France 1835. In the
Normandy village of La Faucterie (commune of Aunay), a sadistic psychopath,
Pierre Rivière, used a pruning hook to kill and
dismember his brother, his sister, his pregnant mother with her fetus, escaped
into the woods, was apprehended after a month, tried and condemned to death.
The
sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. While in jail, he wrote that
his horrible rampage was to avenge his allegedly wife-harassed father (whom he
had never learned to know).
In 1840,
Pierre hanged himself in the jail.
Early 1970s. Professor Michel Foucault, of the prestigious College de France, and his closer students dug Pierre's memories out of oblivion, scanned and rescanned them for 2-3 years and assembled a book, "I, Pierre Rivière" as an intellectual exercise in dissecting a ferocious event and the sick rationalizations to justify it with a bias in Pierre's favor.
He wrote that he saw, in the horrible event, "...a battle among and through discourses..." and his purpose was "to rediscover the interaction of those discourses as weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge".
This, however, generated disastrous
unintended consequences, long known with the ancient "ne mittatis margaritas
vestras ante porcos" ("don't cast your pearls before swine").
That is, those who adopted Foucault's ideas understood them no more than swine
appreciate pearls.
It was custom made
for the hippie generation of instant intellectuals who could thus become tenured
university professors and would use their interpretation instead of knowledge of
whatever subject they didn't have the time or talent to study.
The new dogma was that morality and
reality were substituted by our arbitrary interpretation of them.
The meaning of Shakespeare or Tolstoy works, as well of any artist,
concept or event -even of history itself-, is not what the authors, creators or
initiators meant, but what the reader, viewer or listener arbitrarily interpret.
Through mazes of arbitrary rationalizations ad hoc, it was concluded by eager
half-educated "scholars" (tenured university professors to boot) that "reality
and morality are just a social construct", a tool that allows the dominant class
to exert power, which we have to deconstruct and replace with whatever fits our
goals .
This was adopted as "deconstructionism" by Marxists, hippies and ultra-feminists; later eagerly adopted by all kinds of social groups who could use it against the Western culture, which was and remains in their way, as well as in the way of socialism, "sex liberation", "multiculturalism" etc.
Their trap was and is that the consequently advocated "deconstruction" would give its devotees the condemned power ascribed to the dominant class (without thinking that a later generation will also deconstruct what is now being constructed after our present deconstruction, etc.).
New popular philosophers, like Jacques Derrida and Paul De Man, became
high priests of the deconstructionist movement.
Obscure American universities
avidly got hold of the new French gospel the same way as previously observed by
Tocqueville (1805-1859) that all Americans were Cartesians but almost none had read
Descartes.
Similarly to the claim that hardly any socialist or communist, today
as in the past, has read "das Kapital".
The reaction of the
French creators of deconstructionism to the American cultural nihilism
interpretation was their warning that even the support of the negation of
reality and morality as artificial constructs still today needs the traditional
tools of Western culture to make any sense.
To no avail, however, for the improvised post-'60s pundits had neither the time
nor the capability to absorb a West culture knowledge requiring the necessary
self-disciplined learning.
And they glibly go ahead with what deconstructs their
deconstruction.
Moreover, there was (and is) vested pressure by a coalition of strange bedfellows like the Socialists, man-and-family-hating feminists ("feminazis"), anti-white racists, balkanizing multiculturalists, and all those who cannot meet the Western Judeo-Christian moral and cultural standards.
The posture that reality and morality are just a matter of personal interpretation that can be changed at will fits the deconstructionists (also called postmodernists) as the best way to demolish the Western culture they cannot fight otherwise.
At any rate, the future of deconstructionism is bleak.
The initial successes of
typical deconstructionist myths (examples: black melanin pigmentation superiority, black
Cleopatra, Aristotle stealing Egyptian philosophy, the godlike American natives,
the sadistic white male exploiter, American world pollution, etc.) had to
surrender to solid unchangeable historical reality.
The awakening to reality is
still strongly opposed by self-deluding "postmodernists" who must recognize that
arbitrary changes of reality by them can also be used by their heirs against
them.
The resulting chaos in the foreseeable future is obvious.
***/
One of the most
obvious symptoms is their insistence that "we don't need history".
Magna-cum-Laude PhDs in humanities conferred even to "scholars" without a
single course in history are the appalling evidence.
Ignoring history is like ignoring our genes, cultural, biological and knowledge heritage. Or like ignoring our medical history.
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