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Hrvatski Noahid:
Unfortunately, while the acceptance and consideration of diverse viewpoints represents a genuine developmental advance for Western society that can be largely credited to the postmodernists, the rejection of Western standards of reason, debate, and even belief in an objective and scientifically discoverable reality has led to catastrophic outcomes.
One of the main problems that postmodernism has is its emphasis on cultural and individual relativity, or the notion that different groups of people, or even different individuals, can have vastly different experiences of the world based on their personal circumstances. Thus, as Kimberlé Crenshaw noted in her foundational works, a black lesbian from a lower socio-economic stratum will experience womanhood, and therefore feminism, differently than an upper-middle-class white woman. The idea that different “intersections” of race, sex, class, religion, and other factors can affect someone’s life experience in unexpected and profound ways is known as intersectionality and has since become a philosophical pillar of the postmodernist movement.
The first problem with intersectionality, as noted by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in his many lectures on the subject, is that the West already solved that issue by prioritizing the individual as the primary unit of consideration in a society. Crenshaw’s proposed innovation, while seizing a tremendous intellectual beachhead for Marxist thought, is a step backwards in terms of achieving true justice as it reduces individuals to their group characteristics, and therefore makes them collectively responsible for societal outcomes regardless of individual culpability. In combination with the social critiques and reforms put forth by other postmodernists like Robert Delgado, it becomes clear that the proposed mechanisms of remediation for these grievances are government interventions and extensive reforms, forms of economic and social centralization that are pillars of Marxist thought.
The rapid changes in postsecondary education and large corporations over the last decade are a testament to the Marxist need to control and meddle, with administrative costs in universities soaring to cover the hiring of diversity consultants, equity specialists, gestures of atonement, and administrative staff responsible for ensuring that every aspect of the colonial-industrial systems are made as fair as possible. Similar trends can be seen in the corporate world, with extraordinary amounts of company dollars now being spent on consultants, workshops, special programs, and other attempts to appease postmodernist activists. This is to say nothing of the race-based and gender-based hiring quotas which explicitly exist in some organizations, and implicitly in many other organizations whose human resources staff err on the side of diversity when making new hires.
In the decades since intersectionality became a hidden weapon in the Marxist struggle, the tax dollars of many Western countries have also been laundered into “scholarship” in the humanities and social sciences exploring the many different intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, economic class, and physical ability. Many of these papers are never cited once as a source for another work, and many others are “autoethnographies”, an academic term for essentially diary entries. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 56-57)
Hrvatski Noahid:
Thus, the colonial-industrial system has been bankrolling its own saboteurs, as the publish-or-perish dynamic inherent in postsecondary institutions, a philosophical position driven by high modernist values, rewards high scholarly output regardless of the utility of the work. The so-called intellectuals enjoying the benefits of this swindle have, over the decades, become some of the most prestigious thought leaders within these universities, further cementing the postmodernist viewpoint into the Western psyche.
The embarrassing state of the Western intellectual project since postmodernism’s ascendance has been highlighted through pranks by more level-headed academics that reveal the lack of rigor in postmodern academica. In the 1990s, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an intentionally ridiculous article to the journal Social Text, making fashionable claims that impressed the editors so much that it merited inclusion in their Spring-Summer issue of 1996. Over two decades later, a similar series of hoaxes were perpetrated by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, who successfully published academic “research” on rape culture in dog parks, the social construct of the penis, selections of Mein Kampf remixed as feminist social theory, and other useless non-topics hailed as quality scholarship by postmodernist academics.
The shameless intellectual bankruptcy of postmodernist philosophy, especially when combined with a radical acceptance of diverse viewpoints, is that anybody can approach a postmodernist-influenced organization and claim protected status based on their unique “intersections”. Some of the most outrageous examples include an Ontario teacher wearing fetish gear to class as part of their protected right to gender expression, men claiming to be disabled women, people identifying as disabled children, white women masquerading as indigenous or mixed-race individuals, and “minor attracted persons”, the latest of many attempts to legitimize pedophilia as an orientation. All of these cases take advantage of the fact that no human can see into the mind of another human, therefore making it theoretically possible, at least in the mind of colonized and illiterate Westerners, that there is a chance these identities could be true.
Because postmodernist intellectuals and activists have concocted a pathologically accepting philosophy that cannot say no to even the most outrageous of claims, postmodernist activists have had to spend more and more effort to “control the narrative” – the embodiment of their socially-constructed reality. To accomplish this, they must quash, cancel, silence, or censor opposing viewpoints that dispute or shame their obvious fictions, giving rise to the gulags of the Soviet Union and the “cancel culture” now gripping Western societies. The fundamental alienation from reality itself was noted quite insightfully by Soviet escapee Ayn Rand, whose fundamental philosophical axiom was “A is A”, a repudiation of the violently delusional society she left behind. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 57-58)
Hrvatski Noahid:
Instead of concentrating their disdain on the wealthy, Marxists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries focused instead on delineating the many ways in which the Western capitalist system excluded, disadvantaged, and discriminated against minority groups. By catering their messages to demographics that were experiencing genuine pressures from the colonial-industrial system, particularly blacks and women, Marxists were able to hijack movements like feminism by offering them simple solutions in the form of class struggles.
Thus, women were weaponized against men, blacks were weaponized against whites, and the degeneration of Western society into bitter infighting began. Decades into the project, many Western activists and intellectuals have realized that much like traditional Marxism, the social justice offered by these theories is a dangerous and exhausting game. The endless number of perspectives that must be accepted and respected has created a snowball effect for adherents to these philosophies, creating situations where they must adopt increasingly ludicrous claims to maintain cohesion. Any dissent with the group results in excommunication and potentially career sabotage.
Although the postmodernists’ sophisticated critiques of Western thought have added elements of nuance and plurality that were sorely needed in societies subjected to the newspaper and radio, they have also created a dynamic where people facing any kind of systemic challenge are encouraged to protest instead of adopting more entrepreneurial mindsets. Lesson plans in Canadian schools, for example, now explicitly frame the concept of meritocracy as a myth, instead telling students that their success in life will be primarily determined by their skin color or genitalia until the current system is reformed. Black students at Yale, one of the most prestigious and expensive schools in the United States, nearly rioted over the idea of offensive Halloween costumes, citing the historical disrespect towards black-skinned people as evidence of systemic oppression at work in their institution.
In much the same way that curriculums on slavery can misdirect the black mind away from African civilizational accomplishments, postmodernist feminist philosophy has been uniquely destructive to the younger generations of women that have inherited it. By characterizing women as victims of the patriarchy, or a network of social attitudes and laws set by men that demean and exploit them, feminist thinkers have managed to engender deep resentment in many women that often manifests in verbal expressions of hatred towards men. In the process, feminists alienated many women who take issue with the collectivist and over-intellectualized nature of postmodernist ideas, as well as most men, who are generally predisposed to protecting and providing for women and hurt by the group-based rhetoric. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 58-59)
Hrvatski Noahid:
Despite its bluster and passion, modern feminism is founded on simplistic statistics, histrionic exaggerations, and a denial of the impact of biology on the male and female experience. This can be seen most clearly in the lack of women in technological fields, a longstanding issue for postsecondary institutions and businesses that hire their graduates. According to feminists, the predominance of men in engineering and computer science can be attributed to a mixture of discrimination, a lack of role models, and cultural beliefs about femininity and women that discourage them from seeking technical occupations. However, the actual science on the issue is markedly different, and demonstrates that men tend to be “thing-oriented” and women tend to be “people-oriented”, which manifests not only in career differences, but the toy choices of toddlers, newborns, and even primates of other species.
Other core feminist grievances, like the gender pay gap, evaporate under more rigorous analysis and can be attributed to differences in career choice, working hours, and childcare decisions. Indeed, the issue of “work-life balance” is almost always a focus of women’s professional conferences, whereas male professional culture, subjected to colonial and industrial influences for much longer, would typically view such discussions as almost embarrassing or counterproductive.
Feminism’s departure from reality is documented extensively by gender and art scholar Camille Paglia, who laments the exclusion of the biological sciences from the formation of the first women’s studies departments. Indeed, women’s studies as a field was founded exclusively by postmodernist English professors, a historical decision that is nakedly evident in the overwhelming focus of academics on issues of culture and discourse. In fact, feminists are typically hostile to experts in the physical sciences, like psychologist Jordan B. Peterson or biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, as the hard facts presented by the scientists undermine many of the political and social gains that feminists have made, and therefore represent an existential threat to the consensus reality.
The angry delusions fed to many young women over the past couple generations have not only made them unhappier by distancing them from men, but create endless havoc in their personal and professional lives as their versions of reality are gently or harshly rejected by the market. Consider, for example, that the “body positivity” movement, a rejection of Western beauty standards, has left many women overweight and unattractive to the kinds of high-quality men they desire. Moreover, professional women have not yet accepted that there are biological differences between men and women that manifest in different behaviors, attitudes, and skillsets. Their lamentation that women fail to be represented in executive-level positions or technological roles conveniently ignores the effects of testosterone on the pursuit of achievement, and further neglects the fact that female professionals consistently reject male attitudes and approaches towards self-development, competition, and performance. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 59-60)
Hrvatski Noahid:
Unfortunately, the problem with postmodernist thought is a deeper issue than its accumulation of delusions. One line of investigation has revealed that Americans on the political left, who have generally embraced postmodernist philosophy, experience both a positive change in mood as well as changes in political attitude following a dose of testosterone. A completely different study found that white liberals – and not white conservatives – were prone to dumbing themselves down when communicating through email with people they thought were black. Various studies have found that postmodernists are less self-sufficient, more motivated towards interdependence, and just as capable of discriminatory behavior – as can be seen from the race quotas, segregation initiatives, and hiring requirements now in place at many institutions like Harvard and Dalhousie.
Looking at signals like these and drawing on her own experience growing up in the Soviet Union, Ayn Rand characterized leftists as being gripped by a fear of individualism, which she believed was responsible for driving them to adopt Marxist and postmodernist ideas and make attempts to overthrow capitalist systems. Whereas Rand saw free market capitalism as the highest economic expression of free choice and rationality, she framed the kinds of collectivist movements encouraged by postmodernist philosophy as a form of mutual slavery and intellectual cowardice.
Although he is most famous for his hatred of industrial technology, Ted Kaczynski outlined his thoughts on leftism in his infamous manifesto in the Washington Post. Based on his observations, he thought that these ideas appealed to people with an underlying sense of inferiority and powerlessness, which he connected to the indignities forced upon people by industrial society. By taking on causes only tangentially related to them, such as the black struggle for white women or the feminist struggle for certain men, leftists not only gain a sense of power and mastery over their environment, but can assuage their guilt over the privileges they are forced to acknowledge by their Marxist-postmodernist philosophy.
Unfortunately, both these characterizations are accurate. In addition to the colonial-industrial programming that they are forced to adopt by Western systems, activists in neo-Marxist causes inflict a split consciousness upon themselves which offers no coherent basis for thought or action. While the contradictory and hypocritical stances taken by leftists are an enduring part of modern conservative journalism, the incoherence is a feature, not a bug, of their philosophy.
Take, for example, the feminist refrain of “my body, my choice”, which weaponizes the pursuit of happiness to legitimize infanticide and remove women from the consequences of sexual intercourse. This principle, which has been an axiom of feminism for decades, was promptly abandoned as soon as the vaccine mandates provided women with an opportunity to comply their way into economic safety with employers. The feminist drive to succeed in the workplace, when set against a principle that would require extraordinarily inconvenient employee pushbacks and possibly legal action, easily prevailed despite decades of screaming that would suggest the contrary.
Indeed, as Ayn Rand outlined in her nonfiction works, people without a coherent philosophy lack values that provide limitations on their behavior. In the ruthlessly collectivist environments of leftist politics, the demands of the group, which shift over time as new claimants to historical oppression present themselves, are the overriding directive. As documented by former leftists who have left these movements, the quicksilver-like nature of postmodernist politics is exhausting, stressful, and unforgiving in similar ways to fundamentalist Christian churches. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 60-61)
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