Stephen R. Hicks wrote the book on cultural Marxism/Postmodernist Leftism. He argued in his 2004 book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucalt, that Leftists in America, on moral, historical and scientific grounds, were demoralized, bitter and largely defeated by the 1950s, that socialism and communism were rightly discredited. Rather than abandon their embattled ideology, brilliant, devious French and American professors, resorted to skeptical epistemology to discredit, disarm and hold back their discreditors, to undermine Modernism, capitalism, classical liberalism, the Enlightenment, and most sinfully and impactfully, to undermine human belief in and resort to the wondrous power of reasoning.
He asked late in his book, what was the nature of their living in accordance with the stark contradiction evident between their skeptical epistemology and their absolutist, political, ideological adherence advocating Communism. Can these be conflicting approaches be reconciled?
I accept that Marxist postmodernists hold these conflicting views but I deny that they are irreconcilable, because they only appear to be or are only superficially contradictory, so they are reconcilable because the supposed opposing views are but book ends of the same immoderate stream of thinking. True believers like the cultural postmodernists are imbued with two drastic, polar epistemological stances at the same time. They are wholly skeptical about others doctrines and their claims to knowledge while dogmatically, with full stop optimism express total confidence about the rightness of their own epistemology and doctrine as 100%, absolutely right, wholly certain and inerrant.
But, deep inside their fanaticism is the quagmire, the treacherous ground which is the foundation of postmodernism, which is directly tied to extremism, passion lies, illusions and that poorly reasoned and intuitively unsound and illogical line of thinking which, subconsciously, they know their epistemology and doctrines are not truthful or objective. Deeply repressed inside they know the unacknowledged truth: they know their views are junk but they as true believers who have no self esteem, no meaning, so amazing is their ability to endure, to not totally collapse for they are required to accept wholly the garbage which they have been told is worth sacrificing themselves and dying for.
Marxist postmodernists are true believers or fanatics; fanatics are so completely anti-something that they are also for something. So their out-of-power deconstructive skepticism, about status quo metanarratives of those in power whom they are striving mightily to dislodge, will be abandoned once no longer needed to gull the sleeping masses. Their postmodernist, relativist epistemology is an act not genuinely felt or lived; it is part rhetoric and strategy, part sincere and part actually believed, but Hicks is correct that it is mostly a rhetorical weapon applied in real politic arena to gain power, their sole political aim..
But once in power, they do not hide their epistemological absolutism any longer, their real epistemology, believed by them and held by them all along. Once empowered, there is no longer a need to hide their ultraist, fanatical views from the subjugated public. Now they swing to the other extreme expressing with hyper dogmatism, bold, excessive optimism and certitude of belief in what they claim to know. This new stance contradicts their previous stance, and their absolutist, new stance is superficially contradicting the previous stance and seems antithetical to their prior epistemology, but in actuality, the conflicting views of then and now are just poles poles of same spectrum, ideological, not factual, truthful or logical.
My analysis of how to resolve the contradiction which Hick reveals, is separate from—without disagreeing with Hick’s solution, but is rather meant to supplement explanatorily the explanation which he lays out. Hicks points out that postmodernists as fanatics are actually epistemological dogmatists all along and they know it, but, they disguise their epistemological radicalism to gain ground, when out of power, for they dare not alert the majority of a people as to their radicalism, their true intention to seize power and outlaw any thoughts or creed deviating from their own.
While out of power and seeking to foment revolution, the postmodernist revolutionaries pretend to be skeptical to gaslight the narratives of the status quo so the masses will lose hope and faith in official narratives so they will be ripe conversion to the metanarratives promoted by the revolutionaries.
I believe Eric Hoffer is suggesting the same pattern among up and coming mass movements in a society.
In the hands of these Marxist revolutionaries, skeptical epistemology is a rhetorical and political weapon: once in power they will be doctrinaire as they have been secretly all along. That is their conscious take on epistemology and their absolutist, sincerely held epistemology is consistent with their absolutist political beliefs and agenda; there is nothing to be reconciled, when they tell the truth about their views.
Nevertheless, on a subconscious level as fanatics, they hold unshakably and for dear life onto a tissue of radical lies and half-truths bundled together inside and underneath their surface consciousness, and severed from it. This subconscious web of lies and cherished fantasies about reality and the human condition are junk, and the mass movement of true believers underneath know their beliefs and way of knowing are pure nonsense. But to live with themselves, to render their frustrated life experience bearable at all, they wall off all that is true, all that they so effectively deny.
They keep saying their story of reality, their means of knowing it, and the content of their stories is at the apex of human intellectual development: a state of knowledge which is self-contained, final, complete, perfect, beautiful, and absolutely right, that all these doctrines, views and explanation lead to the one true faith, the ism which they serve and worship. They ardently believe what is worthless and that belief has to be defended as unalterable, narrative perfection.
Epistemologically, (The cultural postmodernist is no exception.) these wild extremes, of assuming epistemological relativism when convenient and blazing forth in public announcement of absolute epistemological supremacy of view once running things, of believing everything one believes is perfection because one believes in nothing or junk underneath, which seem contradictory but are actually poles of a commonality, a mendacious and passionate commonality which constitutes the entirety of intellectual content inside the consciousness of the true believer.
To cobble together a self built on passion, lies and frivolous junk as it is long held and indulged in, makes the integrated consciousness of the self bottom out; then the self-loathing is pure, deep embedded and complete, when producing that much self hatred and resentment. That festering self is a volcano ready to erupt in public, collectively, then a desire to destroy all and everything including the self, desiring for all existence to be exterminated, and that is naked, practiced evil or pure nihilism.
The cultural Marxists play all these games of pure noncognitivism about narratives, all while inside holding ultra-orthodox, ultraist dogmatic beliefs, narrative and claims of knowing, then playing political games. This all further damages an already sick, fragile personal psyche with sheer negative stress levels maximized. What amazes me is why already such fragile, embittered egos do not immediately collapse under the weight of all this negativity and falsity. Somewhere in the future they will collapse.
Hicks suggests these postmodernist epistemological and political claims are irreconcilable, and offers three options, that postmodernist unwittingly hold these views either suffer from cognitive dissonance, use epistemological duplicity as a weapon of strategic advantage to announce and hold such incoherent, juxtaposed beliefs or they hold these inconsistent believes sincerely and that it will psychologically destroy them.
But the postmodernists hold these contradictory views only temporarily as a political campaign weapon. They will shed tolerance, cooperation and inclusiveness towards other metanarratives and systems of beliefs as soon as they run the army, the police, and hold the totalitarian reins of government int heir hands.
To repeat my further point added onto the one Hicks makes about this glaring contradiction is that is they do not hold onto it on one hand as he describes it. But at the same time, perhaps without knowing it in a mood of willful blindness, that all fanatics believe in nothing and claim to know everything in the same psyche all the time. This explains their wild, emotionalist mood swings in epistemology believing in one moment in nothing, and then twenty minutes later, bragging about their absolute, unchallengeable knowledge about the world and all in it.
An epistemological moderate knows more than she does not, when she is truth apt, realistic and aligned with truth-makers and her words and propositions are truth-bearers. She will never boast that she knows it all for sure, or that she knows nothing for sure, but that she can reach knowledge conclusions that are right with high probable certainty, certain enough for her to make decisions and to judged others and herself ethically.
The postmodernists talk skepticism but these true believers, like all fanatics of whatever doctrinal pronouncements, are possessed of an epistemology of infallible knowledge, they believe. That is the way to see the world, they proclaim. They have not a skeptical bone in their body towards their own beliefs and epistemology, though their contempt for and rejection of the epistemology of competitors is totalistic. Postmodernists are not relativists: they view the world in black-and-white terms.
Postmodernists in their revolutionary or political role of seeking power violently, as underdogs talk skeptical epistemology without believing in it. Their claim to be relativistic is but a weapon to disarm their opponents, and to win over the public to not believing the metanarratives of the status quo which they seek to overthrow.
Hicks carefully and in detail lays out how their skeptical epistemology not be accepted at face value by those outside the mass movement, though the postmodernists proclaim it long and loudly. Their epistemological skepticism is but is a clever ruse, hiding their absolutist epistemology, their true-believing, passionate metanarrative that totalitarian cultural Marxism, Communist economics and dictatorship of the proletariat are actually their consistent view of the world, their plan, their holy cause, not to be shared with the public until their revolution has been victorious. Like other evildoers, their hide their intent, until they take over, lest their virtuous enemies discover their plot, and thus know how to defeat them in time to save the country under assault.
My take is that fanatics talk epistemological skepticism about the metanarratives of the status quo majority but their skepticism is a weapon of revolution to overthrow all that is. They inside do not believe in any non-absolutists epistemology about their cherished beliefs, their cherished metanarratives.
But fanatics, without self-esteem and self-love are essentially nihilistic creatures. They believe in nothing but pure deconstruction, nonsense, lies and absurd beliefs because their souls are empty and hollowed out, so they join a pack a mass movement, and adopt the totalist epistemology of their guru and his mass movement and his holy cause, in order to be accepted into the pack, and to fill the void on the agonized surface of their conscious state of mind.
They are epistemological relativists until they come to power and then their epistemological absolutism is revealed and their belief in it is total and sincerely held. In reality inside their minds is a vigorous, active contradiction, a subconsciously operating epistemological contradiction for those believing in nothing tell the world, their peers and themselves that they believe in the one true faith and know everything perfectly, that their beliefs are without error or exception. Thus complete lack of conviction is wedded tightly to a public ideological claim of complete conviction, and this is the epistemology they believe in, though they do not talk relativism unless they are out of power and on the make to win the public over. Their schizophrenic epistemology is tied to their totalitarian, ideology. It is utter lies and denial of liberty, private life and independent thought all the way down.
