https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=e_WBFRRsYn0
I’ve been criticized for my views on postmodernism, my assumption that it’s a form of Marxism. And so here’s what I think Marxism and postmodernism share, and here’s how I think they’re different. And this is a good thing for conservatives to know, because they share the victim-victimizer narrative. And that in itself isn’t Marxist. That’s a variant of the story of Cain and Abel. It’s the ancient way of viewing the world through the lens of resentment. And Marxism was a variant of that. Now the postmodernists dispensed with Marxism, and they did that partly because people like Solzhenitsyn showed how brutal and catastrophic by necessity Marxism became. Now all those French postmodernists, they were steeped in Marxism. They didn’t want to give it up. So they kept the victim-victimizer narrative, and they turned it into something multi-dimensional. That would be the intersectional postmodernism, where you can be a victim or a victimizer on any dimension of comparison and all of them simultaneously. So it’s like a metamarxism. It’s like the full flowering of bitter resentment. But here’s the difference, and this is so stunning. It just hit me hard this week. The Marxists insisted that the primary dimension of victim-victimizer, and really the only one worth considering given their universal human vision, was economic. And the bloody postmodernists put that at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy. So weirdly, although they accepted and propagated the victim-victimizer narrative, they inverted the hierarchy so that, see, you can think about someone like Claudine Gay. There’s no way you can make the case that Claudine Gay was oppressed economically. In fact, economically, coming from a rich family, as she did, she’s clearly a victimizer. But that doesn’t count because for some incomprehensible reason, maybe, and this is where I would particularly like your comments, the postmodern victim-victimizer types, they abandoned the economic issue. That’s why poor white people can’t be oppressed, even though I think the most compelling case you can make for the victim-victimizer narrative is on the grounds of economic inequality. Now I’m not saying you can make an overwhelmingly powerful case for it even there, but if you were going to make a case, that would be… You’ve got to give Marx credit for at least identifying that as perhaps the cardinal dimension of potentially tragic inequality. So, what do you think about that? The prioritization of Marxism as, or the victim-victimizer narrative as the cardinal orienting story of mankind, and then this weird inversion of Marxism that characterizes the radicals that we see today? I mean, I certainly think that there’s a lot of support for that idea. There are a lot of philosophers who, for example, have treated Marxism not as an outgrowth of a capitalist economic theory, but actually as a sort of perverse and twisted outgrowth of a misread of Christianity. That Christianity suggesting that the Meek will inherit the earth, but on an economic level the Meek aren’t inheriting the earth, therefore there must be some form of class exploitation that’s going on. And so reading Marxism as a weird offshoot of Christianity rather than a weird offshoot is sort of one way of seeing that in a misread of Christianity. Nietzsche actually did some of this, right? Nietzsche actually sort of suggested this when he treated Christianity as a perverse version of a victim-victimizer, a victim narrative that replaced the idea of good, strong, and beautiful and weak, nasty, and terrible. His moral prism was the idea that just because something is good and strong doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily bad, and he was creating what I think is a perverse view of Christianity as arguing against that and then creating a victim-victimizer narrative in opposition to that. When you talk about the postmodernists, I think one of the things postmodernists are doing is I think almost all postmodernism is a form of projection. And so when they suggest that all narratives are about power dynamics, I think what they are saying is they wish to use their narrative as a power dynamic. Narrative they understand is the thing that drives human beings, and so what they do is they read their own willingness to drive human beings via a narrative like victim-victimizer into every narrative. So it must be that every narrative is driven by an underlying power substructure because their narrative, they believe, is driven by an underlying power substructure. And I think obviously that’s wrong. And again, I think that that also comes from a postmodernism, again, is sort of a weird perverse offshoot of the Enlightenment in the sense that if you’re talking about an a priori view of the world, which is that everything that you have arrived at in society, everything that pre-exists you is effectively arbitrary or aversion of crammed down power. That there’s no validity to the world that you inherit, which is, I think, one of the premises of some of the changes that came about because of the Enlightenment, but also one of the premises of postmodernism, which is you get to wreck all the systems because you were born into an unfair system driven by perverse views of power. That’s the great lie. And so postmodernism has to have its own narrative. Of course, the great kind of meta-failing of postmodernism is that in its desire to destroy all narratives as forms of power, they have to derive their own narrative in order to do that. Postmodernism is self-defeating on the very root intellectual level. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not effective. And again, I think a lot of this lies, a lot of the Enlightenment, the post Enlightenment, a lot of this lies in, frankly, a perverse misreading of biblical narratives. So let me touch on that one. Okay, so I just wrote about the parable of the unjust steward. Now, it’s a very interesting parable. So the story is about this employer, essentially, and he has an employee, a servant, but an employee for all intents and purposes. And he threatens to fire him for misusing his funds. And the employee goes out to some of his subcontractors and he offers them this deal where if they pay off a certain proportion of their debts immediately so that he has some money so that he can move forward in good faith, apart from this side deal with his employer, then everything will be set straight. And so he does that and he generates enough capital to satisfy his master. Now there’s a certain dishonesty in his maneuverings, but Christ says to his followers that the children of darkness, essentially, are sometimes wiser than the children of light and that there’s some utility in serving mammon properly as long as you don’t prioritize that over services of what is to the highest. It’s a very, very interesting parable. Because as you mentioned, there’s a reading of Christianity that has what you might argue is like an anti-materialist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist bent, but I believe that a close reading of the Gospels puts that interpretation completely off to the side. There is an emphasis that those who claim false power will be held to account for that and that those who are just and good but marginalized will be brought to the center. But that has nothing to do with an essential narrative of fundamental oppression. It’s a much deeper idea than that. The true virtue will be rewarded and false virtue punished even if the false virtue is associated with material prosperity, right, that the truth will be revealed. So Christ’s point in that particular parable is that the discipline that you can learn while managing, let’s say, money or managing money for someone else, managing material prosperity is a virtue that is, first of all, genuinely a virtue and that can be a precursor virtue to service to the highest possible good, which it should be a subset of anyways, and that it can’t just be tossed off casually as all service to material prosperity or life more abundant is because of its materialism or its capitalism to be regarded with extreme suspicion. And it’s also not money that’s regarded as the primary sin in the Gospels either. It’s love of money and that means the prioritization of money over God. It doesn’t mean the pursuit of life more abundant. This is also a place, I think, where the Jewish tradition has got things very right because my sense is there’s a laudable emphasis in the Jewish tradition on the goodness of a good life, right, the material, present, physical goodness of a good life. And that is different than that spiritualized reading of Christianity that makes everything in the material world like damned and corrupt by definition.