A nihilist is a sceptic who believes in the truth of nothing.
Europe’s progressive parties, the US’s Democratic Party, and the ANC are shedding support. Their shared weakness is their overindulging the extremists in their parties who believe in nothing.
The more animated members of their parties have much energy for criticising Western ways and white males while showing scant interest in developing or debating solutions. How did this happen?
Various intellectuals
Until the 1960s, the hard left fixated on Marxist ideas about redressing injustices they attribute to capitalism. But Marxism’s oppression narratives suffered from capitalism improving living standards for ever larger numbers of people whose ancestors had only known poverty.
Then various intellectuals, mostly French, developed Postmodernism (PoMo) in the 1960s. This movement, which awkwardly sought to align with Marxism to mute pragmatism while stifling democratic principles, steadily gained sway among information curators – until quite recently.
The PoMo movement persuaded intellectually minded types that there were always abundant variations of the truth about any event or theme. On this deep point, leading PoMo thinkers made a formidable case referencing the limits of our perceptions. They then claimed that all truths are equally valid. Left-leaning influencers have subsequently adopted such inane thinking to build a pretentious perch from which they dismiss the concerns and interests of those less knowing than themselves.
Consider this truth: we are eight billion great apes with thousands of nuclear weapons. Key centres of influence convincing people that they can believe whatever they want is recklessly irresponsible.
Also central to the PoMo project is Francois Lyotard’s assertion that all grand narratives lack credibility. PoMo is an ideology yet Lyotard and his followers rejected the validity of all ideologies, logic, language, mathematics, gender, human nature, etc.
Exceptional scholars have identified material shortcomings with logic, maths, and language. And all ideologies can be depicted as contrived. Nor is it difficult to find fault with human nature generally – yet it somehow sustained our species.
Notwithstanding their flaws, belief systems are needed to form functioning societies. Their shortcomings don’t justify an embrace of intellectually adorned defeatism.
PoMo arose just as nature’s capacity to whimsically extinguish large volumes of humans was, for the first time, suddenly and sharply contracting. Deaths due to famines plummeted in the 1970s and various infectious diseases had become much less lethal during the previous generation. As survival pressures waned, societies became more indulgent.
Some exposure to PoMo should keep us humble and open minded about our limitations and other people’s views. Rather, it was used to surreptitiously pursue power while paying homage to the presumptive brilliance of intellectual elites. Such conceptually oriented people often loath the power, privilege and wealth of businesspeople and other doers who lack their obsessive focus on rarified insights.
Philosopher kings
Prior to the arrival of PoMo promoters, the Frankfurt School, home to highly erudite Marxists, was particularly prominent among the aspiring philosopher kings who hurled criticisms at capitalism and popular Western culture. Their most impactful mastermind was probably the professor Herbert Marcuse who energised 1960s college protests in Europe and the US.
It was at university protests during the late 1960s that Rudi Dutschke coined the expression “the march through the institutions”. The idea was to take over the humanities departments of leading universities to oppose capitalism and various Western values and from there gradually infiltrate – to the point of domination – the leadership of leading universities, media outlets and entertainment companies.
Today, opposition to hiring conservatives has been institutionalised at many such organisations in the hope of ensuring that their current and future leaders will remain enthralled by identity politics and oppression narratives. Leftist leaders have responded to opposition viewpoints by purging non-believers thus advancing their cancel culture.
Marcuse wrote, “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, rest and repose in their television set…” His were the disparaging musings of a hardened elitist who, along with other leading Frankfurt School alumni, escaped religious persecution in Europe by decamping to California or New York. These big-idea thinkers bred contempt toward pop culture, whether a surfer’s embrace of the Beach Boys or factory workers’ passion for Bruce Springsteen. While disdaining what the less learned loved, these elite scholars promoted their oppressor-oppressed narratives. This then laid the groundwork for PoMo’s engagement mechanism: hateful identity politics. As judging featured, solving suffered.
Battle lines drawn
Europe’s economy, its military, and its commercial verve are all hobbled in ways which evidence the influence of overindulging ideals. Against this backdrop, the region’s prospects have dimmed markedly while threats from Russia and China now demand hard-edged decision making.
The US is a step ahead. The MAGA movement and therefore the Republican Party are hostile to the equity component of DEI, which is sacrosanct among the far-left faction of the Democratic Party. Battle lines have been drawn – and the positions of many social justice warriors are more controversial than they are popular. Allowing trans-men to compete in women’s sports is not a winning proposition with American voters. Another key difference between the US and Europe is that the Supreme Court, with a six-to-three conservative majority, will deliver consequential rulings.
As PoMo adherents are hostile toward fundamental societal values, weaponising pronouns is very strategic. It undermines language, gender and family values. Pronoun militancy further highlights how uninterested the far-left is in pursuing solutions. Unlike English, many languages have gender neutral third person singular pronouns. If the far left was solution focused, they would advocate for solutions such as new gender neutral pronouns and for trade-off compromises such as more nuclear power for combating climate change. But they aren’t and they don’t.
PoMo provokes a destructive mindset that seeks to unravel the threads that are woven to create shared bonds linking diverse groups. Like Marxist before them, they want to overthrow the existing order without feeling any need to provide some sort of proof of concept or pilot-project bona fides. They are anti-democratic and racist in that they only respect the rights of those they deem oppressed.
Most black Americans know that as a group they earn substantially less than their white counterparts. It is less well appreciated that the nation with the highest-income black population is America. Perceptions matter and universities and media houses curate to shape and then feed negative, and oftentimes defeatist, narratives.
An Ivy league education is now less about learning and more about criticising using leftist-calibrated oppression-focused lenses. News outlets now curate their news to appeal to their audiences’ biases. Headlines are invitations to judge and articles are framed accordingly. Meanwhile, audiences have been conditioned to vote thumbs up or thumbs down while comments provide further opportunities to express biases directly or through more thumbs-up thumbs-down clicking.
SA’s path
SA wasn’t directly part of the West’s “long march through the institutions”, which gained much momentum when the Berlin Wall fell. As the Cold War ended, the realism it once inspired faded. Nature’s ability to swiftly kill humans in large numbers had already been curtailed and now the risk of a major war had plunged. Realism spawned by survival pressures was sharply downgraded.
SA’s path to purging pragmatism was remarkably rapid. Whereas the US’s racial inequities had been ratcheting lower since the mid-19th century, SA covered as much ground in the early- to mid-1990s. Our new government’s obsession with identity politics and equality reflected deep political-economic chasms and most voters expected quick quality-of-life upgrades.
China’s growth was gaining momentum from its “reform and opening up” campaign which would continue to unleash a prolonged surge in prosperity. Conversely, the ANC drifted toward its current localisation policies which have entrenched the world’s most severe youth unemployment crisis.
The ANC’s declining popularity is not about indulging high-minded intellectual pretensions. Rather, the party’s unity and electoral support have significantly relied on patronage which is now less viable due to a weak economy and election setbacks.
The ANC’s path to perdition began with the adoration rightly afforded Nelson Mandela, the world’s genuinely credentialed social-justice icon. His various successors, none more so than Cyril Ramaphosa, have subsequently sought to adorn themselves similarly. However, within the last three years the world’s tolerance for the hypocrisy of the ANC’s wealthy elites has declined abruptly.
The idealism that surged when the Berlin Wall fell was severely wounded three decades later by a pandemic that left nearly every government looking inept at protecting its people. Then Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine mocked Europe’s soft approach to deterrence which follows from idealism displacing hardscrabble realism. A year later, support for Hamas became a red line for many just left of centre.
Trade-offs
Due to their contempt for pretentious intellectualism, a huge number of ordinary Americans relate to their uniquely-expressive president despite his extreme wealth. Yet, and rather ironically, his presidency would be less impactful if left-leaning leaders hadn’t become so recklessly dismissive of how central managing trade-offs is to advancing society-wide interests.
While describing Trump as transactional is accurate, it is usually intended as a rebuttal of his emphasis on solutions. The far left shows little interest in solving things. Nothing epitomises this better than the ANC’s uninterest in developing workable solutions to how our unemployment crisis is devastating the country’s prospects.
While this mostly traces to ANC leaders prioritising party unity, which is pursued largely through patronage, the party’s belief system is anchored in oppression narratives to the point that this precludes emphasising growth through raising efficiency, productivity and competitiveness. Yet we live in a world where there is, in effect, only one economy, the global economy, and where growth is fueled by competitiveness and ever greater specialisation amid intense global integration.
The West is contending with progressives having shaped perceptions by firstly undermining core concepts like truth, logic, and family values. Their dubious twin goals are power for power’s sake, and recognition of the innate superiority of intellectual elites. ANC leaders have sought to parlay the party’s now-expired social justice leadership status into material riches for its elites. Neither group of leftists shows interest in advancing solutions.
We should welcome the end of ideals being overly indulged while realistically assessing the opportunities which the global economy offers.
[Image: Jean-Francois Lyotard photographed by Bracha L. Ettinger https://www.flickr.com/photos/bracha-ettinger/125098435/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80535356]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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