Mike D’Virgilio argues that works of fiction can show us how the logical conclusions of political correctness and other distorted ideas of the left are inimical to liberty and a well ordered society.

The human imagination is a powerful thing. When the Bible says that man is made in the image of God, the implications for human nature are profound. The beauty, complexity, expanse, and literally breathtaking nature of his creation are analogous to a human being’s ability to create works that can inspire, inform, and take breath away as well. Thus people are more apt to be moved by a story than an argument, by their emotions than their intellect. (Note that the Bible is made up mostly of stories).

The right has had this backward for the past fifty or sixty years, and most of them still have it backward. But there is hope.

There are many examples of right-minded individuals who understand the power of the imagination to move people, and who are working to expose the tyranny of the left’s vision of the world. Those on the right who are culturally aware have a duty to identify and promote the work of such visionary and creative people.

One of those is Gary Wolf, a New Mexico author who has self-published several books of what he calls hallucinatory reality. We learn from his website that he has “authored a series of futuristic novels that have incorporated themes from the contemporary meltdown: political correctness, multiculturalism, the victim industry, declining standards, affirmative action, feminism, post-modernism, scientific hoaxes on a global scale, and the rest of the intellectual decadence that is reducing the greatest civilization of all time to a state of mental cacophony.”

As Wolf puts it, he is basically “updating Orwell for the era of political correctness.” It should be noted that political correctness isn’t just PC. Those letters sound so harmless, and in effect make light of a very dangerous mindset that is absolutely inimical to liberty. What Mr. Wolf does is use fiction to take this mindset to its logical and ultimately destructive conclusion.

We won’t see movies of his books in Hollywood any time soon, but I’m naïve enough to believe one day it will be common to see in our entertainment industry the shibboleths of socialism mocked with the same alacrity currently and almost exclusively inflicted on true liberalism.

The first book I read by Mr. Wolf is the entertaining Workshop of the Second Self. It won’t be the last. The story is set in any U.S. city 2030, and the protagonist, Clifton Pembroke, is a young professional with a promising career in the field of “disability advocacy.”

Sadly, what he does for a living doesn’t appear particularly hallucinatory if you are at all familiar with present-day Western culture. Pembroke helps people raise their disability profile—a single index that encompasses every variety of injustice that may befall a person.

Oh, but what to do about all that crushing injustice? There are an array of benefits that come from embracing your inner grievance, including subsidies and preferential treatment. But for some people that just isn’t enough. Their very birth was an injustice, a fundamental travesty that can only be remedied by becoming a different person.

They even know who that other person is, and they intend to receive their just compensation—by obtaining the legal right to seize the other’s identity.

Through well-developed characters, believable dialogue, and good descriptive writing Wolf gives us a sense of what a world would be like with all the “good” intentions of socialism fully realized and taken to their logical conclusion. Pembroke slowly realizes that there is nothing good about a society where an individual’s false perception of injustice becomes an absolute right to force remediation from fellow citizens who have done the person no harm at all.

Through works that nobody but a small remnant reads anymore, Pembroke is exposed to ideas that liberate him from the illusions perpetrated by the socialist state. But as the story unfolds, we see that it takes no small amount of courage to stand against the prevailing “wisdom” of the day.

That is no less true in the fictional world of 2030 than it is in our day. Just ask Carrie Prejean. Or ask yourself.

Mike is the founder and Executive Director of The Culture Project.