This Coarse Discourse
As fun as it is attempting to puncture the mounds of lunacy currently doing the large rounds regarding the over-appendaged teacher in Ontario, this article, you will doubtless be pleased to know, is not about those (again).
I’ve (finally) got round to reading the book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. I’m half-way through the chapter on Critical Race Theory which I guess is about a third of the way through (hard to estimate this on a Kindle book with lots of references).
I have tried to read some postmodern stuff in the past - mostly some of the original ramblings - and found it to be largely impenetrable nonsensical waffle that says nothing much more profound than “narratives can control our perception” - although they try to big this up by arguing that words shape ‘reality’ and dress it all up with the typical academic philosopher’s penchant for pretension.
Cynical Theories shows how much, if not most, of the current rancid and illogical quagmire of ‘woke’ ideology has its roots in postmodernism. The deranged droolings of the original postmodernists have been re-purposed and turbocharged with activism which has flowered into the various strands of ideology that plague us today, they argue (although with a lot more neutral language), to become a kind of applied postmodernism.
The book has been a real eye-opener for me. I was aware of the influence of postmodernism before reading it, but I hadn’t realized quite how pernicious and infectious the postmodern virus had really become. I highly recommend the book, even after only reading a fraction of it, because it puts all of the current woke cretinocracy into context.
If you strip away all of the ridiculously over-blown focus on things like ‘power’ and ‘oppression’ and ‘lived experience’ and the various mumblings about how words shape ‘reality’ etc, what you essentially have is the, erm, ‘insight’ that propaganda is effective. Well, strike me down with a feather, Guv, I never knew that - thanks for telling me!
The basic idea behind this applied postmodernism is to actively ‘disrupt’ the prevailing narratives (called discourses) and replace, or subvert, them. The newly created narratives don’t have to make sense, because, of course, requiring that things make sense is a tool of oppression!
Modern gender ideology, for example, has been spawned from Queer Theory, which, quite explicitly, is not supposed to make sense in any traditional way. That’s a feature - not a bug. The incoherence is a deliberate part of the program of subversion.
The applied postmodernists are right, though. Perception is critical. It’s a truism that governments and tyrants have known since time immemorial. You control people by controlling their perceptions.
Look, for example, at how widespread notions like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” have become and how uncritically they are accepted by many. We came, we saw, we conquered, and then everything we have done since then has, implicitly or explicitly, been structured to preserve that colonial dominance, it is alleged. It matters not one jot that pretty much all of the colonial drives, laws and power have been dismantled and destroyed for many decades - they’re still ever present, allegedly, like a bad fart that just won’t go away, turning everything rotten.
It matters not one jot that nobody can come up with any actual examples of current laws, or systems, that are explicitly ‘racist’, just the fact that the systems and laws were ‘created’ by people with a colonial past is sufficient to proclaim everything to be racist.
This particular form of perception management has been devastatingly effective, to the point where even something as frivolous as a movie cannot be considered for a top award unless the requisite number of ‘diversity’ boxes have been ticked off. It’s a kind of cultural reparation that we feel ought to be paid.
The ability to mould perception is important. It’s important for governments, it’s important for those of us fighting against the authoritarian impulses of governments. It’s why memes are so powerful - and why they were so afraid of Trump, because he was able to use social media as a tool to manipulate perception in a very powerful way.
It’s not all just about postmodern prattery - although they have been very successful in getting their deranged and demented discourses metastasizing in every institution. Manipulation is everywhere - we need to be both aware of it and savvy enough to use it ourselves to fight back. Merely being rational and objective, as important though that is, is not enough. We need to be perceived as being the rational and objective ones (which, of course, we are).
One interesting example I saw this week was a Twitter thread about some conservative rally in Pennsylvania. The people at the rally were asked to raise their hands and make some kind of pledge. The collective intelligence of the Twitter ‘left’ (approximately equivalent to the IQ of one and a half radishes) immediately likened this to a Nazi salute - and many people expressed their ‘horror’.
To any normal objective observer this, of course, looks nothing like a Nazi salute. The very idea is laughably ridiculous - and yet many people perceive this as some kind of Nazi homage.
And, we ought to recall, the many pictures of people kneeling, or raising their fists in the ‘black power’ salute during the months where the BLM fetish held sway was not at all creepily authoritarian was it?
This is not just some political power play, though. It has spilled into every institution and every school. The perception that “white supremacy” is something more than the fevered brain-rot of a few nutjobs, that it is endemic in our societies, is just one more example of this evil, and ultimately deadly, program of manipulation that we have to fight.
Subversion and ‘upending’ the discourse is what it’s all about. It’s why it’s encouraged to be proud to be black, and ashamed to be white. It’s why we have what amounts to encouragement in schools to be one of the new exciting ‘genders’ and being ‘cis’ is just so damned boring and quaint. You don’t get any attention, or bravery awards, for being cis. Coming out as some cake-gendered, non-binary, asexual fuck-knows-what will get you a lot of praise and attention and special treatment - we’ll even keep it a secret from your mum and dad (and just how much of a thrill that must be - the allure of doing something secretive and rebellious).
We need to resist this egregious warping of our perceptions. We saw it with covid. We’re seeing it with the alleged climate “crisis”. We’re seeing it with the labelling of people who do not agree with officialdom as “extremist”.
But make no mistake about it, we cannot win this war for rationality and the goals of the Enlightenment (which have brought us sooooooo much progress and benefit) by using the tools of rationality and logic alone. We must win in the battleground of perception. We need to re-take the discourse.
Perception is reality, for the very trite reason we have nothing but our senses to collect information with. While one may argue, fully reasonable too, that using math and assorted other non-sense based methods of measurements helps us circumvent this problem, our perception in the sense of how we think about reality around is still, inevitably, formed by perception. No one goes around thinking about their actions in technical terms like "I'll activate my gluteus maximus to 35% of capacity when describing a downwards motion towards the rectangular wooden square balanced on four wooden poles" when sitting down.
But reality is not perception, and that's one of the two legs the pomos have cut off from themselves and everyone else, Harrison Bergeron style. The rock remains a rock; weight, mass, composition, position and so on no matter my perception of it. And The Rock too, for that matter.
The other leg they amputated using as you mention Queer theory and the overused word discourse (remember when that word had an actual well-defined meaning?) was that deconstructionism, postmodernisms mother-sister-daughter theory, was originally a tool .
And that tool, coming from literary analysis and therefore analysis of meaning/content in communication - all forms of communication - is in itself not an ideological or ontological position. How could it be? Picking things apart to the iotas of their being is initself the opposite of a position: it is nowhere, not anywhere. And since the aforementioned perception of reality informs our biases (again, the original sense and meaning of the word is sorely missed) any such analysis is wholly dependent on the one performing it - to quote a tutor of mine: "Whenever you analyse something using this, you tell as much about yourself as about the subject".
Put that one in the context of today's postmodernists. What is the CRT, BLM, LGBTPWTFBBQ, and so on telling us about themselves, with their analysis and conclusions of their perceived reality?
That they are sadists, mad with power, and with a lust for making others suffer and hurt simply because it makes them feel good.
And - this may offend most people - you cannot counter or combat this without violence.
I don't like winning by using the enemy's tools. When I translated Margaret Anna Alice's Letter to the German Bundestag, I left out (or, abbreviated and commented on) a paragraph on a gesture of Lauterbach that looked like a Hitler salute, when viewed from the right angle. That said, of course you are right that perception is key. And our brains are not well-adapted to what is being thrown at us in the age of internet and social media.