspiring to some standard of morality beyond the fashions of the moment.  It is a world where human rights has ceased to be about protecting the individual from the state and is now about encouraging the state to curtail individual liberty.

What I want to make clear is not what is preached as the new morality is the necessarily the problem, but its basis is the problem. This that or the other cause is irrelevant in the PC world.  They are merely troops to be employed or disposed of  as needed by those with power in the fight for more power.  This is fast becoming a world of false aristocracy where proxy minorities dictate to the majority and public morality is not based upon adherence to a recognised standard, but through the exercise of power. It is capricious and even mischievous. This is very unfortunate, because it makes even the winners vulnerable as fashion changes.  Like the ways things are at this moment?  Don't get too comfortable.  In a world that demands conformity rather than consensus and where who hold the power makes the rules rather than abides by them, then be prepared to get ground under as the wheel turns tomorrow and the public morals change again.

The truly odd thing here is not the wild contradictions, hypocrisy, inversion, nor the Mrs Grnudyish scolding, but how Orwellian the whole mess is.  Nobody knows the rules unless they are already part of the Inner Party.  That's the definition of membership–that and the tendency of ending up on the outside at the drop of a stiletto.  It's a situation where nothing is forbidden except that which is and you won't know what is forbidden until you've been arrested for doing it.

Talleyrand would feel most at home today.