The trending hashtag #OffendEveryoneIn4Words is a sinister campaign of consensus masquerading as a liberation of dissent. It is a perfect example of how social media culture entrenches consensus, while posing as a vehicle for counter-culture.

The purpose of being offensive, is exactly not to offend everyone. Things are only offensive because they appeal to some and not to others. To set out to offend everyone, is to set out to say nothing at all of substance.

Of course that is exactly what these Twitter hashtags are all about. It’s a way of making Twitter look like it is libertarian, while in fact behaving in the most PC way possible.

No one has a problem with decency, unless they are pathological. Political correctness is dangerous because it seeks to make all speech innocuous. The problem arises when we realise that there is no such thing as a substantive, valuable sentence, that will never offend someone.

Defenders of political correctness make the arrogant assumption that their views and opinions are the ones that are devoid of offence, that are the paragons of decency and goodness. However, a sentence that can never, under any circumstance, offend someone, is a meaningless one.

This is especially true in the public forum, where a dialogue of interpretations is what underlies the stability of a civilised constitution.

The subtext of this apparently jovial hashtag campaign, is that offensive speech is something fixed, something identifiable and reducible to a set of core words and views.

While pretending to make a mockery of PC culture, the hashtag is actually entrenching the underlying assumptions of political correctness – that we can police language for damaging speech by identifying singular words and ideas, just like we would identify repeat offenders in a criminal case.

The truth about offensive speech is that it changes, like all language changes. Words that are deemed damaging in one generation are innocuous in a later one, and words that were acceptable parlance in the past, are viewed as dangerous today.

Similarly, words that some people find offensive, are actually brilliantly expressive for another group. Much of what passes for identity politics is not just objectionable to me, it’s offensive. But for a vast majority of people it’s a perfect description of their own painful struggle.

I find the language of identity politics offensive because it cuts to the core of what I believe makes human life worth living – that morality is based on common humanity, not identity. Identity is a hugely significant part of what it means to be human, but the paradox is that what makes identity important is how much common humanity is at the foundation of all difference in identity.

This beautiful fact – that we are hugely diverse but fundamentally the same – gets glossed over in the persistent rhetoric of identity politics. This is offensive because I actually see it as a distortion of the full complexity and genius of human nature, and as a result, it is a distortion of the ethical subtlety of what it means to be one’s brother’s keeper.

So when I hear words like ‘privilege’ or ‘white genocide’ or ‘cultural appropriation’, I don’t just roll my eyes in some reactionary distasteful way. I feel a jolt in my gut, the same kind of jolt I would feel if I heard a racial slur, or witnessed someone being blatantly sexist on the street.

The things that offend me, are exactly the views that people think are free from being offensive. In fact, there really is nothing more offensive to the human imagination than the proposition that we can create language that never does any damage, that never annoys, hurts or disgruntles anyone.

The people that seek to establish this kind of policing of common utterance, are the same people that will lecture everyone else about ‘diversity’. Yet, what exactly is diverse about the idea of offending no one?

This complacent little hashtag is simply a reverse of the conceited logic of political correctness and identity politics. It’s sort of like a parental amnesty, with Twitter saying, ‘okay children, you want to be offensive, then today you get to say it all, and you can get it all off your chest.’ As if what counts as offensive was reducible to an agreed list of unsayable things.

What’s more, it is hashtags like this, paying only lip service to the idea of dissent, that are the real force of consensus. The very idea that it is possible to ‘offend everyone’ assumes that we all agree about what is offensive.

This is actually a corrosive and deeply worrying hashtag campaign, acting as a propaganda effort for the Twitter guardians.

It also assumes that being offensive is some kind of glib, contrarian outburst, rather than a necessary and welcome part of human dialogue.

As frustrating as this silly campaign is, it reveals the stupidity of political correctness in a very clear way. It is a gross misunderstanding of language and public life, and shows that the consensus on correctitude is grounded in a smug, convenient ignorance that celebrates a simplistic view of human nature, and an impoverished understanding of language.