In my view, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS is a type of etiquette. An etiquette is a set of rules for navigating social situations without causing offense. It also provides a kind of informal rule of law that protects us. I can't claim you've offended me if you've followed the rules.

Etiquettes have their downsides. Elaborate social rules can feel tedious and unnecessary. They can cause social interaction to feel fake. People associate these disadvantages with political correctness but they are downsides of etiquettes in general.

The alternative to etiquette is high social intelligence and social capital. You need to build trust with the people you're interacting with so they give you the benefit of the doubt and you need to have high empathy for how your actions affect those people.

Comedians are brilliant at violating social rules while at the same time keeping the trust and empathy of the audience. Most people don't have this level of talent. Getting back to political correctness. The reason political correctness exists is it's addressing a real problem.

I suspect what's going on is this. Broadly speaking, minority groups often have a lot of tricks for building trust with the dominant group as a matter of survival. They also have high empathy for the dominant group and are skilled at reading their reactions.

Minority groups also have an incentive to hide when they're offended. This gives the majority group (usually white and often male here in America) a false sense of social competence.

As minority groups have gained power, this social incompetence is becoming a bigger issue. This is where political correctness comes in. It compensates for this social incompetence in multi-group situations. It's like training wheels on a bike.

I think people often misunderstand political correctness in two ways. First, they often don't understand that it's solving a real problem so when possible they ignore it. This is like pulling training wheels off your bike before you're ready. You're going to fall over!

Second, they get frustrated when they see people violating political correctness without getting into trouble. They don't get that there's a skill level involved. If you know your audience and you've built up enough trust, you can basically say whatever you want.

You don't need training wheels once you've learned how to ride the bike! For those folks that want to see an end to political correctness, you have to figure out how to build high trust and social empathy in the population so that political correctness is no longer needed.

This means we need more diverse spaces where people are interacting and learning about other cultures. Often people who oppose political correctness are opposed to organized efforts to create cultural diversity but if they want less political correctness, they shouldn't be.

Anyways folks. That's my take on political correctness. I will be interested to hear your responses.

Addendum: Two ideas that didn't fit into the flow of the essay are the following: 1. Being politically correct on Twitter is artificially difficult compared to real life because it's hard to build trust and empathize with every group on the internet. 2. People who get offended...

...on behalf of others can be a real headache especially if they don't understand the group they're offended on behalf of. You can have a situation where the actual group likes what you said but people outside the group are demanding your head!