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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2934 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

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I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?

Wokism is a classic Hegelian grand narrative. So are many forms of fascism, certainly in the more popular German incarnation thereof. The current progressive ideology doesn't descend, whatever MAGA QAnon types declare, from the "Frankfurt School". It descends much more linearly from the longstanding liberal-progressive tradition of grand narratives that brought you such hits as prohibition. It descends almost entirely from gentiles who were the key figures in enlightenment philosophy. Postmodernism was 'invented' by leftists but was widely derided, even initially by Orthodox Marxists as covertly reactionary. This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.

All post-modern movements (that is to say, all major political movements that are either not explicitly Hegelian or which do not explicitly involve recreating or extending pre-modern ways of living, like the Amish) are deeply influenced by postmodern thought (including by the Frankfurt school). This includes the 'tradcath revival' that followed Vatican II and filtered into the modern FSSP/SSPX. It includes modern political Islamism as imagined by Bin Laden. It includes weird, esoteric online subculturalist politics. It includes the modern Anglophone 'dissident right'. These aren't entirely postmodern movements by any means, many rely on older ideologies (part of postmodernism is that it allows, unlike modernism/grand narrative room for many smaller premodern narratives, including traditional memes). One can acknowledge this or reject it, but in the end what the postmodernists (or those currently considered academically 'postmodernist') particularly the French like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault were able to provide was the framework for the cultural criticism of the progressive grand narrative in which the modern internet right engages, in which almost all of us engage. Moldbug and many other reactionaries have acknowledged this over time, as I said last week when we last had this discussion.

Dase jumped in angry

Dase's argument in that thread is relatively weak. There are plenty of things to be argued among 'power worshippers'; Western elites, as even Karlin has finally acknowledged, are broadly of a high quality even if they have adopted some low quality memes. Certainly there are very few historical societies people can point to that had universally higher quality elites (as I believe even Signals - or another ethnonationalist regular - noted a few weeks ago, the class of effete, educated, extremely classically well-informed sort of people who ruled Europe before 1914 fucked up big time themselves, in the end, and so many of their sons died for it). American elites rule over Silicon Valley. Even if they did nothing to create it (they did indeed do much, many American elites are Silicon Valley to the core) it is hard to call this incompetence, whatever the state of the homeless in San Francisco. It's also, if anything, something of an ahistorical notion to suggest that early America had particularly high quality elites compared both the present and to many other countries at the time, so I don't think this is merely residual quality now fading. I read an account of the final attempts at reform in China over the last decades of the Qing dynasty and was struck by how absurdly competent certain parts of the court were in that period - they really did try everything they could, but it was too late. Some would argue that the Russians in that post-Japanese war, pre-WW1 period attempted similar.

'Might makes right' is facile but it is also one of the major longstanding narratives in which the right engages, while it can just be discarded or even blatantly ignored when it becomes inconvenient, it is compelling and certain sectors of the dissident right do wash their hands of it a little too much on a case-by-case basis.

This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.

Well of course , because it can criticize anything and its conclusions are arbitrary.

I would say Postmodernism is a revolt against enlightenment rationality, not a continuation of it, but the lineage of the idea doesn’t matter to me. Postmodernism is more than a criticism of grand narratives (bailey).

There are important questions that I deny and @FCfromSSC , @DaseindustriesLtd , @SecureSignals, the woke affirm (you probably too). Questions like:

[Do you agree] that available evidence pertaining to a given issue in some way is effectively infinite ?

That all beliefs we talk about here, ideological, political, religious, philosophical, are fundamentally not like our belief in Gravity?

That the Truth’s influence on people’s belief very rapidly tails off to nothing?

That belief in God is an axiom? [all FC, paraphrased]

That popular opinion is downstream of deliberate political forces molding it (I add the comment: as opposed to downstream from truth)? [Dase]

Dase’s bizarre “power worshipper” insult, as far as I can tell, comes from the foucauldian idea that truth is just a mask for power. So he hears power when I speak of Truth.

In that conversation, you were saying that if some body of myth won out in the public consciousness, it must have had the most merit. You were making the "might makes right" argument, as in "those narratives won, so they must have been the best." That is not my criteria for whether a narrative has merit:

Okay? Who cares? If people enjoy Superman more than conan the barbarian, if anti-hitler arguments win out in the court of public opinion in New York 1945 as well as in practice in Berlin 1945, if ‘jewish science’ produces better results than ‘purely aryan science’, then that is a far better test of their worth than to try to divine the ulterior motives of the creators through their identity. Everyone has an identity and ulterior motives.

Notice you concede the argument "everyone has an identity and ulterior motives." Yes, they do. So why not try to understand them when it comes to something like Captain America or Superman? You are saying the ulterior motives don't matter, all that matter is that they won in the marketplace of ideas. But why did they win? Because they created effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, not because they were "right." What is right does not always win in the court of public opinion, which anyone here should admit.

I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?

And again, I do not believe that might makes right, or that what is right always wins in the court of public opinion, but it is correlated with it (that's why you cited american public opinion in 1939 to defend your isolationist views).

I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?

My argument is that science winning as consensus doesn't make it right, not that all science that has won out is wrong. The science produced by Jews includes the establishment of an academic, race-denying consensus that has, in my view, had cataclysmic impact on European society. It didn't win out because it was right. Of course Jews have also produced good science as well. What ulterior motive do Jews have to manipulate the laws of physics? The ulterior motives for using authoritarian tactics to enshrine race denial in the Academy are in many cases openly admitted by those most responsible.

How do you separate the right jewish thought that went into 'good science' and the false thought into superman? It just seems like the only difference is you haven't come up with a just-so theory why a certain law of physics benefits jews yet. Which feminists have done for men btw. So keep looking.

How do you separate the right jewish thought that went into 'good science' and the false thought into superman?

It's not a false thought, it's effective propaganda. As Rolling Stone wrote last month:

To our ears, fighting for “truth, justice, and the American Way” may sound like old-fashioned patriotism. But in the 1940s, it was controversial.

In fact, looking back on those early days, Superman was very woke. He was known as the “Champion of the Oppressed.” At a time when Republicans opposed President Roosevelt’s liberal programs and opposed entering World War II, Superman supported — in comic books and on a wildly successful radio program — the New Deal, open immigration, and entering the war against Hitler. Some episodes of the radio show lampooned the KKK.

Indeed, in 1940, Nazi propaganda accused Superman of being a Jewish conspiracy to poison the minds of American youth.

Of course, after Pearl Harbor, American sentiment changed, and Superman became a national hero, not only fighting Nazis in the comic books but with his image emblazoned on tanks and planes. At first, however, he was a progressive — even a radical.

And of course, Superman was also an immigrant. As Schwartz puts it in his book, “he is the ethnic guy with the Hebraic name Kal-El who came to America, changed his mannerisms and appearance. He tucks his tallit [Jewish prayer shawl, but Schwartz means Superman’s costume] down into his suit, and he goes around the world like a gentile. So it’s sort of like the ultimate assimilation/assertion fantasy, the ability to decide which part of you should interact with society at any given moment. What is more American than being an ethnic immigrant, and bringing the gifts and uniqueness of your cultural heritage to the greater benefit of the American society?”

If you think I describe this as a "false thought" or even a "wrong idea" you misunderstand what I am saying. It's highly effective propaganda. In this case, we know the ulterior motives and the cryptic meaning behind the myths because they are openly admitted to, as in the case of Captain America. But even if they weren't openly admitted to, they could be analyzed in the same way every other body of myth or art is analyzed for esoteric symbolic meaning. The case of Superman is pretty overt, we could conclude this even if it weren't openly celebrated by Rolling Stone magazine. You seem to be pretending that with all myth and art we can work to understand the motivation of the artist, but this content produced by Jews is just completely inscrutable? It isn't, it just takes a little bravery to call out a pattern that is very, very clear.

As in, for example, the Frankfurt school they were open about the academic focus of their work being to find a psycotherapy for the Authoritarian Personality to stop anti-Semitism and another Holocaust. In the easiest cases which are well documented, we don't have to guess at the motivations as they are openly admitted to by the influencers. Madison Grant commented on Jews blocking research into race science as early as the 1910s.

You don't need a "just-so" story, you just need to believe them when they describe the motives and meaning of what they are creating!

Can you at least accept Superman as an example of the phenomenon I am describing, even if you want to continue to argue that this hasn't been a widespread practice in the Culture Industry for the past century?

The issue is the strength of the phenomenom. Of course artists put their personal experiences, often their political beliefs, in their work. That doesn’t mean the resulting public opinion is corrupted, and you can just pick 'which truth' you want to follow. A superman comic can’t convince me to jump off a bridge, and it can’t convince americans to go to war with hitler (I can’t believe I’m writing sentences as silly as this).

Or take you, for instance. You have probably consumed copious amounts of pro-white anime or something, where we don't have to guess the motives and meaning of creators either. Does that mean your pro-white views are corrupted bullshit? I would think there is more behind them than you happening to catch conan the barbarian on the tv one night.

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