Who Loves Post-Modernism? - New Video

[Lila9]

I love it. It's very insightful. I'm looking forward to the second part 🐉

[Nivsch]

Just finished the video. As always interesting to me and adds to me more things I didn't think about before, especially at the beginning with the sophisticated ideas and strengths the post modernism has, for example the other ways people can interpret the bible and god's intentions. But there was another even more insightful thing right before that I don't remember at this moment so I will have to hear it again.

Edited September 8 by Nivsch

[Sandroew]

I just finished too. There is a lot to it. I'm excited for future episodes, especially learning more about cognitive development. Going to check back later, I have some thoughts which I have to articulate for myself first. 

[Nivsch]

On 6.9.2024 at 2:30 PM, KingCrimson said:

Without medication, many of these individuals would pose a danger to society and struggle to survive, let alone lead fulfilling lives.

They have been conditioned for decades to think that what they feel is a malfunction, so of course this is not going to be fixed so fast for them.

Their condition and their perception of their condition are intimately intertwined and bi directionally self fulfilling all the time, so there is a gordian knot to solve very slowely.

Unfortunately the mainstream mental health system does not help with that but rather oftentimes makes the problem worse.

Edited September 8 by Nivsch

[Flint]

Around 1:30:00 in the video you mention the dichotomies and distinctions that are made by language e.g. men vs woman and the fact that postmodernim would consider one social construct dominating the other and that those dichotomies should be undone.

But isn't that essentially a value judgement of one social construct/idea/concept being better than the other ? The fact that one part of a dichotomy is dominant or superior over another is relative to a certain society or a certain point of view. So aren't Post modernists being biaised in saying that the dichotomy should be undone because they either say it relative to the idea of every perspective being equal in the abstract or in practice deconstructing a certain power structure those duality enforce in a specific society ?

Even the statement that one part of the duality is dominant compared to the other is very relative.

[enchanted]

On 05/09/2024 at 4:20 PM, Leo Gura said:

 

Who are these postmodernists that Peterson, Dugan, James Lindsay, modernists, and premodernists are so against?

Is it solely the SJWs on college campuses? 

Where else does postmodernism exist that has the modernists so riled up?

I'm not sure if the Leos video answered this question or not. 

 

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, enchanted said:

Who are these postmodernists that Peterson, Dugan, James Lindsay, modernists, and premodernists are so against?

In their deluded minds it's the entire left.

At this point, anyone who threatens the right-wing worldview is a "post-modernist".

Edited September 8 by Leo Gura

[ArcticGong]

Does geography count as a grand narrative? Then I’m a strong proponent of its validity. Because I’ve observed that naturally endowed countries tend to do better than less gifted countries. Not to discount human capital and ideas, but some places are just bound to be more successful. But I’m still a fan of many post-modern concepts. 

[Leo Gura]

5 minutes ago, ArcticGong said:

Does geography count as a grand narrative? Then I’m a strong proponent of its validity. Because I’ve observed that naturally endowed countries tend to do better than less gifted countries. Not to discount human capital and ideas, but some places are just bound to be more successful. But I’m still a fan of many post-modern concepts. 

Notice, you can make it a grand narrative or a micro-narrative. That's up to you.

God gives you enough rope to hang yourself.

[BojackHorseman]

Am finishing the video
About the example of "being a mad man might be better than living a life stuck in cubicle"
Sure, everything is relative
But most of the time, for the sake of simplification, I'll take extreme cases, and I believe that what we qualify as "mad" is a person that cannot take care of him/her and is dangerous for them or others.
Which lead us back to "is hurting others or dying bad?"

Thing is, objectively, no, it's not. Being Hitler is objectively not bad, and I'm not even mad at that thought.
But as a living species, we have to decide of a way of living.
And if we do want to, well, live, with the least "useful" (as in, the one that makes us make progress) suffering, we can't decide to just die.
And we can't decide to let useless suffering happen if we can help it.

In the mad man exemple, not commenting on the methods and I think psychiatry does have its share of bad treatment and just numbing people out.
But, if we accept that we want to be a living species, and therefore protect life, I think it's not of any use avoiding the idea that healing people (the best we can), protecting them in general, is an idea that could be considered bad.

Those ideas about bias are very seductive (I actually do tend to think like that whenever I can), and absolutely true as a way of thinking, and can be VERY useful to understand the world better around us rather than being dogmatic, but at some point we gotta ACT. For our survival. And if we do not want to survive, fine. But for those who do (otherwise, what is the point of life honestly, if you don't use it?), yeah, I think taking decisions that will, on average, make humanity stronger, is good.
Not talking about capitalism or tech or whatnot. Those can still be problems to discuss and balance and will leave plenty of ordeals to grow ourselves.
But simple survival, and just not killing each others? I'm sure those could benefit anyone that puts his ego on the side, fighting for petty things (yes, even religions and territories)

EDIT : the video is still great and useful tho. It is a great way of thinking. But sometimes, balancing things too much I think, may be almost as detrimental as being dogmatic. And I'm the first victim of that. People have always looked at me weird, frustrated, because I'm always trying to balance things out instead of just having a simple unilateral opinion

Edited September 11 by BojackHorseman

[KingCrimson]

On 7.9.2024 at 9:28 PM, Leo Gura said:

@Nilsi There is a problem in that we have a big difference between "postmodernism" as a broad idea in our culture vs the actual technical philosophical work of specific post-modern philosophers. There is a disconnect in how to summarize the work of all these PM thinkers into a cohesive thing.

Most of the so-called post-modern philosophers like Derrida would not even regard or call themselves postmodernist.

PM has become a sort of gross abstraction, made all the worse by right-wing renditions of it.

The challenge with this topic is that if you get really technical and scholarly with it, there's not even going to be a "postmodernism" at the end of the day. Yet people still talk about the postmodern era.

Laymen and right-wingers still speak of postmodernism as an ideological movement or broad attitude. That's what my videos are focused on addressing, not the individual works of Derrida or whoever.

The point of my video is not to present a lecture on the history of philosophy but to help the mind make sense of important epistemic insights that modernism and premodernism misses.

Making a video about the techncial arguments of Derrida or Deleuze is just not useful to our work. No one but philosophy nerds cares about that and it will not be applicable in everyday life. Even my video is already quite disconnected for most from daily application.

This is one of the problems I have with academic philosophy: it may be scholarly rigorous, but it has zero application in real life. Nothing is actually made sense of. It's just the parroting of ideas some dead guy has said. You can have perfect technical knowledge of Derrida and it will get you nowhere, but you will waste several years of your life to achieve it.

While I do agree with what you've said here, I would like to point out that even in academic philosophy, there are outliers and exceptions.

For example, I was lucky to find a professor who has been practicing (real) Yoga his entire life, spent a decade in India for that purpose, and who is very much in favour of psychedelics. Of course, he is pretty much an outcast at the institute, which is dominated by analytic philosophers who basically don't take him seriously. But he doesn't care. He realizes that some topics, such as psychedelics, are taboo among what he calls "burgeoise" philosophers. He just does his thing, is able to get the research money to work on the projects he's interested in, and he teaches the stuff that he himself considers valuable. The way he teaches is also the opposite from what you suggest happens within academia: In all his seminars and lectures, he is encouraging students to think for themselves and constantly coming up with real-world, tangible examples for the ideas he is talking about. He was happy for me to do a comparison of Ken Wilber and Sri Aurobindo's ontologies for my bachelor thesis.

If you're interested, here's a lecture by him. Incidentally, he immediately addresses some of the problems of academic philosophy you mentioned right at the beginning:

There is another professor at my university who is originally from Japan who is teaching a lot on East Asian Buddhism and the intersection between philosophy, physics, and consciousness studies. As part of her lectures, she regularly invites her students to take part in a meditation session in the Zen-Do she is involved with. She, too, is very adamant about her work not being mere mental masturbation, but trying to make an actual impact on people's lives. Meeting this woman has been a very enriching experience.

All of that is to say: There ARE university professors who do not agree with the status quo and whose teaching is very much more along the lines of what you're proposing. You might need a bit of luck to find them, but they do exist. I am stressing this so much because I almost ditched the idea of studying philosophy at university for the reasons you suggest. When I actually went, I found that some of my assumptions had been wrong, and I was happy to have made the decision to give it a go. I would have missed out if I had kept my "Academic philosophy is bullshit anyways" attitude, I was ignorant of the possibilities I would have at uni, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I also don't necessarily agree that understanding the work of Derrida, or any other philosopher, "will get you nowhere". It MIGHT get you nowhere, it MIGHT as well get you somewhere - if you actually grasp the concepts as opposed to just memorizing and parrotting them, and do the original thinking required to apply the concepts to your own life. If nothing else, it will give you a better understanding of the philosophical positions you reject and why that is the case. I certainly feel like I got a lot of value out of my coursework so far. Not only the actual content that's being taught - I feel like my thinking is sharper, and I can more easily identify flawed reasoning and arguments. I have become a better writer and a more eloquent speaker, and I have even been able to spend a lot of time studying things which I actually find meaningful.

I am curious: How much impact do you feel your own Bachelor's in philosophy had on your work? I have been following your work for years and have probably watched every single video at least once, and from my perspective, you might be underestimating how much you have gained from your degree. I think Actualized.org might look very differently (or might not even be possible) without that academic background of yours, but of course, I could be wrong.