“Don’t you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn’t going to change the truth. Any more than it’s going to topple a skyscraper. There’s truth, and there’s belief. Don’t call a mule a stallion.”
You don’t need to give a shit about postmodernism and other tangential beliefs for them to work on you.
Before long, people are programmed to act in a certain way, use the correct language and associate with the right people because thinking this way becomes part of the socio-cultural constructs in which we live and have our being; it becomes a default auto-suggestion, a kind of neuro-linguistic leveller for interpersonal relationships acting at the subconscious level. Academia’s psychology of choice is transposed to cultural precepts and channelled swiftly across the global brain of info-tainment technology. People don’t even know they are following the herd because postmodernist thinking is designed to homogenise and consensualise; to enforce conformity through ostensibly benign principles. That’s how it seduces intellectuals who are happier living in their head than their heart, hence the seeding of these ideas in universities.
Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson is passionately against this brand of postmodernism and their adherents, having been on the receiving end of their witch-hunts for refusing to use the correct gender pronouns. (We’ll look at gender issues later on in the series). Peterson’s view on postmodernism is unequivocal and asserts the origins of this philosophy is rooted in cultural Marxism. From a recent interview given to The Epoch Times (see video below) he explains that by the 1960s even French intellectuals had to concede that state communism was a disaster and needed re-branding into a new ideological platform “under a post-modern guise;” identity politics would then swiftly take over the reins of popular socio-political movements for change.
It didn’t take long for this catch-all philosophy to spread through Anglo-American academia channelled through the traditions of workers’ emancipation and minority group rights. The unpopularity of Marxism meant that insights from the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxism were brought into play. Peterson states: “They started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.” Postmodernist thinking s actually the same form of intellectual tyranny exemplified by state communism but re-invented through philosophical circus tricks ostensibly based on a collective social conscience. Unfortunately, it is anything but the latter. The professor explains:
“It was no longer specifically about economics,” he said. “It was about power. And everything to the postmodernists is about power. And that’s actually why they’re so dangerous, because if you’re engaged in a discussion with someone who believes in nothing but power, all they are motivated to do is to accrue all the power to them, because what else is there?” he said. “There’s no logic, there’s no investigation, there’s no negotiation, there’s no dialogue, there’s no discussion, there’s no meeting of minds and consensus. There’s power.”
“And so since the 1970s, under the guise of postmodernism, we’ve seen the rapid expansion of identity politics throughout the universities,” he said. “It’s come to dominate all of the humanities-which are dead as far as I can tell-and a huge proportion of the social sciences.”
“We’ve been publicly funding extremely radical, postmodern leftist thinkers who are hellbent on demolishing the fundamental substructure of Western civilization. And that’s no paranoid delusion. That’s their self-admitted goal,” he said, noting that their philosophy is heavily based in the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, “who, I think, most trenchantly formulated the anti-Western philosophy that is being pursued so assiduously by the radical left.”
“The people who hold this doctrine-this radical, postmodern, communitarian doctrine that makes racial identity or sexual identity or gender identity or some kind of group identity paramount-they’ve got control over most low-to-mid level bureaucratic structures, and many governments as well,” he said. “But even in the United States, where you know a lot of the governmental institutions have swung back to the Republican side, the postmodernist types have infiltrated bureaucratic organizations at the mid-to-upper level.” [1]
Peterson does not think its dangers nor “the degree to which it’s already infiltrated our culture can be overstated.”
