During the George Floyd demonstrations, the city of Minneapolis at one point decided to abolish its police force (voters made sure it didn’t happen). A CNN interviewer asked a city councilwoman “Who do I call if someone is breaking into my house in the middle of the night?” The woman’s response began with, “You need to recognize what a question of privilege that is.” This insane, monumentally moronic statement sums up how post-modernism has infected our politics and our societies. Postmodernism and its tenets are the worldview of all extremists, right or left. If you are wondering why so much of the political rhetoric you hear is crazy, dumb and delusional, you need look no further.
Postmodernists don’t believe in the liberal state (liberal here is used in the classical sense), which is made up of the following – an open, secular society with free speech; a bill of rights and a democratic political process; some sort of free market economy; and the primacy of the scientific method, which uses reason and a testable process to discover the truth. Postmodernism claims that all human interactions boil down to those who have power versus those who don’t. As such, democracy is a sham, capitalism is entirely a way to oppress the majority of the world’s population and there is no objective reality because everything we consider true and moral is in fact wholly contingent on our position in the social system we live in – there is no hope of overcoming our inherent biases. Postmodernism therefore adheres to moral relativism - our own notions of what is good and just have no universal application. If Somalians believe that horrific female circumcision is necessary, we have no business condemning them, mainly because “white people have done lots of bad stuff throughout history.” While this is true, it isn’t an actual, relevant argument.
Postmodernism used to be mainly associated with the far-left, most notably the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. But now it also animates the fringiest far-right – which is to say most conservative parties. One thing the right has enthusiastically adopted is that there is no such thing as objective truth - for example “alternative facts” or Rudy Giuliani’s brain dead rant about “truth isn’t truth.” Polls show that something like three-quarters of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, even though absolutely zero evidence exists to back this up. In actuality, the entire platform of the US Republican party is an aggregation of laughable conspiracies that create a feeling of immense victimhood in their adherents. If I feel like a victim, I must be one.
You probably can guess that these people aren’t rational – and they’re proud of it. Since there is no such thing as facts and objective reality, postmodernism doesn’t rely on rationality as the way to understand the world; This is epitomized by Trump, who when asked why he believes things that aren’t true answers with “I’ve always believed that” or “a lot of people are saying” as if that were some kind of proof. If all viewpoints are purely subjective and wholly based on time, place, class, race, etc., then irrationality - feelings, beliefs, superstitions, prejudices - is a perfectly legitimate way of viewing the world.
Our universities are populated with many postmodernists, in all sorts of fields, and they spread their ideology to impressionable students. Social media is completely infected by thought leaders (ha!) of the far-right and -left shitposting this junk to their thousands, if not millions, of followers. You might think this is relatively harmless, but it isn’t. Postmodernism is cynical, petulant, bitter and self-loathing. The underlying mindset is a hatred for their own society, and a very dim view of humanity in general. Postmodernists usually only identify with real or perceived victims because they are severely aggrieved themselves. You can see this in the far-right, who believe that “their” country has been stolen from them and that they are persecuted by society. You can also clearly see it in the far-left, many of whom tried to claim that the Hamas slaughter of Israeli civilians was entirely justifiable. (Yes, Israeli leader Netanyahu’s conduct of the ensuing war has been despicable, but that does not mean Hamas isn’t pure evil.) Seeing only victims and oppressors forces you to pick a side, morality and complexity be damned.
Foucault believed that illegitimate political power was often disguised as expertise. Both the right and left extremists hate elites, but their definition of who is an elite is different. Right-wingers’ loath academia, scientists, the media and government bureaucrats. Left-wingers’ loath big business, law enforcement, scientists and the working class. Scientists appear on both lists because they are the ones who take whatever fantasy these people believe in, subject it to rigorous testing with objective evidence, and then blow it to smithereens. You’ve probably heard one of these people say things like “Western medicine is a scam to get us all hooked on pills”; Then you show them how life expectancy has increased by 40 percent in the last 100 years. Or you hear someone saying climate change is “natural” and then you show them data on how the temperature change during just these last 100 years of heavy industrialization has been many times higher than during the preceding 11,000 years. Postmodernists can’t fathom things like evidence and data, and so they retreat into a fairyland of lies and conspiracies.
But in an ever more complex world, we must rely on experts, and we need to use facts and evidence to govern. Pretending these don’t exist and making decisions based on emotions and feelings isn’t just stupid, it’s incredibly dangerous. Eventually, realty comes knocking and the postmodernist falsehoods are exposed. But what do they do then? Bend reality to their beliefs. Karl Popper said “sooner or later, irrationalism leads to crimes” and a look through recent history irrefutably verifies this claim. You know who adhered to irrationalism? The Nazis. Fifty million corpses should make it abundantly clear what the price of this deranged worldview really is.
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