Postmodernist Tourette's Syndrome
Commonly understood truths once protected us from abject stupidity being treated equal to wisdom.
From claiming that throwing soup on a masterpiece is good, to believing inflation is good and Bidenomics is working, to being judged guilty of crimes against humanity solely due to skin color, it should be clear that a large segment of society – and civilization - has lost the ability to reason, if they every had it in the first place.
Postmodernism means never having to say you are sorry - and it means that you are never required to be logical. It's like having a case of mental Tourette's Syndrome where just saying something, no matter how irrational, makes it true.
The whole idea that "my lived experience" and "my truth" is stupid on their face – assuredly, we each experience things in different ways, but truth is truth. If every individual has their own "truth", civilization cannot survive. There are an absolute minimum number of things that must be considered as "the truth", a truth applying to all, that generate agreement for mankind to move forward - water is wet, fire burns, wind blows, the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west, the law of gravity is real, just very basic stuff.
Today that isn’t the case. Math is racist. A man can be a woman if he wants it bad enough. Climate change is going to end the world in a decade. There isn’t a two tiered justice system in America.
When those guardrails are stripped away, chaos rules - and until those guardrails are rebuilt, chaos will continue to rule.
In Atlas, Ayn Rand, described our current societal and intellectual issues well.
From Chapter VI, The Non-Commercial, here is an allegedly fictional scenario we see repeated in the real world ever day now. It is an exchange between Dr. Simon Pritchett, the leading “intellectual” of Rand’s fictional world:
Dr. Pritchett picked a canape off a crystal dish, held it speared between two straight fingers and deposited it whole into his mouth.
“Man’s metaphysical pretensions,” he said, “are preposterous. A miserable bit of protoplasm, full of ugly little concepts and mean little emotions—and it imagines itself important! Really, you know, that is the root of all the troubles in the world.”
“But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?” asked an earnest matron whose husband owned an automobile factory.
“None,” said Dr. Pritchett, “None within the range of man’s capacity.”
A young man asked hesitantly, “But if we haven’t any good concepts, how do we know that the ones we’ve got are ugly? I mean, by what standard?”
“There aren’t any standards.”
“It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult,” said Dr. Pritchett. “Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more . . . tractable.”
He shrugged and reached for another canapé, a businessman said uneasily, “What I asked you about, Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.”
“Oh, that?” said Dr. Pritchett. “But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.”
“But, look . . . isn’t that sort of a contradiction?”
“Not in the higher philosophical sense. You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid.”
If that exchange sounds familiar, it should. We see, hear and read about such exchanges every day - many of them are taking place in our own Congress. Want a taste, go to Twitter for five minutes.
To this point, David Mondrus, a long time Facebook friend, noted:
“Don't think they ever had it [the ability to reason] in the first place. In the past these people were restrained by society. You know where the term "fired" comes from. We've been too tolerant for too long and are now paying the price.”
Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance is certainly in play.
As Popper, the Austrian-born British philosopher, stated in his Paradox of Tolerance, if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.
David is spot on, instead of celebrating idiocy as some sort of revelatory thinking, we once just called it what it is - bullshit - and simply ignored those people.
Instead of being shunned, in the postmodernist society of today (and apparently of Rand’s predictive imagination), they become presidents of universities, “thought leaders”, and government officials.
SPOT ON !
But in mentioning Tourette’s Syndrome we should also note how much the left has promoted actual vulgar and obscene speech such as using the “Ef” word incessantly. This is part of the left’s overall rejection of conventional norms of etiquette and decency in civil discourse. Valuing emotion over reason the “enlightened” resort to coarse speech to get a stronger emotional reaction from their audiences. The problem is the more they do this then the more trite and empty-headed they expose themselves to be. The problem I see is that the use of foul speech becomes contagious over time with even conservatives resorting more to responding in kind in a way that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. As Talleyrand once said of Napoleon and his coarse swearing “Such a pity that so great a man show himself to be so ill-bred!”