Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2019 8:27 pm
Neo-Marxism is just their excuse. The motive is much simpler, and far less intellectual, and much less "moralizing." It's just that privileged children want to do what they please. And they want free stuff. And they want to be told they're wonderful and good and delightful for wanting it. That's all.
Dear IC,
Yes, agreed. Though I think we need to remember that these kids are also victims. The fact that they are behaving in foolish, antisocial ways, is largely a consequence of the kind of garbage they have been taught by their teachers and college professors. The average 18 -19 year-old is very vulnerable and impressionable; she or she, naturally assumes, that adults placed in positions of authority in society, persons like university professors, are wise and trustworthy individuals who will have their best interests at heart. Unfortunately, this is not the case. American educators have betrayed the trust that was placed in them by students and their parents. It is a monumental scandal and something that could be quickly eradicated - I'm talking about the indoctrination of youth with Postmodern propaganda and the destruction of the traditional humanities/Liberal Arts curriculum.
What has happened is that for
well over 30 years now, young people in the West (particularly in the US) have been intensively bombarded with the poisonous precepts of Postmodern philosophy/ideology through the curricula in their high schools and universities. It is, as I say, chiefly the humanities/liberal arts/Social Sciences curricula that have been effected; the STEM (Science, Technology Engineering, Mathematics) curriculum, thankfully, is still uncorrupted. This is mainly because it is not so easy to peddle ridiculous/absurd narratives about the subject matter of chemistry, physics and mathematics. ( Though I do recall reading a review of one paper published in the "reputable" literature by a notable feminist US college professor who had argued that "quarks" and "electrons" were socially-constructed, "sexist fictions" and that "black holes" were evidence of a "deeply" gynocentric
kosmos" (and so on). The response from the scientific establishment was rapid and predictable, and when the machine-gun smoke had cleared, this particular feminist scholar was nowhere to be seen.
So what exactly is Postmodernism in its philosophical context ? I tend to see it as an ideological/philosophical/political amalgam of: "Critical Theory" ( like the "Frankfurt School" Critical theory that Herbert Marcuse brought onto US college campuses in the 1960s/1970s), "Cultural Marxism", "Neo-Marxism", Social Constructionism, "Post-Structuralism" (e.g. Foucault's early work) and "Deconstructionism". I mean, it's difficult to pin down because I could add lots of other "isms" to the list, like the distinctive pragmatism of a notable, Postmodern philosopher like America's Richard Rorty, or the psychologisms in the work of some Postmodern theorists who incorporated psychoanalytic concepts into their philosophy.
If you strip "Postmodern philosophical theory down to its sub-frame, you will see that it is squarely based on old-fashioned Marxist precepts, in particular, the oppressor-oppressed narrative. In Marx's work, history was all to do with the economics of ongoing class struggle: i.e; of an impoverished, oppressed proletariat being suppressed and exploited by an oppressor, namely, the wealthy bourgeoisie. In Postmodern neo-Marxism the, meta-narrative is still that of an oppressed --oppressor struggle, only now it is not between (socioeconomic)
classes, but between competing Identity Groups (differentiated according to categories such as: ethnicity, race, gender, sex, sexual orientation (LGBTIQ), sexual expression. For instance, if you are a white, straight, married, American male in 2019, a SJW would classify you as a member of a powerful, privileged, "oppressor" Identity Group; whereas if you are a black American female who is a single mother, you would be classed as a member of a dis-empowered, persecuted, oppressed Identity Group. The ideology of Postmodern neo-Marxism does not recognise the existence of individual human beings, BTW; there are no such things as individual human persons, only GROUP IDENTITIES: Black, Latino, Cis-Gendered, Lesbian, Male, Queer, Feminist, Disabled and so on. One of the problems with Identity politics is that the number of groups has an unlimited potential to multiply. For example: In a hypothetical PoMo world order, there might be an organised group of transsexual Black, Pygmie males who are bald, fat and wheelchair-bound who cry out that they are dis-empowered, victims of discrimination and as such demand the state provide £5 million cash compensation, a permanent suite at the Ritz Hotel, a Rolls Royce motor car and a chauffer to ferry them about in it.
"Derrida was, IMO, the founding father of the Postmodern neo-Marxist movement in the West. He was a life-long communist (an orthodox Marxist) who simply could not accept the fact that Marxism in the Soviet Union had failed, when, in the later half of the 1950's the truth was plainly exposed for the entire world to see. (For example: (1): In the US, the capitalist economy that Marx and Engels had predicted (in 1844) would soon implode had survived the Great Depression and two World Wars, and in the later half of the 1950's was absolutely booming; (2): The in 1956, Kruschchev, personally tells the world that Stalin had, in fact, been an evil, genocidal tyrant whose regime murdered millions; (3) : That same year, 1956, - a bad one for the Kremlin - countless thousands of people around the world , who now all had that amazing, new-fangled contraption called the television at home, turned it on one evening and saw live images of Red Army tanks and troops invading Hungary and enforcing a brutal, bloody clampdown of the Hungarian people protesting Soviet rule in their country. (No one knows how many Hungarians were imprisoned or murdered or "disappeared, in 1956; my guess is that it was no small number as we do known that hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled the country (to seek asylum abroad as refugees) during, and immediately after, the Soviet clampdown."
By the end of the 1950s most Western Marxists have seen enough and tore up their communist party cards. If you happened to be a Marxist academic working in the Western academy, your days of preaching and publishing the virtues of Marxism were over, and you needed to "re-skill" fast or you'll be out of a job. People like Derrida and Foucault were not fools, they knew the game was up Orthodox Marxism was now a dirty word in the academy, so what did they do? Derrida is the main culprit, so I'll focus on him. Derrida thinks: "I need a new philosophical/political theory that retains the most important/fundamental precepts of Marxism (because, as I mentioned above Derrida was a "true believer") but looks as though it's got nothing to do with Marxism from the outside - I need to build a "Trojan Horse."
So he did build a "Trojan Horse", and when it was completed, he posted it to the US (the English language department at Yale University) in 1968. To cut a long, long story very, very short Derrida infected the American academy with the template of what would, over the next 50 years develop into the philosophy of Postmodernism. Derrida became (and remained) a celebrity in the United States for many years, much like a Hollywood star. He was handsome, tanned, always outfitted in the height of French chic, assumed to be an Aristotelian genius, a debonaire playboy whose affairs with beautiful, French girls and use of cocaine fascinated America's fashionable Liberal intelligentsia. My point is that Derrida, although he was a passionate Marxist was hardly a champion of the down-trodden masses. In fact, he couldn't have given a fuck about anything but his pretentious, pampered, narcissistic self. Make no mistake , Derrida was a very clever man indeed, but the bottom line is that he misused his intellect to become one of the 20th century's most devious and dangerous academic charletans. The next time you hear some idiot feminist "sounding off" on television or images of brainless mobs of 19 - year-old SJW girls protesting White America's racist past on campus, you can thank Derrida for that.
Postmodernist neo-Marxist theory has, as I mentioned, permeated all of the non - STEM faculties in pretty much the majority of America's high schools and colleges. It's effect, over the past 30 years has been utterly devastating. University students studying, say English Literature, History, Politics or Anthropology , (for example, are being taught worthless politicised garbage). Students studying the prose of , say, Francis Bacon, are taught that he was a vicious, male, chauvinist pig = a "dirty dog" whose "toxic masculinity" undermines his reputation as a great thinker. Shakespeare, as well, is guilty of just about every conceivable crime in the Politically Correct handbook - did you know that a number of his famous male characters are (metaphorically speaking) inveterate "pussy - grabbers ( !) That's right (!) - no better than that scoundrel, DONALD TRUMP; and this is why we need to ban the works of William Shakespeare from the English curriculum FOREVER ! The degrees these wretched children obtain are not worth the (imitation) parchment they are printed on. Because they have acquired, in their years of study, no marketable academic/intellectual/practical skills. (And) It comes as a shock to them when they graduate with a PhD in Lesbian Sexuality, a Master's degree in Queer theory, or a Bachelors degree in Hillary Clinton Studies to learn that they unemployable. This means they cannot repay their student loans, and that means that someone (guess who ?) has to "cough up" and service the multi-TRILLION dollar student loan debt, before it "sinks the "Titanic.""
Oh dear, I''m rambling again... (!) so let me quickly get to to main point I wanted to make. Postmodern theory is still running rampant through America's high schools and colleges .You almost certainly will not hear any mention of the actual term "postmodern"/"postmodernism" in the media or in what you are told your children are being taught, but it is, in fact, postmodernism. Postmodernism is the dominant world-view they are being taught to embrace. What you need to know is that postmodernism has only one objective as an ideological movement and that objective is TO UTTERLY DESTROY THE WHITE, MALE WESTERN PATRIARCHY. The teachers and professors who promote postmodern theory in US high schools and universities are basically communists who despise capitalism and America's Western patriarchal traditions. These people are very big on HATE. They hate just about everything: the use of logic/ reason; the idea that men and women of good will can solve their problems through the use of civilised, rational discourse; (Christian) marriage, White Western males; the nuclear family, the moral idea of absolute RIGHT and WRONG.
The only thing that they do not hate is POWER. In fact, or the postmodernist thinker, EVERYTHING BOILS DOWN TO POWER - nothing else matters. Because this is how they understand the social world, namely the person with the bigger club will always bludgeon down the person with the smaller club (or no club at all) and thus prevail in the conflict. That's what life is all about for Derrida, the quest for POWER. The quest for the POWER that is needed to beat the shit out of any groups in society who happen to disagree with you. When you have the power, you can "smash them like guitars", crush them like cockroaches, and thus become "King of the Castle.".
The leaders of the postmodern movement in the US want the POWER to smash the 2000 year-old
phallogocentric Western culture of America.
"Phallogocentric" was a term coined by Derrida: phallo = phallus =
PENIS; logo = logos = the word/
logic/reason When Derrida criticises Western countries like the UK, the US, Australia, etc; he is saying that he believes the White (Anglo-European) American male is, basically a brutish "slave-master", one who has for centuries forcibly subjugated and enshackled women and the members of ethnic minorities, it views the American patriarchy as a tyrannical, institution of privilege and domination, he rejects Enlightenment rationality as an instrument of (male) oppression ( this includes, BTW, a rejection of capitalist economics. You can see the influence of Postmodern ideology very clearly in the Democratic Party's lurch to the lunatic left of the political spectrum. The current Trump impeachment inquiry farce is another example of how profoundly Postmodern neo-Marxist thinking has addled the Democratic Party's mind.
Finally, what to do about the problem of Postmodernism in American education. That's easy. Trump should immediately cut all federal funding to all colleges in America by 30%, likewise federal research grants. In the ensuing battle for funding in colleges across the nation, Postmodernism would not survive.
Regards
Dachshund (Der Uberweiner)
