#5 : (Question: does doing the #5 thing result in the author of post 5 being notified of being mentioned?)
Thanks for the reference to the article, I have heard it mentioned before but never read it until yesterday. I think it sums up the issue of postmodernism gone mad very well.
integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/Quoting:
Beginning in the 1960s, green (postmodernism) first began to emerge as a major cultural force, and it soon bypassed orange (which was the previous leading-edge stage, known in various models as “rational,” “reason,” ... and “progress”—in short, “modern” in contrast to green’s “postmodern”) as the dominant leading-edge. Green started with a series of by-and-large healthy and very appropriate (and evolutionarily positive) forms: the massive civil rights movement, ... a heightened sensitivity to any and all forms of social oppression of virtually any minority, and -centrally - both the understanding of the crucial role of “context” in any knowledge claims and the desire to be as “inclusive” as possible. The entire revolution of the sixties was driven primarily by this stage of development—in 1959, 3 percent of the population was at green; in 1979, close to 20 percent of the population was—and these events truly and irrevocably changed the world...
But as the decades unfolded, green increasingly began veering into extreme, maladroit, dysfunctional, even clearly unhealthy forms. Its broad-minded pluralism slipped into a rampant and runaway relativism (collapsing into nihilism), as the notion that all truth is contextualized (or gains meaning from its cultural context) slid into the notion that there is no real universal truth at all, only shifting cultural interpretations (which eventually slid into a widespread narcissism). Central notions (which began as important “true but partial” concepts, but collapsed into extreme and deeply self-contradictory views) included the ideas that all knowledge is, in part, a social construction; all knowledge is context-bound; there are no privileged perspectives; what passes for “truth” is a cultural fashion, and is almost always advanced by one oppressive force or another (racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, capitalism, consumerism, greed, environmental exploitation); each and every human being, often including animals, is utterly, absolutely unique, and absolutely of equal value (egalitarianism). If there were one line that summarizes the message of virtually all of the truly prominent postmodern writers (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, etc.), it is that “there is no truth.” Truth, rather, was a social construction, and what anybody actually called “truth” was simply what some culture somewhere had managed to convince its members was truth; but there was no actually existing, given, real thing called “truth” that is simply sitting around awaiting discovery...
Even science itself was held to be no more true than poetry (Seriously). There simply was no difference between fact and fiction, news and novels, data and fantasies. In short, there was “no truth” anywhere.
So it ended up that, to the general postmodernist perspective, all knowledge is culturally bound; there is no universally valid perspective, therefore all knowledge is based on a mere interpretation announced from a privileged (therefore oppressive) perspective ... and if any truth or value is claimed to be universal, or claimed to be true and valuable for all, the claim is actually nothing but disguised power, because it is simply an attempt to force all people everywhere to adopt the same truth and values of the promoter (with the ultimate aim of enslavement and oppression). It is therefore the job of every individual to fight all of the authoritarian truths handed to them from yesterday and to be totally, radically autonomous (as well as not to entertain any truths that could or should be forced on anybody else, to allow everybody their own radical autonomy as well—in short, not to entertain anything called “truth” at all, which now was seen as always being a power-grab).
Put bluntly, since everything handed to us by yesterday is not a real and enduring truth, just a fabricated fashion of history, it is our job to accept none of it, and instead only strive for a total, self-created, self-initiated autonomy (which very soon became indistinguishable from “Nobody interferes with my narcissism!”). You simply deconstruct every single truth and value you find (an approach that indeed rapidly slid into nihilism and, again, its tag-team member from postmodern hell, narcissism). In short, the aperspectival madness of “there is no truth” left nothing but nihilism and narcissism for motivating forces.
The catch-22 here was that postmodernism itself did not actually believe a single one of those ideas. That is, the postmodernists themselves violated their own tenets constantly in their own writings, and they did so consistently and often ... Their entire theory itself is a very Big Picture about why all Big Pictures are wrong, a very extensive metanarrative about why all metanarratives are oppressive. They most definitely and strongly believed that it is universally true that there is no universal truth. They believed all knowledge is context bound except for that knowledge, which is always and everywhere transcontextually true. They believed all knowledge is interpretive, except for theirs, which is solidly given and accurately describes conditions everywhere. They believed their view itself is utterly superior in a world where they also believed absolutely nothing is superior. Oops.
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When it becomes not just that all individuals have the right to choose their own values (as long as they don’t harm others), but that hence there is nothing universal in (or held-in-common by) any values at all, this leads straight to axiological nihilism: there are no believable, real values anywhere. And when all truth is a cultural fiction, then there simply is no truth at all—epistemic and ontic nihilism. And when there are no binding moral norms anywhere, there’s only normative nihilism. Nihilism upon nihilism upon nihilism... And finally, when there are no binding guidelines for individual behavior, the individual has only his or her own self-promoting wants and desires to answer to—in short, narcissism. And that is why the most influential postmodern elites ended up embracing, explicitly or implicitly, that tag team from postmodern hell: nihilism and narcissism—in short, aperspectival madness. The culture of post-truth.
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But this “order out of chaos” is exactly what the green leading-edge began failing to do. If anything, it was producing “more chaos out of chaos.” It had no idea of what true order was to begin with all such “metanarratives” were completely and aggressively deconstructed. Because nothing was true at all, there could be no true order, either, and hence no preferable direction forward. And so, as the leading-edge of evolution collapsed in a performative contradiction—lost in aperspectival madness—evolution itself temporarily slammed shut, and began various moves, including a regressive stepping back and searching for a sturdier point where a true self-organizing process could be set in motion once again.