#35 - Applied Postmodernism

What happens when postmodernism infects a culture? Nothing good!

Last time, we covered what postmodernism is. While it may be hard to grasp, it’s important as it underpins a lot of thought on the far left and is much more widespread than most realize. Check it out:

Today, we’ll pick up from there and see what happens when postmodernism meets the real world.

For anyone not indoctrinated, postmodernism sounds like an unbelievable fantasy. But it is critical to understand that many important people are actually operating based off a postmodernist belief structure.

Case-in-point, Katherine Maher provides a good case study in this. She’s not inconsequential: she was the CEO of Wikimedia (which runs Wikipedia) and became the CEO of NPR in 2024. Here is her talk on “what Wikipedia teaches us about balancing truth and beliefs.”

The whole thing is eye-opening, so watch it, but one line kind of gives away the script:

“In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that's getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

If the world feels absurd to you, it might be because people are actually out there operating like Katherine. She won’t let the truth or some “reverence” for it stand in her way. That’s going to lead to all sorts of crazy things (many driven by other aspects of postmodernism).

Recall from last time: true postmodernists don’t believe that there is a knowable single truth, and rather that the only real thing is individual perceptions, which can differ. This is how we hear phrases, unironically spoken, like “your truth” and “my truth.” That’s why you hear things like Jussie Smollett, after clearly faking his “MAGA hate crime” in Chicago (he was found guilty of filing a false police report in 2021), saying things like "It's not necessarily that you don't believe that this is the truth, you don't even want to see the truth." To Jussie and those like him, the fact that there is hate out there justifies organizing a hate crime hoax because it tells a story and, hey, why let a reverence for the truth get in the way of getting things done.”

Of course, if you are reading this, you probably know that this mindset of a malleable truth is horribly fraught with bad consequences. But let’s continue to examine where this leads.

Two big things come out of this malleable truth next:

• Cultural Relativism: the idea that all cultures are equal and that no one culture/way of living is better than any other.

• The Power-Oppression Narrative: given the above, the use of Oppression as a “god of the gaps” or explanation for any and all differences in outcomes between two groups.

Cultural Relativism should make intuitive sense as a next jump. If there isn’t some ground truth out there, how could you possibly say one culture is better than any other?

If you want to see a postmodernist squirm (or identify one), a good question to ask is “hey, what do you think about how Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia treat women and LGBT individuals?” Instead of a simple “yeah, that’s pretty messed up,” you’ll get obfuscation and equivocation.

Likely, the answer they give will involve the concepts of power and oppression, if not by name then in concept. They’ll say that both women and LGBT people have been oppressed everywhere, and that Islam has also been oppressed and is misunderstood, and so on.

It should follow logically: if all cultures are equal and no culture is that much better or worse, then the next most logical explanation to explain the big gaps between places like the US, Europe, or Japan and Africa or the Middle East is the exertion of power and the oppression of those “less advantaged” groups.

We see this within the US as well, of course. And like any good myth, there is an element of (real) truth that certain groups were oppressed in our history. But postmodernists capitalize, and expand it way beyond any rational bounds to construe our culture as one that is still fixated on oppression (a classic case of projection).

And of course, when you strip away the truth in favor of an ideological agenda, you get all sorts of absurdities. Just to sample a few:

• Meritocracy can be branded as a microaggression,

• Closely related to this are calls that will-power is a myth and other broadly nihilistic mindsets,

• Math and science are racist because white people came up with them,

• Being fat is actually healthy,

• Fitness trainers are like nazis,

• We’re too obsessed with rationality,

• Men and women are basically the same, men give birth to babies.

Now, do most Democrats believe all of this? No. But the activists within the party (and increasingly younger voters) absolutely do thanks to all of these ideas being imbued in our education system by 1970’s radicals. And the tail is wagging the dog: the Democratic party increasingly operates based on radical postmodernist principles.

There’s a lot more that could be said on how postmodernism manifests itself in some of today’s political and cultural scene, but we’ll leave it here for now. Go take a look at some of the gems sourced above.