I really cannot explain all the concepts in a quote.. nor a picture.
btw, this was a better explanation of what happened in Nazi Germany than the book 'ordinary men'.
Since we have literally no input, no possible method by which to change the outcome, I'm doing my best to enjoy the shitshow.
Lenard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels is starting to look prophetic.
The present trend is certainly not very encouraging. But in order to understand what is causing it, one must realize that politics is not a primary. One cannot say what is wrong or right in politics without defining what is wrong or right to begin with - that's the philosophical branch of ethics. And one cannot define what is wrong or right without a theory of knowledge more broadly - the philosophical branch of epistemology. A culture's political trends are ultimately downstream of its philosophy - politics is the final effect, not the cause.
It's no coincidence that those who denounce capitalism most vehemently argue in epistemology that objectivity is a myth and in ethics that self-interest is evil. Hatred of capitalism is simply a consequence of those views. Our age is defined by a philosophical battle - and the only thing that can defeat the subjectivist nihilistic philosophy of the left is a rational, pro-freedom alternative.
If you're interested in where this country is headed and why I cannot recommend enough the amazingly prescient The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America by Leonard Peikoff which details the cultural similarities between the US and pre-Nazi Weimar Germany. I would also recommend this talk which outlines the critical importance of philosophy.
Unfortunately, I think it is all but inevitable unless there is broad systemic change, cultural change in our society.
What ultimately charts the course of any society is ideas. It was intellectual forces that allowed for the glory of Greece and Rome, intellectual forces that destroyed it in favor of the Dark Ages, then intellectual forces again which ushered in the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment which, of course, produced capitalism and the prosperity we enjoy today.
If you want to know where society is headed, look to the thought leaders. There you will see respected tenured professors arguing that objective reality does not exist, knowledge is subjective, self-sacrifice is moral and that the state ought to control every aspect of our lives.
Capitalism was birthed by the opposite premises: that reality is objective, man can know it, and he ought to use this knowledge to pursue his own happiness, and that the only purpose of government was to protect his rights to do so. With every one of those ideas undergoing centuries of assault by Kant, Hegel, Marx and their ilk, capitalism's days have been numbered for some time. And if the rioting in the streets has shown anything, the end may be far sooner than we have thought.
By far the best account I've read to make sense of where we are culturally is Leonard Peikoff's amazingly prescient The Ominous Parallels. It details the similarities of our society and that of Weimar Germany just before the rise of the National Socialists. While frightening, it powerfully elucidates just what is necessary to save our civilization before it's too late - a philosophy of objective reality, reason, egoism, and capitalism. For more see this brief introduction.
As far as I'm concerned, nearly the entire school of postmodernism rises from rotten soil (largely German idealism, Continential philosophy, Marxism, and phenomenology) and is thoroughly anti-rational. One of my favorite philosophy books, The Ominous Parallels examines how German idealism and postmodernism gave rise to totalitarian political philosophies (especially the Nazis) and how even post-fascism, post-modernism is still pushing people in the same direction.
In essence post-modernism argues that because nearly all human knowledge has its ultimate origin in some subjective judgment or observation about the world, therefore all human knowledge is subject to subjective interpretation and criticism. It seeks to undermine rationality (man's primary tool for making sense of the world) by declaring everything to subjective and/or a social construct - to be interpreted by the viewer in any way they see fit. As if all history is just the story we agree to tell, all science is just people's best guesses, economics how we steal from each other, and philosophy the lies we tell to justify the world being how it is.
My next big beef with post-modernism is their willful exercise of obscurantism. The term refers to the deliberate use of vague, unclear, or jargon-heavy language for the purpose of concealing the true meaning of the text, rather than just saying it in clear and understandable prose. Derrida is practically the poster-boy for this, and he learned from Heidegger the card-carrying Nazi.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, I'm one of the most voracious readers I've ever met. I'm the kinda guy who reads philosophy for fun, and I've read a lot of it. And every time I've tried to read post-modernist texts, I've walked away in frustration as I had no idea what they were actually trying to say. Their logic is invariably impossible to follow, their texts filled with bullshit and filler, and their actual ideas to be thin gruel and trivial at best, or flat out wrong at worst.
The unsophisticated and uncritical often mistake obscurantist texts for having profound deep meanings that ordinary person just doesn't understand. I consider that bullshit. To me, obscurantism is the hallmark of the intellectual fraud. The purpose of language is communicate clear and consistent meanings, not to distort, confuse, and hide meaning. Unfortunately it has a long tradition in bad philosophy - Kant was a past master of the art.
To me, Foucault is a thinly-veiled Marxist sadomasochist. Kant (the ultimately ancestor of postmodernism) an OCD-sufferer who undermined rationality in order to attempt a reconciliation of science and Church dogma. Heidegger a nihilistic Nazi. And as for Derrida, I think he's one of the biggest frauds of them all. I haven't seen a single idea of his that I think has any merit and I consider his boast that his work is impossible to criticize as proof positive that he is a fraud, and worse, a dangerous fraud.
To me, philosophy must come correct and be written for the purpose of being understood by most if not all who read it, or else it's simply not philosophy worth reading. If you can't or won't communicate the meaning behind your thoughts clearly, then you have no business calling yourself a philosopher or having your thoughts taken seriously.
> ". . . anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity, by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."
-- John Searle on Deconstruction