 Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks. So if you've been watching this channel for a while, you know that I have never said that a book is a must read, but this one's a must read, especially for libertarians. It'll put into context centuries of important philosophical thought that informs the left. You may be thinking, why is it so hard? Why aren't our libertarian arguments the case for a free society? The obvious prosperity that capitalism achieves. Why isn't it obvious? And this'll show you where they're coming from. It'll show you their thinking. And he starts with the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment of Sir Francis Bacon, Des Cartes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and its fruits, the fruits of the Enlightenment were so obvious and so immense. They invented science. They invented engineering. They built civilization that only an academic could fail to appreciate them. In France, you had Rousseau, who was a perversion of the Enlightenment. And in Germany, you had the counter-Enlightenment begun by Kant. Now, I've only read bits and pieces of the philosophers that I'm gonna talk about and that I learned more about through this book. So I've only read bits and pieces of first-hand, you know, of original sources. So I am coming from the perspective of this criticism mostly. And there's probably a little bit more to be said. But they did seem like a whole bunch of degenerates to me. And I'm sticking by that statement. Kant was the first. He put a barrier between perception and reality. Nothing can really be known about the world. Logic is okay. Rationality is okay. Had Kant even had a very liberal, and I mean liberal in the 19th century sense, political and economic beliefs, but he put this barrier between the real world and what we can know about it. Now, he didn't just say perception is imperfect. He went like other skeptics did. He went all the way and made a much more stronger statement that we can't know anything about the real world. So yes, our thoughts can be logical and rational, but they're disconnected from the real world. That's why Anne Rand called the machine gunner of the mind. In David Gordon's series on philosophers, he says there's a European and American interpretation and Anne Rand seemed to only criticize the American one. But Steph and Hicks' book certainly makes it sound like the American one is the actual version, is the actual correct interpretation. Maybe there's more to be said. And why did Kant do this? Well, Kant was deeply religious and he wanted to defend religion and he needed to change epistemology. Rationality was wreaking havoc upon religion or so he fought and so he changed the rules of truth essentially and he admitted this. I hear therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith, he wrote. After Kant came Hegel. Hegel didn't dismiss Kant, but he wanted some kind of reality. So he created a metaphysics. He said that we create our reality, our minds create reality. And he put contradiction. He says, contradiction is okay, you can, it doesn't disturb reason. You know, it's one thing to have doubts and to see the limitations of human perception and stuff like that, but it's another thing to declare it impossible. Hegel was also deeply religious and had similar motivation. The book talks about Schleyermacher. He wrote, the essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. I repudiate rational thought in favor of a theology of feeling. Then there's the, I think he was Danish. Kierkegaard, he wrote a book called Fear and Trembling in which he writes how God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac and how this is, you know, that biblical passage and how that's an example of irrationality. Therefore we must relinquish our understanding and thinking and keep our souls fixed upon the absurd. Faith requires the crucifixion of reason. Now to me, these all seem like completely degenerate philosophies that should fall prey to their own logic. If there's no such thing as truth and reason and rationality, what basis do you have for making these claims? What basis do you have for relying on feelings? The book also talks about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who are also reality and reason denying degenerates but they were also atheists. So they followed in the tradition of these theists who began their skepticism in order to preserve religion but they, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche happened to be atheists. We go into the 20th century with Heidegger why is there being rather than nothing? He says that conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality. Which, you know, it's fine, you can't answer these questions. I don't think have sufficient answers why is there something rather than nothing but just because you encounter contradiction doesn't mean you throw out the whole rational mind that doesn't mean you throw out reason when its gifts are so obvious. It seems like these people are just kind of like socialists do with economics. They find one little tiny flaw of capitalism or these guys find one little tiny flaw of reason or logic or something that it can't address. And then with no scrutiny whatsoever they propose some ridiculous stupid system. They do not apply their scrutiny to their system. They only apply their scrutiny to the one they're criticizing be it capitalism in terms of today's socialists or reason in terms of the counter-enlightenment. He talks about Wittgenstein, about Kuhn, about Rorty who says, Rorty said, to say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that out there there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would best be served by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter as a topic of philosophical interests. So Rorty says maybe there is, maybe there isn't truth but we should forget about it. Okay, so here's the counter-enlightenment but the big question remains why are all these post-modernists who follow on the shoulders of the counter-enlightenment why are all the post-modernists leftists? Why are they all radical leftists? It's almost without exception. Foucault, Derrida, I don't know all of these. Lloyd Tard, Rorty, Lacan, Stanley Fish, Catherine McKinnon, Andreas, Houston, they are all radical leftists. And Stephen Hicks' fascinating thesis, which I think is correct, is that the far left had a big identity crisis because socialism was such a spectacular failure. It was such a, to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, it was such a spectacular failure that only an academic can fail to realize this and academics indeed fail to realize this and they responded by creating a new reality or denying reality and playing all these stupid games that they borrowed from the counter-enlightenment. So the book sort of resets then and after offering this thesis and it traces the philosophers that had a more political bent. Rousseau, who was a horrible, horrible human being, it seems, he wrote things like. All the subsequent progress has been made in appearance in so many steps toward the perfection of the individual and in fact toward the decay of the species. He views progress as decay, he views civilization as decay. The state ought to have universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole. This is Rousseau, we can understand now why he's so popular among academics because he's a gigantic socialist. And we learn about Johann Herter. I am not here to think, he wrote, but to feel, live as socialism. We learned about Johann Fichte, who I'd heard about first in the wonderful podcast called School Sucks, School Sucks podcast. Great, great material coming from there. And this was an interesting bit of history too. The unification of Germany came from a fear and humiliation at the hands of Napoleon. So the Enlightenment happened in England, Rousseau perverted it in France, and it was Rousseau's followers who gained control, especially towards the end of the French Revolution and out of that chaos and out of that bloodbath arose Napoleon who invented total war, contacted the disparate German principalities and left in his wake this desire for Germans to never let that happen again. And I never had all those events connected, which is another reason why this was such a fascinating read. And Johann Fichte, a following herder, was just calling for this unification of Germany and Fichte created the modern public education system. That's almost identical everywhere in the world. It was Johann Fichte was the intellectual force behind its creation. We learn about Joseph Goebbels saying basically national socialism and Marxism are the same. There was kind of a struggle who could claim to be the left, who claimed to be the right, eventually the Marxists ended up on the left and the national socialists on the right, even though they were very, very similar. There's an observation by Hayek of American students returning from German universities, not sure if they were national socialists, meaning Nazis or Bolsheviks, but absolutely sure that they hated the free market. Again, it is so obvious that national socialism and Bolshevism are very similar and that Nazism is not capitalism, even though I was taught that at the University of Iowa that the Nazis were pro-capitalism and the Marxists were pro-socialists and what we really need is a balance between the two. Absolutely ridiculous, the type of nonsense that only an academic could come up with. We had the war ended, the war ended right collectivism. It was left collectivism and right collectivism and a little bit of libertarians who most people ignored like Mises and Hayek. Then right collectivism lost the war. So what was left was left collectivism, huge celebrations among the socialists. That's why you had journalists like Walter Duranty saying there was no famine when millions of Ukrainians were being starved to death. That's why you have, what was his name? That Welsh journalist who was writing the truth about the Ukrainian famine, he was assassinated. I'm going off on a tangent here. I'm of Ukrainian descent and I've read a lot about these issues, this bit of history and it upsets me how little known it is. Back to explaining postmodernism. So postmodernism, things were great. They weren't really great, but everyone thought they were great. And in the West, they thought they were great until about 1956, two things happened in 1956. Stalin died and you had Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. Khrushchev said, yes, we're killing millions of people. There are all these labor camps, there's this big gulag. So some people, this is how dedicated many American socialists were. Some people dismissed Khrushchev as a CIA spy who was spreading lies about the glorious Soviet system. But most socialists could not follow that line of thinking. You also had the Soviet invasion of Hungary. There was a revolution in Hungary of workers and other people. And that was not good for the workers' paradise. So they sent all these tanks in and brutally repressed these protests. So there was this crisis in socialism. And Hicks' whole idea, which is the correct idea, is that socialism has had an identity crisis ever since then. There's this chart in the book, and I'm gonna try to put it in the video, but you had a classical Marxist socialism, which presumed to be scientific, Marx even called it scientific socialism, although, and this isn't a point made by Hicks, but Mises has written a lot about how Marx's dialectical materialism is idea that everything, all human thought even comes from man's material conditions. I think that can rightly be regarded as a war on rationality. The book doesn't address this. Dialectical materialism is illogical in a war against truth. Mises wrote how Marx, rather than rebutting the economists who were saying, no, you're an idiot, none of this makes any sense, he just dismissed them as agents of the bourgeois class because your thoughts come from your class, not from logic or rationality, so therefore anything the economists could possibly come up with is just a function of their class. So that seems to contradict the idea that Marxism was originally logical and scientific and the product of the Enlightenment, although Marx called it scientific socialism and there were many people who certainly argued along those lines, so I don't know how to resolve that, but nevertheless, socialism made a bunch of claims, Marxism made a bunch of claims, capitalist countries would grow poorer and more exploitative, which socialist countries would go richer and stronger. This became absolutely ridiculous. The masses would revolt and capitalism would collapse. You had failure, so then you had this rethinking rebranding of Marxism. We can't leave it to the workers, we need the intellectuals to do it. That was Lenin, Mao, and you can also add that idiot who appears on all the T-shirts, Che Guevara, we can't rely on the workers, they have uprisings in Hungary, so although that was after the fact, but that failed, the intellectuals failed, by 1956 it was clear that Lenin's revolution turned into a gigantic meat grinder, China was becoming poorer, Cuba was a disaster, basket case everywhere you look. So you had the true believers saying that the revolution will still come, they failed, and then you had this splintering of socialism, looking for a new epistemology. One is changing the ethical standards, the other was changing their epistemology. By changing their ethical standards, there was a switch from need to equality. In the early days, it was about need. They argued that socialism would produce more material wealth, and we want it to be rich. Socialism makes people more rich than capitalism, but then when it became, when that became ridiculous, they said, oh no, we don't want wealth, we want equality, that huge important switch. And I think many libertarians, in arguing their point, they don't acknowledge that this switch has been made. They're still arguing, they're still making the need argument, not realizing that their ideological opponents have switched to the equality argument. We need to argue against equality. The other switch in the standard, instead one was from need to equality, the other switch was from wealth is good, to wealth is bad, which is environmentalism. And for anybody who doesn't like hearing this or gets offended when people throw out the term watermelon green on the outside, red on the inside, there is even a book called From Red to Green, written by Rudolf Bahro, B-A-H-R-O, some Marxists wrote the book From Red to Green. Again, this was a splintering of socialism in different directions when the original socialism proved to be an absolute disaster. Another little branch of that splintering was fomenting violent terrorism. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was this rise of all these red terrorist groups. University students would sit around and talk about the best way to kill 50,000 people, which would probably be necessary. One of their intellectual heroes was Herbert Marqueuse. And he made an, again, and he was already antirational because rationality had already condemned socialism. So he explicitly called for the use of philosophy to achieve the quote, absolute annihilation of the common sense world. Rather than admit you're wrong about socialism, you need to annihilate truth. So this was the new left, the new violent left, just calling out for these terrorist groups to lash out. And by the 70s, they were all either arrested or dead or lost interest. And Herbert Marqueuse was asked in 1974 whether he thinks the new left is gone. And he said, I don't think it's dead. It will resurrect in the universities. And it did. It's always the intellectuals. You had Foucault, you had Louyoy Tard. I don't know his writing at all. Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. It was Rorty who said, I think that a good left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn't care about its past sins. So today we are left with post-modern contradictions. We've all heard them. We may not know them under this label, but we've all heard them. On the one hand, all truth is relative. On the other hand, post-modernism tells it the way it really is. This philosophy, like the whole counter-enlightenment should fall prey to its own logic. If truth doesn't exist, on what basis are you making these claims? Continuing with the post-modern contradictions. On one hand, all cultures are deserving of respect. On the other hand, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad. Values are subjective, but sexism and racism are really evil. Technology is bad and destructive and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others. Tolerance is good and dominance is bad, but when post-modernists come to power, we're gonna dominate the hell out of you. Post-modernists say that the West is deeply racist, but they know very well that the West ended slavery for the first time ever. And that it is only places where Western ideas have made inroads that racist ideas are on the defensive. They say the West is deeply sexist, but they know that Western women were the first to get the right to vote, contractual rights and the opportunities that most women in the world are still without. And lastly, they say that Western capitalist countries are cruel to their poor members, subjugating them and getting rich off them, but they know very well that the poor in the West are far richer than the poor anywhere else, both in terms of material assets and in opportunities to improve their conditions. Now, Hicks specifies three reasons why, why are they making these blatant contradictions? Like a five-year-old can notice these contradictions. I think his three reasons can be summarized into two reasons, evil and stupid. Evil meaning it's Machiavellian, they know they're lying as an excuse to weaken the opposition and come to power. And stupid is they're just dumb. They, contradiction, no problem. He makes a, now Nietzsche, I think for the most part, was kind of also a degenerate. And he was brilliant, I think he was a genius. He was a degenerate, I think his philosophy is full of contradictions, which you would probably celebrate, and it's just a collection of aphorisms, sometimes contradictory aphorisms. But towards the end of the book, Hicks uses Nietzsche, a quote from Nietzsche to accurately describe the postmodernists, and he kind of interested me too as a writer. He says that language is the weapon of the weak, words are the weapon of the weak. And I thought about this for days after reading it, and I think he's right. Aristotle was trying to justify himself, Machiavelli was ousted from society and was trying to win his way back in. All these writers, they write because they're outcasts. The rulers just rule, but all these great thinkers that who've been ousted, they're the ones who need to write. So these postmodernists, they're the socialist losers, and so they write. And he also uses Nietzsche's term, resentiments, which is like resentments, but stronger, resentiments. And he says, since they can't have their way, they wanna burn down the world. He writes like postmodernists, Iago, it's from Shakespeare's Othello. Iago's weapons were words. The only difference, the postmodernists are not so subtle in their intended targets. All right, 25 minutes. I'm gonna, all right, so why is this book important? Well, it puts all these philosophers and all this intellectual history into context. Great, connected a lot of ideas. Connected a lot of ideas from Rousseau to the unification of Germany, from Rousseau to Napoleon to the unification of Germany. Fascinating. But it's also important in terms of libertarian strategy. I would like to achieve as libertarian a society as possible. But I think libertarians, so I want libertarians to be effective. And I think they're making mistakes. Libertarians are still arguing against Marxism. They've given up Marxism. Our ideological opponents have long given up Marxism. In place of Marxism, they've adopted irrationality and egalitarianism. And that's what we need to argue against. Kensianism a little bit. But for the most part, it's equalitarianism. And that's all for now. Have a great day. Thanks for listening.