Postmodernism, politics, TV and Trump

[Herr Abubu]

What is modernism?

It's very difficult to explain because it requires you to look very deeply and discerningly into the historical events and intellectual trends of the past. You pretty much have to fully immerse yourself into this to understand it.

Modernism is, essentially, a new way of looking at the world. It was a break away from the wisdom of the past, which modernity calls superstition and whatnot, and with the Medieval Ages being its synthesis, in favour of an envisioned future guided by reason alone. It's the embracing of our age and its presuppositions and way of thinking a priori.

It begins in Western Christendom and its nominalistic ideas, starting with St. Augustine, which in the 14th century St. Gregory Palamas of the Eastern Orthodox Church argued, rightly, would lead into atheism. In the Renaissance you see the dominance of the Catholic Church wane, with occult groups springing up, occultism becoming very popular in intellectual circles, even with Catholics, and dozens of Christian sects forming outside of the Church after the Reformation. Then you get the so-called Enlightenment, which saw the Medieval past of Europe as completely sick and idiotic. The Enlightenment saw itself as being in favour of reason whereas Christianity and religion was superstitious nonsense with no foundation in reality (although the Enlightenment had its own religion, seen in the French Revolution and Robespierre and his Cult of Reason, whose contemporary descendants are the New Atheists, people like Richard Dawkins). A scientific worldview guided solely by reason and evidence would replace religion as the center of modern society. We get ideas like constitutional government, democracy, secularism, liberty and egalitarianism from the Enlightenment. Liberalism, Nazism and Marxism were all born out of the Enlightenment. All of contemporary politics has roots in Enlightenment thinking. The left and right dialectic in politics stems from the internal divisions within the Jacobin political movement, the left-wing Montagnards and right-wing Girondins. The Enlightenment culminates in the French Revolution. Also, America was founded on Enlightenment, modern, ideas. Modernity itself culminates in the World Wars and the Cold War, with the eventual loss of the Marxist USSR to the liberal America. I would argue that modernity died off with WW2, but that postmodernity, its heir, wasn't inaugurated before the fall of the USSR.

[Sarmatian]

The irony of postmodernism is that in it's denial and dismantling of modernism it actually opens way for revival of traditionalism. Sure postmodernists have all the technology at their disposal but traditionalists don't even need a direct confrontation to win. They just have to wait and let postmodernists to die out since these fellas don't really breed well. Decline of fertility is rampant in postmodern societies while traditionalists focus most of their lives on making as many kids as possible.