https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u-BSbF0zRr0
All right, so today what we’re going to try to do is talk about postmodernism. Now, I made this video and I didn’t do a good job, so I had to remake it. But I want to propose to you that some of the problems with postmodernism are knowing how, where, when, and to apply it. It doesn’t have a stopping point for its application. It puts the burden of authority on you and by allowing you to ignore authority as such, but that lacks cooperation. And it lacks a good, like where’s the good? So I’m going to outline this case. I’m going to use a bunch of framing. I’m going to tell you what I think about this. And hopefully we can get to the bottom of this idea of postmodernism. Now, I think that one of the fundamental things you notice with postmodern thinking is that it’s kind of everywhere and we’re doing it without thinking about it. But what are we actually doing? So one of the interesting things I noticed is I’ve seen a number of French philosophers who are in France, never been to the U.S., and they’ve been asked about sort of the postmodern ideas being implemented in the United States. And invariably they look aghast. They don’t understand why that would be a postmodern argument, which is sort of weird. And they’re typically asked, like, well, what do you think of this? And they’re like, well, we would never apply postmodernism on that or in that way or using that sort of formulation. And I’ve seen more than one interview like this. And the interviewer will ask them, well, why wouldn’t you? And they can’t answer the question, which is really strange, very strange. And so it seems like there’s a set of axiomatic assumptions that isn’t being expressed correctly by the postmoderns. Like, when does this get used? What things is it valid to use the postmodern framing on? You know, where is this? And I think that’s your responsibility as a philosopher or a practitioner of a philosophy is to know your starting axioms. Like, what are you starting from? Where are your limits? How do you apply this? Right. And this is kind of important. It’s kind of important. Otherwise, you know, how do you know if it’s going to stray into the good or the bad? Right. Like, how do you how can you prove it’s for the good? How do you prevent it from straying into the bad? What happens if it gets in the hands of somebody else? These are real concerns. And I don’t think postmodernism as a philosophy addresses any of them because it doesn’t talk about axioms. And it seems to be to me that the way people are using postmodernism is that they are implying that there’s no limit to things like the number of interpretations or that that limit is arbitrary. They’re not defining, well, these are valid interpretations, these are invalid interpretations. But what if there are an infinite number of interpretations? Because that just leaves us confused. And again, this goes back to starting axioms and the boundaries and limitations of your system. Or are you claiming your system has no limitations? Because that’s an interesting claim. All right. I would call that religious claim, by the way, not a philosophical claim. So if there’s no limit, if there’s no system of interpretation, what are you talking about when you say the meaning of a text? And I think this is one of the key problems is that we’re very confused about the term meaning and what is meaning. And I don’t think meaning is an object of the same type of, say, a text or a word. And I went over this in a previous video, right? Meanings and words. And roughly speaking, words don’t have meaning. That’s not how that works. Words have content. We typically call that a definition. They might have more than one possible definition, but they have content and context. And that’s the sentence, the paragraph, the words that become before and after. Right. And maybe the culture in which those words are expressed. So you see this in the difference between how people in Australia, England and the U.S. express frustration or swear. Right. We have different different phrases for that with with different in different ultimate uses, but the similar meanings. Right. Like if you’re going to call somebody stupid, you do that very differently in Australia and you do that very differently in England from how you do it in the U.S. And I know there’s more than one way. Right. You say there is the postmodern criteria. It’s not because not always are valid. Like if I call somebody a flower, I’m not necessarily calling them stupid. So it’s not arbitrary. So where are the lines? And if you’re not defining the lines, you’re not helping anybody. You’re just making things worse. I think that’s worth understanding. Like, are they actually making things better by engaging with this? If meaning is an emergent property from context and content, well, what does that mean? That probably means that there aren’t an infinite number of interpretations and that the interpretations are not, in fact, arbitrary. So it’s easy to get confused between more than one interpretation and arbitrary interpretations. Those are different statements. Those are entirely different statements. So you can look at Moby Dick and you can say, you know, Moby Dick is about the sign of the times or wailing or one man’s obsession, right? Is it addiction with whatever? Or honestly, you could frame it about gender. You could say Moby Dick is a whale and the whale represents the white patriarchy. Absolutely. You can do that. Yes, you can pick any frame you want and put any text you want in any frame you want. You can do that. Is that useful? Is it helpful? Is it towards the good? Because that might be the most important thing. And the problem with this sort of an attitude is that the ability to do this, the ability to take a text or a set of words or a set of propositions, right? And change how you interact with them gives you a sense of power. You feel smart and you can do it by yourself as an individual. Right. And that’s an allure for your ego. Right. It makes you egocentric. It tells you you have more control over the world than you have because an interpretation is only good if other people can connect to it. If other people can participate in that interpretation. And then you may say, oh, one other person in the world on the Internet can. OK. But if it’s only one other person, is that really good? Like if it’s just you and one other person, are you going to manifest something in the world? Because that seems a little limiting. And then it removes authority entirely. But that puts you in the position of being authoritative, which, you know, feels nice. So I’m in charge now. I can just change the frame of Moby Dick and suddenly the author means nothing. True. But the author does mean something. The author lived at a given time, right, in a given place, was trying to make a point or maybe two, maybe also made other points because maybe that’s unavoidable in the world. Like you can’t just select one thing and change the one thing. Right. As maybe the postmoderns seem to indicate, you can, whether they state that explicitly or not, is irrelevant. That’s how it’s interpreted. And fairly so, I think. I think it’s fair to interpret it that way. And that’s because there’s no state it starting axioms, no boundaries, no limits stated within postmodernism. And so that gives you a great deal of power. Right. You can be clever. But are you an author? Like, are you are you able to critique an author? Is that have you written enough stuff that you can do that? Have you written enough stuff that other people understood in the way that you intend? Have you written enough stuff and had it critiqued by others that you’re now a good critic? Because that might be required. I don’t know. And I’m not saying that’s an exclusive claim, but it’s a good marker to look at. And then if you’re reinterpreting a text, are you acting out of superior knowledge? Or are you acting out of ignorance? Because those look the same. And that’s sort of shocking. And it happens all the time, all the time. People, you know, you don’t need you don’t need that extra line of code. You don’t need you don’t need quite so many supports for your bridge. Yeah, you don’t need you don’t need that many colors in your painting. Are you sure? Are you sure you’re right about that? Maybe not for your goal, but maybe for their goal. And maybe it can satisfy both goals. But maybe you’re just trying to be efficient or reductionistic, because efficiency and reductionism are pretty close to the same thing. And there’s no reason for that. And that’s actually antithetical, because maybe you’re cutting out something that’s required so that thing can be more than you realize, more than merely your personal perspective, bigger than you. And so, yeah, I mean, is it just making you look smart? Because all you’re doing is rejecting things, right? And it’s very individualistic, objective and materialist. And I have a video on that. If you haven’t seen that, it’s good video, right? I talk about those three concepts. Postmodernism is wrapped up in that, I think. I don’t know which came first. I don’t care. You know, it doesn’t matter. It seems like you’re empowering somebody will to power, right, with individualism by giving them this objectivist worldview. But that seems to cause them, you know, to think more of themselves than maybe they ought, right? It seems to give them a sense of authority while rejecting the idea of authority, because after all, they’re the ones interpreting the text now, not these other people who maybe have thought about it, read it many more times, or maybe are authors themselves and then critique, right? Or maybe see something that you can’t, right? No, they’re not important. They’re not authoritative. I am. And, you know, it allows anybody to play that game, too. So, you know, you can’t just say, oh, he claims to be unauthority and therefore, nope. And this is all very gnostic, right? You look smart, you know, critiquing is easy, right? It’s easy to critique things. I can find flaws in anything. That’s a simple game, really. Kids do this all the time. So do animals. You’ll notice people will get a dog and then they’ll find out that the dog was getting shoes. So they put the shoes up high. And then one day the dog gets the shoe that’s up high because it does something clever that the owner never thought of. Yeah, that happens all the time. Happens with children constantly, too, right? Try to keep the kid out of something. And the next thing you know, the kid figures out a way to get there. And they’re usually rather inventive ways that you wouldn’t think of. That happens all the time. Like, it’s not hard to find flaws in things. It’s not when you’re when you have a goal and aim. It’s not hard to enact that goal and aim in a way that that’s novel to the people preventing you from the goal or the aim. This is why governments don’t work very well, right? Because they’re always trying to do stuff and people are distributed cognition. A hundred people know way more about your algorithm than the five people that wrote it. They’ll find a way around it, you know, whether that’s an algorithm from a government, that’s a procedure or whatever else. And then. So it’s Gnostic, right? It’s authority through knowledge, right? It’s an arbitrary interpretation. But if you do an arbitrary interpretation alone for yourself, that might not necessarily end up OK for you, right? Like you have to participate with others and there’s no participation. It’s a problem. And that’s why authority is important. It gives you a way to participate, right? Because you can all look to one person, right? Or one set of people for guidance, right? And that guidance isn’t going to be perfect. You’re going to be able to critique it. Congratulations. Welcome to being a four year old. But I’m not impressed. And, you know, where does all of this critique and this right to critique come from? Well, this is Emmanuel Kant. I mean, I’m not saying it doesn’t go back further than that. Of course it does. But Emmanuel Kant’s really the one of this critique of critique. But it’s self-referential, right? I’m going to critique the idea of critique itself. OK, Captain Obvious, you sound like a real smart guy there. It’s self-referential. It’s parasitic by nature, right? And the concept of self-reference definitionally won’t lead anywhere, right? But it uses up time, energy and effort, right? Attention. It uses all those things up. There’s no participation in it. You can spend forever ruminating, right? You can spend forever critiquing critique. And you can, you know, maybe do it with others. But are you really? I mean, all you’re doing is tearing something down. Like you’re not building anything. And that’s a problem. That’s a problem. And then this gets us to deconstruction. The idea of deconstruction makes no sense. You’re using the D-E to take a negative of con, right, for construction, right? So construction is building. You don’t unbuild things. You destroy them. So the idea that you’re clever enough to carefully remove parts without destroying the essence of something, right? Without destroying the form, right? Is foolish. You’re not that smart. You don’t know when removing a part makes the whole vanish. You have no idea. You might be right. And what is the whole? Maybe you made a part of the whole, so it’s less of a whole vanished that you didn’t see, right? This is destruction. That’s the better word to use. There’s no such thing as deconstruction. It’s destruction. That’s what it is. You’re destroying things. And then destroying things is cute, but it’s easy. Like any four-year-old can destroy a building. Not hard. It might take them a while, but you can. You can blow up buildings. It doesn’t take much to build a bomb. One person can build a bomb. They can blow up most buildings. Not hard. More than one person had to build those buildings, though, right? And so it’s hard to build. It’s hard to construct. But it’s not hard to destroy. And I think that’s all you’re doing. And part of that is self-referentiality. And so there’s really no stopping point in destruction. Like destroy what? For how long? Forever? There’s no building up in postmodernism. So there’s really no stopping point, right? And you can say it’s a critique of grand narrative. Like, OK, the idea of grand narrative is bad. Are you sure? Because I’m not. Maybe we need narrative. Now what? Should we critique the thing we need? Can we? When do we stop deconstructing or destroying it? I don’t know. These are good questions. And oh, by the way, you didn’t give me any tools to build it back up again. And if I need it and I can’t build it back up again, hmm, that’s a problem. And again, you can ignore authority. That’s great. But you lose cooperation. And now the burden of authority is on you. You have to prove your point. And this stymies postmodern thinkers. You just ask them, OK, what good is this? And then they can’t answer. It’s like, OK, well, your critique is wonderful, but it’s not doing anything good. So maybe as a critique, it’s beautiful, but maybe it’s not beautiful towards the good. That’s possible, right? And maybe it’s not true. Maybe your critique is not good or true. It’s just beautiful in its execution, because it could be. I don’t know. Probably I’ve seen beautiful, quote, deconstructions, although I’d call them destructions before. People are fascinating watching buildings get destroyed. It’s a fascinating thing to watch. But the authority is now on you, and now you have to justify yourself. And you probably can’t. Where’s the good? That’s the better question to ask. And so this leads us into sort of the objectivist argument. Like, where are these people, these postmoderns, standing to do this destruction, this deconstruction that they call it? I call it destruction, right? Where are they standing when they’re doing this? Well, they’re standing in objective material reality. I’ve talked about this before, right? This doesn’t exist. It’s not a place that you can stand in. And if it was a place, do you have the right stance in it? Like, if you’re not an author, can you critique an author? Again, the fact of multiple meanings in a text doesn’t mean they’re arbitrary. It doesn’t mean there’s an infinite number of them. It doesn’t mean they’re all equally valid. And what’s the most important point in a text? There’s a question you can ask. And you can debate that. People do all the time. It’s called the book club. Highly recommend book clubs. We’ve done book clubs on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server before. We love them. There’s a few on the Bridges of Meaning Discord server. They have a whole writer’s server you can join where you can get into a book club. And they do some great books. So, you know, you can bat that idea around and sort of get more out of a text that way. But getting more out of a text is not the same as deconstructing it. And I think that’s the difference. The destruction of text is not getting more out of it. It’s just making yourself seem smarter. You can’t be in a position to judge the text independent of yourself. You can’t be in a position to judge things in the world from a space where you have, we’ll say, a God’s eye perspective, right? Where you have a view that isn’t informed by your own perspective. That doesn’t exist. There’s no objective material reality. Now, moving the frames around, but not moving the propositions around, but manipulating them, right? Because again, meaning is dependent upon those two aspects, right? The context, that’s the framing, plus the content, those are the propositions. Meaning changes. And again, that’s great. You can manipulate that. Kids do it all the time, though. Like literally, four-year-olds, three-year-olds, two-year-olds, right? They will grab a bunch of toys and they’ll play house with dinosaurs. Okay, right? And you can play house with dinosaurs. I’m sure dinosaurs have nests and houses and sure, right? You can make up a story, a grand narrative, if you will, about what the Play-Doh means and how you’re interacting with the Play-Doh and what these blobs could be people. And kids do stuff like that all the time. This isn’t an impressive feat to me. Maybe it is to you if you’re like a, quote, intellectual. But then I’ve got to kind of question how smart you are at that point. And moving the frames around changes the meaning for sure. It’s not hard to do, but it doesn’t make you smart. And it doesn’t have the same import, the same impact as something that people can participate with, right? And when you change the meaning of a text, people can’t participate the same way. So if Moby Dick is a book about gender and the white male patriarchy emerges from that framing, and it will or it could, then all of a sudden who am I to read that book? I’m a white male, so I don’t think I’m part of a patriarchy. I wish I was. That would be great. Like, show me the patriarchy. I’m all in. That would be awesome. Now I can’t participate. You’ve excluded participation of a bunch of people. Is that really what you wanted to do? And it probably is, sort of unconsciously. I think this is part of the problem. There’s lots of things going on, and we don’t understand the time that the author wrote the book because we weren’t there. There’s unconscious things happening with the author for sure. And maybe you can see some of those for sure. But guess what? There’s also unconscious things going on with you. And can you see all of those? Because I don’t think you can. Right. I think that’s why we need other people. We outsource our sanity. So, you know, fair enough. Like, there’s unconscious things going on with the author. There’s unconscious things going on with you. Maybe a little humility. There’s some stuff going on with the framing. But changing that framing might lose important lessons in the text that you were never aware of. Right? That happens. That can happen. You surely have to admit it can happen. And I think that that’s true. And now you’re a judge. Right? And maybe you’re bringing down the hierarchy. Right? You’re in objective material reality. There’s no hierarchy here. We’re all equal. Right? No hierarchy. But it’s still there. Right? Because you’re assuming the role of the judge. You’re assuming the role of authority and saying, I can interpret this text. Right? Or I can participate in this other person’s interpretation of the text. There’s still a hierarchy there. So they can tell you there’s no hierarchy there. But there is. It’s right there. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It sounds nice, but it’s not the world we’re ever able to live in, no matter what. And I think people don’t take that seriously. Right? Frames matter. Frames are not arbitrary. Fitting a frame around a text doesn’t mean much, especially with most of the things you can’t participate with. It’s how you know a good book from a bad book. Right? Oh, that doesn’t resonate with me. And maybe it resonates with other people, and that’s fine. Is that a postmodern critique? I don’t think it is. I think, you know, maybe someday it’ll resonate with me. And what’s a deep book? A deep book is when you can go back to and get more out of every time you read it. Not all books are like that. And how much can you get out? How many times can you do that? Part of that’s a function of you, not the book. The book didn’t change, obviously. Hmm. That’s interesting. What’s really changing here? Where is the thing that moves? Is it the book? Because the book doesn’t actually move. But you do. So it sort of matters. Context, the content, and the observer, and the hierarchy all need to be in alignment. Right? You need an orientation within the hierarchy to be a proper observer of the content and the context in order to get the meaning. And a proper education. And most of our education we frame as training. I think that’s a mistake. There’s a standard. You get an A or a B, right? Or a C or whatever. Maybe you fail French and Latin. But we’ll set that aside. And, you know, but you need to be in proper relationship. What did you learn from the content and the context? What did you learn about the importance of the context and the content and their interaction? That’s true education. Not, oh, you believe what I believe, or you believe this about the text and that’s the only way to interpret it. That’s not right. Or, oh, you can interpret it any way you want. That’s also equally unhelpful, if not more unhelpful. I’d rather have a single authoritative interpretation of a text than an arbitrary non-authoritative set of interpretations. Because now I have to choose. And choice is a difficult thing. I have enough stuff to choose. I don’t need more. Thank you very much. And the other problem is when you can deconstruct, everybody else can too. And this is the problem with postmodernism. It eats its own tail, right? You can deconstruct a text and then I can deconstruct your deconstruction. And then you can deconstruct that deconstruction. This never ends. This is no good. This is not a fun game to play. And I went over this in a video recently that I released, right, with games in particular, right? A strange game. The only way to win is not to play. And I think that’s the best way to think about postmodernism. It’s a strange game and the only way to win the postmodern game is not to play. You don’t have to play every game, right? And it’s hard to let go of because, again, it’s easy to destroy and hard to create. And you’ve been given the impression of postmodern power from above that you’ve obtained over the author. And you can just deconstruct your text, right, or whatever you’re deconstructing. And it gives you that sense of power. The world is flat. No one’s judging you. And you’re judging all these other people. You’re kind of at the top of the hierarchy. But no one told you that. It’s very seductive. It’s very subtle. It’s very sneaky, right? And postmodernism does all this to you. And I don’t think it’s good. Like, I think all of that stuff being done to you is bad. You’re being manipulated badly and not to good ends for yourself. You know, and if somebody’s manipulating you to good ends to yourself, maybe I have a little bit more sympathy for them, but I hope it’s an actual person who’s alive today and interacting with you because otherwise I’m skeptical as to how possible that is, right? Now, I think that one of the other problems is Marx and, you know, the postmoderns and a lot of these people. They don’t define power. And they don’t give you the sense for that. So I have videos on power and I have a video on principalities. Just check both of them out. I can probably only link one here, but whatever. I’ll link one. They’re there. And the idea that power only comes down from above and that you obtain it by flattening the world is very sexy. But it’s incorrect. It’s inaccurate. And it’s unhelpful. You can’t participate with it in any reasonable fashion. And you shouldn’t try. And there’s no need to because you actually already have power. And once you realize that, it’s like, oh, I don’t need to take power away from people. I already have quite a bit. And they don’t define power when they use power. They typically use it to mean control, influence or force or some combination of those three concepts. But those are different concepts. And power is for me just more directed energy, right? Time, energy and attention directed power. So one of the problems with the postmodern sort of narrative and they have one right top down power from above. That’s a narrative. If it was correct, revolutions wouldn’t exist. Power from above wouldn’t couldn’t be overturned, right? Would never happen. But it’s happened. So their their map is wrong. Their map of the world, the descriptive map of the world is wrong. Their predictions are all wrong, right? Their prescriptions are all wrong. So you take a narrative like Karl Marx and you say, well, you know, what if, you know, what if his predictions could be correct? They weren’t correct. They were wrong. And people said, well, look, we’re going to make them correct. And all they did was kill 100 million people, something like that, possibly. And it still didn’t work. Like the utopia still didn’t emerge, as Karl Marx predicted. It’s a good hint that he’s just wrong. It’s not hard. He’s just wrong. Right. And and and you can blame the implementers of these systems for the system being wrong, but maybe the system’s just wrong. Right. And then what what what happens? Like what happens to people, you know, who disagree? Like, where’s the revolution of the revolutionaries? This never ends. It never ends. And a bunch of people, you know, believed in the revolution, believed that it would work, but disagree with the outcome. And they appear to be all car carrying socialists, like all the postmoderns seem to be car carrying socialists, if not outright communists. Right. And they think that the problem is grand narrative. I was like, well, but if you remove a grand narrative, is that a valid move? If you do it, what happens? Whatever story you have left is now the grand narrative. OK, but we need to get rid of grand narrative. So we’ll remove that. Well, this doesn’t end. Like, maybe we don’t operate without story. And when you keep deleting grand narrative, right, what happens is you eventually unwind language itself. And this has happened. I’ve been in many conversations with many postmoderns who end up there. I’ve seen conversations. There’s a great clip I’m going to try to clip here that is fantastic where Manuel is talking to one of these postmoderns on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. And he basically says language doesn’t work. Now, using the phrase language doesn’t work is kind of strange and performative, a performative contradiction, obviously. And yet they use this sort of phrasing with ease. Why? Because they got trapped. They were wrong. Their formulation doesn’t work or it’s exposed a problem in the postmodern system, which I think is easy to do. So I’m a little concerned that people don’t do it all the time because it’s really simple. But whatever. And they they flee into, well, you don’t know what you’re talking about because language doesn’t work and therefore we can’t communicate. And now I don’t have to deal with your critique. That’s how they get out of being deconstructed or critiqued, which is right. Deconstruction is just critique. So it the problem with that is it devolves to might make right. It actually devolves to might maker. I’m OK with that, by the way, because, you know, maybe I’ll use my might long before you will, whether you’re whether you have more of it or not, it’s not relevant. If I get the first hit in, that might be the only hit I need. I don’t like that. I think that’s probably wrong and bad. So don’t do that. Don’t engage in postmodernism. And I think that, you know, where that ends, that destruction of grand narrative is it includes a destroying being itself. But being is good. And so you can’t have postmodernism and being as good. And so the real question is, well, what’s the problem with the postmodern critique? And I would say it’s not a critique. It’s an observation and it’s incorrect. And we need a better observation. Well, what’s a better observation? Well, a better observation would be what did Hitler and Stalin do? They were geniuses. First off, you have to appreciate them for their evil geniuses. Right. No doubt. But they were geniuses. Hitler replaces religion with pure Gnostic practices. Plus, he rewrites history to justify the story that he’s telling, to justify the actions that he’s taking. So in order to put together a coherent grand narrative, you need that historical grounding, which he rewrites to this Aryan story. Right. To justify the valid science of eugenics, valid science, invalid ethic. Right. Don’t like eugenics. Think it’s bad framing. Shouldn’t talk about it ever, even though it’s a perfectly valid science. I don’t think you should. You should participate in it, even if you can. And I don’t think you can. Different, different video. Right. And then why do you take over religion? Why are you replacing religion? Because religion is the thing that tells you a good narrative from a bad narrative. So in order to do a bad thing, to come up with a bad grand narrative, you need to get rid of the religion. Stalin did something similar. Right. So Stalin doesn’t care about eugenics. He’s just using the science of socialism, which is roughly the science of government, to be a dictator like Hitler. Right. They’re using, they’re both using socialism, the science of government. Right. Which you can’t science government. That’s why this ends in tears. And all Stalin does is shut down the churches by making them not talk. So you can stay open. You can have parishioners. You can’t talk to one another. You can’t put out statements. You can’t compete with the government in any way, shape, or form. Right. And the problem with that is that churches are supposed to push back against the king. They’re supposed to push back against the authority. They’re supposed to point out what’s good and what’s bad. They’re supposed to point out what should be avoided. They’re supposed to point to problems and where things are sketchy, where they could stray from good to bad. That’s their role. All right. The church is supposed to push back against Caesar. Right. It’s not supposed to do what Caesar says, and it’s not supposed to depose Caesar, but it’s supposed to push back. It’s supposed to be there to point to the good. And the heads of the religion are supposed to anoint the king or the ruler or the dictator or the president. That’s supposed to happen. It happened in Egypt. Right. And it happens in England. And it happens everywhere. This is an important pattern. It’s a pattern, by the way, that Napoleon broke. So I have a video about Napoleon with Adam. It’s a good video. If I can link it here, I will. It’ll be in the description in either case. And it’s important that these patterns maintain. So my claim is still, you know, that you can find flaws in anything. This isn’t an interesting trick. A four-year-old can do it. I’m not impressed. I don’t think it makes you smart. I think it puts a lot of burden on you. Things are not perfect. Nothing is perfect. We’re not living in a perfect world. We’re not living in a utopia. We may want to live in a utopia or what we think of as a utopia, but I don’t think we can. So maybe no. Maybe don’t try to do that because it’s not going to work. And yeah, you know, look, religion sucks at pointing out good versus bad, but it’s the best thing that we got. That’s the other thing. Everything else has been tried multiple times throughout history. If you actually look at history, you’ll notice that. And you’ll notice the postmodern ideas, finding flaws in everything. It doesn’t mean that you can do better just because something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you’re smart enough to do better or any group of people is smart enough to do better or that the system you came up with is better. It’s not what it means. It means that everything’s flawed, including the new system you came up with. And the biggest problem, I think, with postmodernism is there’s no good in it. It’s not a new idea. It’s not interesting. Deconstruction is a nonsense term. Deconstruction is a nonsense term. There’s no good in it. It gives you a lot of power, right, which is control, right? You can control the meaning of the text by changing the framing. Very clever, very clever. It allows you to acquire the will to power. Sure, it does, right? It flattens the world, but there’s no axioms. There’s no boundaries. It references itself, right? It ignores hierarchy, flattens it out, right? But hierarchy is older than trees, right? You’re embedded in hierarchy, and you’re not at the top. And that’s okay. You don’t need to be. Being at the top sucks, and it’s hard. I hope that you realize, because there’s nothing constructive, nothing mutually participatory and constructive where you can build stuff in this ethos of postmodernism, in this framework of postmodernism, that it can’t be for the good. You can’t manifest the good except by accident with postmodernism. And I don’t like to rely on accidents to manifest the good, and it hasn’t really worked out so far. And I think that’s the problem. And if you think these people are smart or that they have a point or that you should listen to them, maybe no. Maybe they’re just four years old, and they used a lot of big words and fooled you, because I think that’s what happened. And hopefully this makes sense, and it helps you to avoid postmodernism and my video on games and the fact that you don’t have to play, say, the postmodern game will help you understand that there are just better frameworks for understanding and participating in the world and that they’re generative and not degenerative, or they’re constructive and not deconstructive, right? That there’s a way in which you can empower yourself by making things with other people, which is much more fun because you can make bigger, more complicated things with others than you can by yourself, and that that’s more interesting. And deconstruction is only the road to individualism and this objective worldview that is destructive. So I hope that outlines that. And I know that you’re interested in the good, right? Because you give me something very good, I would say something very close to the most good by giving me the thing that I value the most, which is your time and attention.