Living in the Post-Rational Age

During these last three centuries, politics has corrupted Man more than during the whole of pre-History. – Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The news is ominous.

We are living a in post-rational era. A post-rational era does not lament or suspect the height, and all that has been lost, of a civilization that is under siege by despotic forces.  

Postmodern ideologues, intellectuals, and academics who run the once formidable legacy institutions of Western open societies have created a post-rational age. What does this mean? It means that relativism has run its course. In the process, relativism has siphoned the lifeblood of Western culture, castrating its values, eviscerating the imagination, and destroying reason – the only viable avenue that man has to distinguish human reality from mere appearance.

The aim of relativists, philosophical materialists, and knife-sharpening Marxists, who are energized by the secular messianism of the here-and-now, has always been the destruction of Christianity, capitalism, and democracy. The ever-morphing variants of relativism, materialism, and Marxism, whether implicitly or explicitly, have played a significant role in the corrosion of Western values and civilization. These forces were aptly consolidated by the Frankfurt School and its Marxist ‘critical theory.’

Postmodernity stepped up the radical ideological antics of the Frankfurt School’s quest to annihilate Western values. Members of the Frankfurt School and other postmodern ‘philosophers’ clearly and vividly spell this out in their writings.

Postmodernism cannot be separated from the ideological agitators of the Frankfurt School. They disguised relativism, nihilism, and totalitarianism of the Marxist kind as critical theory.

The Frankfurt School’s ‘New’ Marxism: The Culture War

The goal of postmodernism’s ‘de-construction’ of Western civilization has brought about a domino effect of the dissolution of values that continues to debilitate, if not accelerate the collapse of Western civilization, for nihilism is the calling card of postmodernism.

Postmodern social/political despotism relishes nihilism. Nihilism clears the way for the creation of a world of people who are no longer capable of cultivating and practicing reason: the cognitive operation that is critical thinking; inductive generalization affords man a fighting chance to tell the difference between reality and appearance.

During no other time in human history has critical thinking been so crucial to saving the human person from descending into a maelstrom of sophomoric, life-threatening mendacity. The Russian writer and thinker, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was correct that Bolshevism and its attendant values were, and remain, intent on creating an infantile world where human reality gives way to reality-as-fiction.

The Frankfurt School and its social-political arm twisting turned all aspects of human life political. From Gramsci to Marcuse to Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno, et al., and their messianic cadre of Marxist critical theorists-in-arms, they understood that healthy societies are made up of functional families that develop functional individuals who consequently become productive citizens. The core of responsible and productive citizenry is the human person. Individuals make up nations and institutions, not collectives.

Dating to its Bolshevik roots, the Frankfurt School recognized that responsible and thoughtful individualism and non-conformity are the greatest threats to all forms of collectivism. The Marxist program of the Frankfurt School was deemed progressive. What does that mean? Consider that the Frankfurt School sought to break down, de-construct they call it, the societal structures of democratic, open societies by breaking the will and reasoning ability of individuals. They focused on politicizing all aspects of the human person and reality itself through social, political, literary, aesthetic, religious, and cultural deconstruction that owes its ideological and rhetorical calisthenics to Marxism.

The Frankfurt School’s notion that Marxism ‘must re-shape society’ into progressive collectives saw to it that reason and critical thinking became the handmaiden of Marxist totalitarian ideology.

Making the family structure dysfunctional and self-destructive turns family members on each other, garnering aberrant mores, including dislodging sex and personal identity from any connection with biology and correspondence to objective structures of human reality. These are only a few of the outcomes of the culture war. Today we possess ample evidence to understand that the cultural war in Western democracies is the hallmark of mental illness on a colossal scale.

Given the ideological power-grab demands of Marxist dialectic, members of the Frankfurt School could never admit that their program was totalitarian by its very nature.  Yet, while ingratiating themselves in over-intellectualized critical theory that aims to destroy the structure of democratic societies, members of the Frankfurt School can never successfully hide their messianism of the here-and-now as self-loathing resentment for the human person. Members of the Frankfurt School were consumed by what the French philosopher, Jean-François Revel (1924-2006), characterized as the ‘totalitarian impulse.’ 

The Unintended Caveat of Postmodernism: The Creation of a Post-Rational Age

The alleged emancipation from free will and the axiological hierarchy of constructive values comes with a massive and devastating unintended caveat for Western democracies that the spiteful imagination of postmodernists will never admit: the creation of a post-rational age.

Aiming to create a post-Christian age that takes its cue from Marxist totalitarianism, the Frankfurt School also triumphed in creating a post-rational age. Cloaking themselves in the smartness principle, the platitude that believes that the present world is highly superior to the past, postmodernists celebrate the dawn of alleged limitless emancipation.

Postmodernism fails to understand that killing God and turning man into a pathetic moral/existential agent of his own destruction comes with civilization-altering side effects.

While it is the intended purpose of postmodernism to aid in the destruction of Western values, little did snide postmodern theorists realize that ruling, not governing, over a post-rational age will take a concentrated machinery of propaganda, disinformation, censorship, and social/political violence. Or is this precisely their endgame as critical theorists mired in the totalitarian impulse?

Postmodernism has turned governments into totalitarian bully pulpits for a behavior-conditioning thought police that cannot allow individualism and non-conformism to exist. This is one reason why postmodern behaviorists are in a race to destroy the human person through transhumanism and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The appeal of dystopia for postmodernists is the promise of a large share of state power. State power is the fountain that quenches the thirst of despotic intellectuals’ need to rule over other people. How else can the marriage of bourgeois Frankfurt School totalitarians and despotic, oligarchical millionaires/billionaires could have taken place? From the rubble, a morally bankrupt and existentially hollow, zombie-collective has emerged. This is the legacy of postmodernism that future generations must contend with.

Postmodern conformism has made us fashionably numb – dim-witted. The latter is the totalitarian vision of the managerial class for mankind: technocrats and oligarchical elites who rule the world through the administrative state, and Marxist intellectuals who provide them with ideological and theoretical scaffolding.

The Creation of a Post-Rational World

The creation of a post-rational world is not a recent phenomenon. The leveling of Western civilization that the here-and-now-messianism of the metropolitan denizens of the culture of critique has created originates in the secular celebration of the twilight of the Gods. The question remains: What now? What happens after all constructive, life-affirming values have been obliterated?  We mustn’t forget that spite and resentment are fundamental components of Marxist critical theory.

Critical theory does not take place in communist nations, for it embraces a conveniently selective praxis. To truly measure the ground effects of these questions, thoughtful people only need to pay close attention to the sorry state of Western culture and the dead-end, bankrupted values of society, circa 2024.

School-age children rejoice when the teacher momentarily leaves the room. If the teacher takes too long to return to the classroom, anarchy is soon to follow; emancipation quickly gives way to mayhem. Then, panic ensues, for only the rotten apples do not long for the guidance of an adult in the room.

Chesterton is right in The Everlasting Man in his assessment of the dissolution of civilization in modernity by the proponents of ‘evolution’ and ‘transition’: “They suggest everywhere the grey gradations of twilight because they believe it is the twilight of the gods. I propose to maintain that whether or not it is the twilight of gods, it is not the daylight of men.”

Chesterton’s idea of daylight for man means that civilization is created and nourished by healthy-minded people. On the other hand, the decay of civilization and culture signals moral depravity, social-political despotism, vulgarity, and a slew of the attendant values of nihilism. Nihilism is not a grassroots movement of postmodernity. It is instead its modus operandi.

Part of the problem in identifying the decay of Western civilization and culture is that people get used to decay, in addition to the barrage of disinformation propagated by government technocrats, their press agents, and institutions that have much to gain from instilling nihilism on the unsuspecting.

Postmodernity breeds confusion and disorientation in the human person. This is not by chance. While it takes untold generations to create contented, well-grounded individuals, and prosperous societies and values, the same cannot be said for their destruction. Hence, few people can identify the source of the dissolution of values. Even satire about the nature of decay fails to make its point. Chesterton alerts us to this, ‘the modern world is madder than any satires on it.”   

Chesterton suggests there exist three mysteries in the great transitions of civilization. These make up aspects of the perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis), the essentialist idea that universal truths inform man’s search for understanding and knowledge throughout time. These mysteries are: The origin of the universe itself, the origin of the ‘principle of life,’ and the origin of man. All three have been obliterated by twenty-first nihilism. That is, these only remain concerns of a minority of thoughtful people. These ‘why?’ questions, which have major metaphysical/existential implications for living a well-grounded life, if they even pop up in postmodern culture at all, immediately become negated by vulgar and well-funded scientism.

The Evisceration of the Self

The greatest single caveat of postmodernism’s creation of a post-rational age that few people have caught on to is that along with the annihilation of objective reality and reason comes the evisceration of the self.

The destruction of the self makes a post rational age possible, and desirable for despots of every stripe. How can reason and self-reflection exist, or matter, in an era when human beings have been gutted; living as mere sensual guinea pigs to be experimented on? This is to say nothing of the coming age of AGI as the ultimate tool of totalitarianism. This I will leave for part II of this essay to come.

The flight from free will, moral, spiritual, and rational autonomy has devastated the human person and will undoubtedly be the downfall of humankind.

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