The Absolutist Craving

 

 On Page 84 of his seminal book, Explaining Postmodernism, Stephen Hicks lays bare the contradiction, if not the outright hypocrisy, practiced and preached by postmodernists today, espousing their disbelief in metanarratives, their radical skepticism, their ontological anti-realism--while, at the same time championing pure Leftism as their totalistic political cause.

If one is a dogmatist, totalistic, either as a communist or fascist, then one is immoderate, evil, out of balance.  Max Stirner and the postmodernists correctly object to pure objectivism in epistemology and ontology.

Equally correct are rationalists like Hicks who regard as extreme and out of balance is the postmodernist,  overwrought penchant for approaching pure skepticism, love of irrationalism, their subjectivity, their relativism and their complete rejection of universals.

I argue that the postmodernist metanarrative that the ontological substrata of life is raw power of group against group, that contradiction and struggle are all there is at the bottom of things.

Hicks accuses them of being cunning and hypocritical--they pretend to be relativistic, but that is a ruse to manipulate people as they push their Communist agenda to take over the world.

I think people, like evil Nazis at work and that could go home and be gentle with their children, compartmentalize their kind, sane and normal lives from their vicious, crazy, and abnormal work at work. 

People are hypocrites and relativists and yet they are at the same time, absolutists.

There is an innate craving, shared by all humans, to adopt an objective metanarrative to live by so that they can make life meaningful and filled with purpose.

If the cultural cause and metanarrative is too absolutist, then the people, when they back it, become extreme, radicalized and an actual or potential mass movement. They can be rightists or leftists but all are fascist at heart. That society devolves into absolutism, totalitarianism, mass movements, evil and radicalism.

Where the postmodernists seek to overthrow society, with no values and no shared norms--this too leads to absolutism, totalitarianism, mass movements and so on.

We need God, Mavellonialism, the America economic and political system, our capitalism and moderate individualism, we need political moderation: Political diversity of thought without majority persecution of political minorities is necessary.

We need a general, public outlook of moderate epistemology that is more rational than irrational, and an ontology that is more realist than anti-realist, but this combined, complementary if contradictory metanarrative of moderation will keep at bay undesirable absolutism of any kind.

People turn fanatical, cruel, hate-filled, bitter, nihilistic, and angry without a God-based metanarrative, a story of culturally intertwined set of values that provide meaning in their lives, a template for knowing how to live, a standard to live up to and by. 

The law of moderation governs this critical, communal, and personal, human requirement that each nation's citizens must have a metanarrative to live by, and it must be rather true and ennobling, to challenge the citizens to muster self-discipline so that they can be virtuous citizens.

What this application of the law of moderation towards the establishing and sustaining a people's metanarrative and cultural ethos entails is that metanarrative is crushed, corrupted or hopelessly distorted in two ways. 

Either the people radicalize their support of their traditional story, and fetishize it, converting it into a horrible spook or ism, as Stirner warns against. Now it is an absolutist cause, and that is the path to hell for people, and totalitarianism, mass movements, lawlessness, disorder and crime are the fruits that any ism, especially government-controlled and directed.

With no story, no traditional metanarrative any longer accepted and practiced by a people, then meaninglessness, nihilism and chaos permeated all lives as the young are not brought up right, without values, purpose, love, and structure.

They, lacking a benevolent deity to worship, and no wholesome metanarrative to grow up by, will not tolerate a vacuum in their lives. They will find some absolutist, totalistic, false, and wicked metanarrative to worship and fill the void. 

Therein, crowdism, collectivism, totalitarian government, poverty, and maximized suffering is what the citizens will experience and inflict upon one another and themselves. Hell on earth will have arrived, and once such a sick society is corrupted, distorted and ruined, it is very difficult, perhaps impossible to extract a people from this quagmire.

A good, free, ennobled citizenry require God, a wholesome but alive (willing to incorporate reasonable and enlightening new ideas that do not seek to overthrow the sensible, inspiring, existing cultural system of values) metanarrative to live by. 

These citizens should be brought up to maverize as individuating/anarchist supercitizens in a constitutional republic with a capitalist economy. That is how I envision the arrival of high civilization for humanity.