Book description
"Political correctness" involves much more than a restriction
of speech. It represents a broad cultural transformation, a shift in the
way people understand things and organize their lives; a change in the
way meaning is made. The problem addressed in this book is that, for
reasons the author explores, some ways of making "meaning"
support the creation and maintenance of organization, while others do
not. Organizations are cultural products and rely upon psychological
roots that go very deep. The basic premise of this book is that
organizations are made up of the rules, common understandings, and
obligations that "the father" represents, and which are given
meaning in the oedipal dynamic. In anti-oedipal psychology, however,
they are seen as locuses of deprivation and structures of oppression.
Anti-oedipal meaning, then, is geared toward the destruction of
organization. This is done in the name of a higher morality, which
demands compensatory love for those who have been deprived of love in
the past by the father and his organizations, who should be hated and
destroyed. The author looks at how anti-oedipal dynamics have played out
in various organizational failures to which political correctness has
led. These include the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times, the
destruction of employee morale at the Ford Motor Company and the
Cincinnati Police Department, the self-destruction of Antioch College,
and the forcing out of Larry Summers at Harvard University. He concludes
with some reflections on the shift from oedipal to anti-oedipal meaning
that is represented by Princess Diana supplanting Queen Elizabeth as the
national symbol of the United Kingdom.
