the_fell_bat:

"It should come as little surprise that the disenfranchised, notably those who disenfranchise themselves willfully, are also the ones most receptive to tenets of postmodernist thinking. They possess no authority, so they desire to annihilate it – or fondly imagine the possibility of its annihilation. They do not possess the capability to build up organizations of power, so they would like nothing better than to see all such structures and institutions torn down. They do not perceive the necessity of conformity in some contexts, so they indiscriminately tout individuality with scant regard for exigencies of circumstances or simple good sense. Their faculties of reason and intelligent analysis are hampered by the logical incoherence of their thought processes and their wrongheaded embrace of irrationality as a guiding intellectual principle. Rather than perceive that a functioning system constitutes fertile ground from which humanity’s various schools of thought may flourish – including their own self-destructive unsustainable one – they ardently wish to see the implosion of all such systems in an anarchic orgy of violence and destruction, a lashing back against a phantom foe that exists only in their own envious imagination.

Fortunately for civilization at large, we may safely proceed along our productive ways, fulfilling our human potential for exercising our reason and intellect upon the world around us, without being unduly affected by these ineffectual provocateurs. They can problematize themselves into oblivion for all we care. They can splash around in the baby pool of semiotic fluids, they can sit around in their little hermeneutic circles knitting interstices with subversive paroxysms, and spend their days gazing within themselves in narcissistic self-indulgent reflection – except they can’t. The demands of this living, breathing external world we inhabit compel some measure of rational action from them, or will eventually do so given enough time. As puzzled as they may be by the notion that a meaningful life is a productive and pleasurable one based on rational principles and the framework of capitalism so many of them find inordinate pleasure in condemning as “de-humanizing”, they will eventually be forced to partake a little of this life, simply in order to live. Else, these death-fetishists write themselves neatly out of the gene-pool, more or less in the manner of Yukio Mishima and his ilk, and the rest of the world shrugs and moves on.

They can stand atop a skyscraper and deny the heights of capitalism’s achievement; they can eat the food grown and delivered to them by the most efficient system for such purposes and smugly decry that same system; they can enjoy the benefits of modern amenities and the safety afforded by modern public institutions and complain of being totalized by the forces of modern conformity; they can close their eyes to the advancement of science and true intellectual thought and worship the horrors of the unknown, with no intention of meaningful engagement with the unknown; they can misuse the tools of reason to preach unreason. Yet for all that they remain laughable specimens of humanity. Unable to produce value, they condemn production and value, while surviving on the productive efforts of others.

There is something gleefully satisfying in watching these thinkers exile themselves to their own Galapagos Islands, where they will simply become the evolutionary dead-end their warped forms of ideology condemn them to be. There they can languish and extemporize at length on the post-condition of their post-exile, the post-structural post-problematics of their post not getting through, on the post-inefficiency of the postman and their post-desire to post-explode the post service. In the meantime, the rest of us will be getting our mail, and on time, too.

The solution to bad science is not no-science, but good science; the solution to bad government is not no-government, but good government; the solution to flawed production is not no-production, but good production; the solution to apathy is not murder, but compassion."


Democracy is the most problematic form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Capitalism is the most problematic economic system, except for all those other systems that have been tried from time to time.

Rationality is the most problematic cognitive framework, except for all those other frameworks that have been tried from time to time.

Academics should be read, not heard.