Postmodernism:A World View of Bullshit

Most people who are familiar with Postmodernism consider it to be some bizarre 20th century movement that is associated with shitty art, ugly architecture, dumb philosophy, terrible books, awful music, and really crazy liberals. While all of that may be true, that is not postmodernism’s biggest contribution to the world. Postmodernism’s greatest achievement is its contribution to the world of bullshit.  One of Postmodernist’s greatest thinkers Stanly Fish once famously said, “Deconstruction (a postmodern technique) relieves me of the obligation to be right and demands only that I be interesting.”  You know what else relieves me of the obligation to be right and demands that I only be interesting? You guessed it. Bullshit. Thanks to lunatics like Stanly Fish and his other Postmodernists buddies who don’t have a rational thought in their tiny little malfunctioning brains, bullshit finally has its own philosophy, a movement if you will. As we will see in this chapter, postmodernist bullshit is very impressive.  The Postmodernist bullshit movement is going to be one of the greatest movements we’ve seen in history.  It is going to make the Civil Rights movement of the 60s look like Earth Day.

I mention Fish and Deconstruction because deconstruction is the foundation of all postmodernisms in society today. It was effectively named and popularized by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s. His original intention was for deconstructionism to examine the relationships between opposing ideas or words. He argued that the idealist concepts such as truth and justice in language is complex therefore it is fluid. Aside from trying to sound smart, it seemed like deconstructionism was mostly geared toward language.  However, like most movements this concept didn’t stop at its intended target.  It overshot the mark, and eventually it seeped its way into disciplines of law, psychology, sociology, history, language, feminist studies, LGBQT studies, and whole bunch of other college majors you that won’t get you a job.  Deconstructionism started out with a dumb philosophy on language and has since morphed into the contrarian viewpoint against all accepted truths and narratives.  The biggest problem with deconstructionism is that it seeks to deconstruct what exists, but it doesn’t offer anything else to put in its place.  

Deconstructionism has been the catalyst for some of the craziest bullshit coming out of people’s mouths in the past several years.  Defund the police aimed to deconstruct the accepted narrative that police officers are good. Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote “The 1619 Project” which reframed history to claim that slaves founded America in 1619, and that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery. This claim was widely debunked by scholars and historians, but Nikole Hannah-Jones still won a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project. Her employer, The New York Times defended her work and the 1619 Project began being circulated as curriculum in schools, and it was even heavily merchandised by Oprah Winfrey. Many people accepted the 1619 project as true even though it wasn’t, and whether you’re a postmodernist like Nikole Hannah-Jones or a bullshitter like me, getting people to believe things that isn’t true is always the point.

Postmodernism has been heavily politicized in the past years, and the Progressive left have adopted postmodernist theory in their view on culture and how the country should be run.  They are vehemently pushing back against the accepted truths and norms of American Civilization, but they don’t have a clearcut idea on what should take their place. Karl Marx did the same thing in his Communist Manifesto. He gives a blueprint on how to overthrow a government, but he doesn’t offer a blueprint on an effective system to replace it with.  Yes, he harks on the redistribution of wealth and all that crap, but he doesn’t explicitly say how it can effectively be accomplished.  He answers the what question and not the how, which is the mark of an excellent bullshitter. That it because it is much easier to destroy something than it is to create it or make it better.  Think out it. I never had to watch a YouTube tutorial on how to break my toilet, but I had to watch several hours of them to learn how to fix it. My point is whenever someone tries to claim that deconstructionism is a skill or an intellectual movement, they are full of shit.

The beauty of postmodernism, like most other excellent works of bullshit, is that there is no one really knows what the hell it is.  Whenever something is “hard to define” that is the hallmark of good bullshit. According to Wikipedia, “Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it considers to be the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, as well as opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning. Postmodernists dismiss objective facts as naive realism. Postmodernism is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.” If that definition sounds like nothing more than a bunch of bullshit. That’s because it is.   Postmodernism’s biggest critics argue that the weakness of postmodernism is that it is incoherent, hard to define, and denies that truth exists.  That might be a weakness if you are some nerdy scientist or math guy who believes in logic, reason, and objective truth, but if you’re an appreciator of good bullshit, that is postmodernisms biggest strength.  Incoherent, hard to define, and denying that truth exists are everything you want in a good piece of bullshit.

The term “Postmodernism” first originated in 1870 and was used by some guy by name of John Watkins Chapman to describe a style of painting, which is harmless.  Many bullshitters make an honest living critiquing art.  There is nothing wrong with pretending that Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell Soup paintings is a social critique of mindless consumerism, when the truth was that Andy Warhol painted Campbells soup cans simply because he liked soup.  

The Postmodern movement born so innocently in the arts quickly got hijacked and basterdized by the cunning world of academia. In 1914, J.M. Thompson used the term first used to harmlessly describe a style of painting in a scholarly philosophical journal titled “The Hibbard.”  He used the term postmodern to describe changes in the attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion. In it he wrote, "The raison d'être of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."  Wordy, convoluted, and overstated.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  

By 1926, the president of Bard College was using the term postmodernism to describe history. In 1942 H.R. Hayes officially declared postmodernism a new literary form, and by 1949 there was a postmodern architectural movement.  The Postmodernist bullshit really started flying in the 1970s when a bunch of French philosophers named Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard dubbed themselves postmodern theorists. By the 1980s the postmodernist movement was all over the world. By 1996 Walter Truet Anderson officially declared postmodernism a worldview. He described postmodernism as a worldview where truth is seen as a social construct.  Saying that truth is nothing more than a social construct is something a bullshitter who has no idea what the fuck he is talking about would say.   I’m not bragging or anything, but in a previous chapter titled, You Don’t Have to Be Smart to Sound, I said pretty much the same thing when I said, “Without bullshit, there would be no truth.”   I said that sarcastically, but it turns I was right.  Scholars have now deemed bullshit an official worldview. What began as a way to critique art and design a few stupid looking buildings has become am official set of assumptions about the make-up of the entire world.  Truet compared Postmodernism to neo-romanticism, scientific worldviews, and social worldviews. However, according to Grace Communion International, Postmodernism is a worldview that sits right alongside some of the most prominent worldviews in history.  There are Atheists, Christians, Buddhists, and now Postmodernists.

Postmodernism has undoubtedly conquered the final frontier of bullshit. It has done what no other bullshit was able to do, and it has gone where no other bullshitter has dared to go. It got men to think they are women and play women’s sports. Of course, there was some collateral damage in this line of bullshit, like in 2015 when a transgender man pretending to be a woman named Fallon Fox fractured the orbital bone of her female opponent, Tamikka Brents. Thankfully, society didn’t let Tamikka Brent’s face stand in the way of progress, and since that devastating beatdown of a woman by a man we have seen all sorts of men pretending to be women and dominating women’s sports since then.

Postmodernists argue that much like truth, gender is also a social construct. This means that anyone can be whatever gender they want to be, and, since they believe that there is no absolute truth and bullshit reigns supreme, then people can even go back and forth between genders in what is known as gender fluidity. This is obviously nonsense not based in any sort of objective reality, so whenever these postmodernists have their world view challenged by truth and facts that debunk their bizarre reality with things like chromosomes, hormones, bone structure and sexual organs, they do what all great bullshitters do.  They gaslight you. They will make you appear to be the irrational one and accuse you of transphobia.  Currently, there are 64 new genders ranging from agenderflux, which means that a person’s gender identity is mostly agender with brief shifts of belonging to other gender types, all the way to omnigender where a person experiences all 64 genders. There is girlflux, genderswitched, esspigender, cavusgender, and the list goes on and on. I am not going to mention them all here.  You can check them out on websites www.medicinenet.com or any of the other gazillion websites that list bizarre make-believe genders.

Don’t misconstrue this as some sort of “transphobic” rant or hate speech of any kind. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I am fascinated by the trans-community. I am in awe of the level of commitment that these crazed trannies have to their bullshit.  Anyone willing to cut their own dick off in the name of bullshit is alright in my book.  Barrack Obama wouldn’t even do that.