You might have noticed that something is frightening and fundamentally wrong in modern universities. Violent social justice warriors shut down conservatives’ speeches, even moderate ones such as Ben Shapiro, under the pretense of “fighting fascism.” Students rail against male and female toilets as “sexist.” Halloween costumes are deemed to be racist and “cultural appropriation.” Professors claim that math, science, and meritocracy are expressions of “white supremacy.”
What’s going on? Has the world gone crazy? Has academia been possessed by demons? It’s much worse than that. The philosophy known as postmodernism has infected intellectuals and the humanities and social sciences in particular all over America. We can trace nearly all of the disturbing behaviors that are seeping out of universities back to this dark and mangled philosophy.
It started with Hume
Postmodernism is the product of a cancerous tumor that began to grow late in the 18th century. Up until then, the world had seen remarkable progress in science, which resulted in the industrial revolution and capitalism. Right at the heart of Western thought, David Hume injected a deadly poison, which marked the foundation of the philosophy called Skepticism. He undermined the idea that we could have certain knowledge (“the problem of induction”), and he undermined the idea that we could have moral knowledge (“the is/ought problem”).
These speculations may seem distant and unimportant to the modern casual reader, but Hume’s ideas were the seed that first grew into Kant’s philosophy and finally culminating in postmodernism.
Postmodernism claims that knowledge is fundamentally impossible. Everything is relative. There is no truth, only power. That is from where the idea of science and math being white supremacy comes. It is from this dark philosophy that the idea that there is no such thing as sex, race or scientific truth has emerged.
The Ominous Parallels
Philosopher Leonard Peikoff, a student of Ayn Rand, was one of the first academics to detail the connection between the German philosophy following Kant and the rise of Nazi Germany in his book “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America.” He also made a warning and prediction that the ethos that had nearly destroyed the continent of Europe had also infected American universities and that in the future we could see in America a rise of something akin to the totalitarian forces we witnessed in the 1930s.
Postmodernism is ominously parallel to the ideas of hate and destruction that infested the Third Reich.
Cain and Abel
As Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson has pointed out, postmodernism does not seem to be motivated by an honest search for truth, but rather by resentment and hatred of being. Peterson describes this as the story of Cain and Abel. Enraged by his failure and pain, Cain kills his moral ideal, his brother Abel, in revenge.
Peterson says that hatred of Being itself is the motivation that drove the Columbine killers to shoot and murder innocent children at a school. He says that postmodernists have the same motivation – to destroy everything that is good out of a deep resentment for existence itself.
The endarkenment
The postmodernists are openly against every ideal and value of the enlightenment: free thought, free speech, freedom of association, the efficacy of reason and objective truth. As such, postmodernism represents a form of anti-enlightenment, which has as its goal to extinguish the light at the heart of Western culture. Therefore postmodernism should aptly be named the endarkenment.
