 If Apple got in trouble for a racist faux pas during a press release, would it be a case of Mac vs. PC? With holiday shopping on everyone's brains, it's time for my annual reminder that modern tabletop games are the perfect gift idea for almost anyone on your list who doesn't hate fun. Cards Against Humanity is one such popular party game, which is branded as sort of a more risque version of apples to apples. It's sort of a slot machine for creating the most tactless, insensitive, discriminatory jokes imaginable, and then removing the discomfort usually associated with making those jokes by placing the blame squarely on the nature of the game itself. I mean, it's not like I would ever make a joke about racist stereotypes or rape, but I was dealt these cards, see? Now to be fair, offensive humor can be a fantastic force for raising awareness of real social issues. It can be poignant and thoughtful and galvanize us to change things for the better. But it can also be used as an anesthetic to deaden that awareness, to comfort us that, for example, racism is just a fact of life and we shouldn't feel too bad about that. After all, we're laughing, right? Talking about discriminatory or deliberately offensive speech, like that in CAH, is often framed as a discussion of political correctness, or PC. A term which implies that the whole point of any such discourse is ultimately political, to establish the most bland, generic, inoffensive face possible. Many have begun to campaign against it, saying that direct advocacy for politically correct speech has become nothing more than offense for its own sake. And unfortunately, there are some behaviors that PC advocates are historically prone to that make it difficult to dismiss that criticism as totally baseless. There's a definite trend among those advocates of picking fights, not just with neo-Nazis or racist politicians, but with each other. There are two theories in social psychology which make this supposed internal conflict make a little bit more sense. The first is social dominance theory. According to SDT, there are certain groups which our culture has marked as being okay to oppress, certain demographics which we feel more comfortable talking down to or bossing around, and others which we feel less comfortable doing the same to. That social bias doesn't just vanish because somebody decides that discrimination is bad. That gut feeling dictated by our culture of who can be successfully bullied is just as present in social justice warriors as it is in CEOs or presidential candidates. And unfortunately, those people who most benefit from egalitarian thinking, who have experienced systemic discrimination firsthand, tend to be on the lower end of that hierarchy. And guess which side of the PC debate they generally fall on? For that reason, according to SDT, PC advocates are prone to vehemently correcting each other, more so than they are individuals who belong to more traditionally dominant demographics. That's not great. Second, there's construal level theory. According to CLT, the psychological distance between someone and whatever it is that they're thinking about determines how abstractly or concretely they think about it. So in CLT, if I live in a comfortable suburb and I'm thinking about bare grills roughing it in the wilderness, I'll think about more abstract things, like rugged individualism and connectedness to nature, whereas if I'm actually camping, I'll be thinking about more concrete things like how there's no good firewood and, oh God, what if there are ticks in my boots? And it might be the case that for people who are interested in egalitarianism, the minds of neo-Nazis and overt races are so far removed from what they're used to that they can only be thought of as abstractions, maybe as symptoms of some underlying social disease. Whereas fellow social justice warriors are close enough that every single concrete detail of their behavior is ripe for criticism. If you would do everything that I would do except for one tiny thing, it's very easy for me to get on your case to fix that one thing and overlook all of the stuff that we agree on. Whatever the psychological justification, the internal conflict among advocates for politically correct speech makes it easy for their opponents to simply dismiss them as noise for its own sake. After all, if you were on the outside looking at a group of people who regularly tear into each other for relatively innocuous, linguistic, or behavioral oversights, why would you want to be part of that? Well, the thing is, the justification for politically correct thinking doesn't really have anything to do with politics or offense. It's more about empathy. First, if you are of the opinion that words can't hurt people or that if somebody's offended then they're somehow at fault, a quick refresher. Language is essentially mind control. I am making you think things right now by making these noises. We might really like the idea of a world where we don't have to pay attention to what we're saying, but unfortunately, while sticks and stones might break someone's bones, words go directly into their brains and can do serious damage while they're there. And brains, inarguably, respond to language differently. A lot of the motivation behind PC activism is to make sure that people whose experiences have left their brains especially vulnerable to the harm that words can do can still lead relatively normal lives, despite that danger. It's kind of like making people drive slower in school zones or provide handicap access to buildings. It's recognizing that while some kids are savvy about crossing the street and some adults are capable of using stairs, there are a significant number of both who might require some sort of societal assistance, and we shouldn't make them beg for it. Similarly, somebody who's living with sexual assault or PTSD might be totally okay hearing offensive jokes made at their expense or watching traumatic media, or maybe not. Now, there's definitely a spectrum to this principle. On the one hand, we want those individuals who are likely to be unnecessarily hurt by certain speech to be protected from that pain. But we don't want to unnecessarily curtail freedom of speech in the process, and we certainly don't want to lash out and cause more harm than we prevent. That's really what the ideology that drives PC activism is about. It's hard to remember that words that are no big deal for us might be devastatingly painful or oppressive for someone else, and to be mindful of that when we choose them so that we don't hurt or subjugate anyone unnecessarily. I think aspiring to that sort of mindfulness is a noble goal, but it does make it questionable whether Cards Against Humanity is the game that you should get for someone. If you'd like some recommendations for some other, less offensive games to give this holiday season, check out the list in the video description. Yes, I own all of these, and no, I won't be offended if you say I have a problem. I'm well aware. What do you think of SDT and CLT as potential explanations for the friction that we see in these communities? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.