Emotional Correctness
Another TED Talk worth listening to...only six minutes...I recommend you check it out.

"Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us.  That is emotional correctness."
 
'Political persuasion does not begin with ideas and facts or data.  It begins with being emotionally correct.  We cannot get anyone to agree with us if we can't get them to listen.'  Instead of spending time on the treadmill talking past each other, we need to learn to 'talk through our disagreements,' by putting ourselves in our opponent's shoes to see if we might be able to (as Getting to Yes puts it) invent (new) options for mutual gain.

A recent Allan Johnson blog also takes on the notion of political correctness, from a different perspective.  He argues that the term itself, like other terms once used to challenge power and privilege, has been hijacked for political purposes, reframing a once ‘powerful tool in the struggle over social justice’ so that is appears as merely another ‘petty imposition on freedom of speech.’

“The goal of such attacks was to separate behavior and speech from their political consequences, so that objections to everyday acts that enforce privilege and oppression would be seen as nothing more than a trivial protest over etiquette and hurt feelings.

…The hijacking of political correctness has helped remove the reality of privilege and oppression from public conversation and replaced it with a running battle of competing complaints about offensive acts on the one hand and the policing of personal behavior on the other.

And now ‘feminism.’ Not to mention ‘socialism’ or any other alternative to unbridled capitalism. And ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are not far behind as corporations and the wealthy show the rest of us what raw power can do.

What is at stake in this struggle is not only words, but the ideas we live by. And to see how it matters, this selective destruction of words and the ideas they name, we need only look at where we’ve come and where we are going. This is how it is done.”

Thanks to my good friend Kathy for connecting me with both of these texts!