Postmodernism: Confusing and Shaming Us to Death

For decades my vacation reading was books like Bucky Fuller’s Synergetics, Arthur Young’s The Reflexive Universe and Walter Russell’s The Universal One. Later, it was Bastiat’s The Law, Icke’s The Biggest Secret or Mises’ Human Action.

So here I am on vacation once again, in semi-retirement. What am I reading? Believe it or not, I have had a burning desire to make any sense at all out of what happened to Liberals worldwide… of which I used to count myself as one. So, I have been trying to get to the roots of Wokeism through reading their own thoughts, in their own words. 

I have been reading Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, as well as Hicks, Megill, Rorty, Fish, Lyotard and Lentriccia.

I found what I was looking for, and it’s even worse than I thought. Let’s dive in…

The premodern thinkers depended on myth, faith, and original sin for their framework of belief and behavior. 

“The loss of the transcendent dimension…leads to modern man’s homelessness in the world. This is the crisis.”

It is the loss of authoritative standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful to which reason has access, coupled with loss of the word of God in the Bible.

— Allan Megill

The modernists understandably found fault with the premoderns’ lack of grounding and developed disciplines of logic, science, rationality and the beginnings of a morality that was based on everyday experience and critical thinking.

The postmodernist academics, correctly observing that not everyone was doing well, possessions were unequal, and many people didn’t treat each other with kindness… went about deconstructing the intellectual and philosophical foundation of society.

The irony that pervaded Modernism tried to uncover a Man or Culture or Nature or History underlying the flux of surface experience. In postmodernism, this has given way to a new irony, one that holds these erstwhile realities to be textual fictions. We are seen as cut off from “things” and confined to a confrontation with “words” alone.

When Derrida avers that “there is nothing outside of the text,” he is working within an aestheticist perspective, even as he parodistically tries to reduce that perspective to absurdity.

“We are postmodern now. Leading intellectuals tell us that modernism has died, and that a revolutionary era is upon us — an arrow liberated from the oppressive structures of the past, but at the same time disquieted by its expectations for the future.”

— Stephen R. C. Hicks

Of course, they had no coherent vision of the future because the postmodernists, by their own declaration, cannot offer any coherent truths, principles or ethics. They were missing a universal morality and a reconciliation of physics with metaphysics.

“All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence.”

“It is meaningless to speak in the name of — or against — reason, truth, or knowledge.”

— Michel Foucault

“The difficulty faced by a philosopher who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicist — is to avoid hinting that this suggestion gets something right, that my sort of philosophy corresponds to the way things really are for this talk of correspondence brings back just the idea my sort of philosopher wants to get rid of, the idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature…

Reason is the ultimate language of madness — (with postmodernism) there is nothing to guide or constrain our thoughts and feelings so we can do or say whatever we feel like.”

— Richard Rorty

“Deconstruction,” confesses happily, “relieves me of the obligation to be right… And demands only that I be interesting.”

— Stanley Fish

This is the same pattern that happened in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s communist China. The elite socialists used collectivism to shame and confuse the public into giving up their individual sovereignty to the state… in the name of “the good of the whole.”

“Many postmodernists, though, are less often in the mood for aesthetic way than for political activism. Many deconstruct reason, truth, and reality because they believe that in the name of reason, truth, and reality Western civilization has wrought dominance, oppression, and destruction.”

— Stephen R. C. Hicks

“Postmodernism seeks not to find the foundation conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change. The task of postmodern professors is to help students spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time.”

— Frank Lentriccia

“Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, but as a radicalization, within the tradition of a certain Marxism.”

— Jacques Derrida

Metaphysically, postmodernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality. Postmodernism substitutes instead a social linguistic, constructionist account of reality.

Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge of that reality having substituted social-linguistic constructs for that reality, postmodernism emphasizes the subjectivity, conventionality and incommensurability of these constructions. Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist, holding that individuals identities are constructed largely by the social linguistic groups that they are a part of, those groups varying radically across the dimensions of sex, race, ethnicity, and wealth.

Postmodern accounts of human nature also consistently emphasize conflict between those groups; and given that de-emphasize or eliminated role of reason, postmodern accounts hold that those conflicts are resolved primarily by the use of force, whether masked or naked; the use of force in turn leads to relations of dominance and oppression. Finally, postmodern themes in ethics and politics are characterized by an identification with sympathy for the groups perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts, and a willingness to enter the fray on their behalf.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks

Karl Marx was a major champion of this deception and the Woke collectivists merged Marxist socialism/communism with postmodernism to better dupe the masses. Postmodernism is basically the worldview that says there is no fundamental morality, and there is no fundamental truth. This is what now comes out of virtually all major Western universities as well as Hollywood, mainstream media, the military and governments. When people think that their opinion is as valid as anyone else’s, whether or not they have any evidence or logic… When people think that any behavior is acceptable because morality is relative… then it is much easier for the totalitarians to bend the masses to their will, and shame them if they dissent. Most people want to be good, but in this era, most are completely confused as to what that means. It’s no wonder so many U.S. college graduates are lost, scared, confused, purposeless and medicated.

This was all predicted by Yuri Bezmenov, a refugee from the Soviet Union, and a former KGB agent become whistleblower. I have written of this numerous times, but it can’t be over emphasized. Here is a video from 1984 where Bezmenov describes the 4-stage scheme of communist takeover to G. Edward Griffin.

I described the background of Wokeism in a previous blog, but in this one, I want to actually shine a light on the illogical logic of the postmodern thought leaders.

In a nutshell, humanity is being bifurcated into those who believe in equal rights for all individuals, and those who believe the individual should be subordinate to an authoritarian state.

Bacon, Descartes, and Locke are modern because of their philosophical naturalism, their profound confidence in reason, and, especially in the case of Locke, their individualism.

Modern thinkers stress human autonomy in the human capacity for forming one’s own character — in contrast to the premodern emphasis upon dependence on original sin. Modern thinkers emphasize the individual, seeing the individual as the unit of reality — holding that the individual’s mind is sovereign, that the individual is the unit of value — in contrast to the pre-modernist, feudal subordination of the individual to higher political, social, or religious realities and authorities.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks

In the medieval era pre-modernists leaned on mysticism, faith, fear of hell, and feudalism.

During the enlightenment and 20th century sciences, businesses and technical fields, the core emphasis changed to realism, naturalism, objectivism, experience and reason, which led to individualism and liberal capitalism. John Locke’s treatises in the late 17th century linked to the human capacity for reason to ethical individualism and its social consequences: the prohibition of force against another’s independent judgment or action, individual rights, political equality, limiting the power of government, and religious toleration.

• Individualism and science are the consequences of and epistemology of reason.
• Individualism applied to politics yields liberal democracy.
• Individualism applying to economic yields free markets and capitalism.
• Science applied systematically to material production yields engineering and technology.
• Science applied to the understanding of human beings yields medicine.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks

Postmodernism’s essentials are the opposite of modernism’s.

• Instead of natural reality — anti-realism.
• Instead of experience and reason — linguistic social subjectivism.
• Instead of individual identity and autonomy — various race, sex and class group isms.
• Instead of human interest as fundamentally harmonious and tending toward mutually beneficial interaction — conflict and oppression.
• Instead of valuing individualism in values, markets, and politics — calls for communalism, solidarity, and egalitarian restraints.
• Instead of prizing the achievements of science and technology — suspicion tending toward outright hostility.

In law, the legal world becomes a post-modernist background. As there are no universally valid legal principles of justice, arguments become rhetorical battles of Wales. The critical legal theorists represent the race, class, and sex version of legal postmodernism… All decisions are inherently subjective and driven by preference and politics. The law is a weapon to be used in the social arena of subjective conflict, and arena driven by competing Wells and the coercive assertion of one group’s interest over those of other groups.
 
In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the real world. That view of education is replaced with a view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity. Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual and class identity. Our current social context, however, is characterized by oppression that benefits white males and the rich at the expense of everyone else.
 
— Stephen R. C. Hicks

Postmodernist thought leaders have caught themselves in their own traps. They want to virtue signal to the world, while claiming that there is no such thing as virtue. They want to argue against science and rational thinking, while claiming that we should not be rational. So, in their frustration they have nothing left but throwing the game board in the air, escalating anger in conversations, canceling those who don’t agree with them, and using violence to tear down any structure.

I have compassion for their frustration, because most are well intended, but on the one hand they have not found the way out, and on the other hand they are being covertly used by the global elite technocratic tyranny and their superpower of choice (the Chinese communist party — CCP). They are being impoverished by fraudulent currency and crooked central banks, injured or killed by lethal Big Pharma and Big Med, and lied to by their fake news mainstream media.

So, what’s the way out?

• Independent truth media for real education and collaboration
• Alignment with natural principles — scientific, moral, and spiritual
• Human alignment with the universal morality of the Non-Aggression Principle — that no one is allowed to violate another except in true self-defense (the natural extension of which is no authoritarian government taking our money and sending our children to kill and be killed)

That’s the why of my THRIVE films, website, articles and podcasts. Discuss this with your friends though your voice may tremble.

Onward! Because truth floats, love wins… and that’s what we are here for!