Postmodernists do not believe in the notion of "Truth" with a capital "T." Rather, they hold that each individual or group is morally vindicated in selecting their own "truth" (with a lower case "t") based on individual whims, inclinations, interpretations, and presuppositions about life and reality.
Postmodernism is a temporarily convenient, but ultimately prurient and pernicious ideology that relegates mankind toward the animal plane and away from the divine.
But are the roots of all evil found in postmodern philosophy? The answer to this question is a resounding no! A conception of basic algebra illumines our minds to the reality that any linear continuum contains not one, but TWO extremes from the mean point of any given line.
Postmodernism represents only ONE extreme version of wrongness, and therefore only one half of the problems that we in the United States (or those in other countries) face at any given point in time. What then is the other extreme? What is the polar opposite of postmodern ideology?
The answer is PRE-STRUCTURALISM.
A synonymous term we could also employ is PRE-MODERNISM (as opposed to postmodernism—it being a polar opposite ideology to postmodernism). However, from this point on, we will employ the former term of pre-structuralism instead.
Before getting on to the definition and explication of pre-structuralism as a philosophical foil to postmodernism, I must remind readers of something else I have written about. In previous posts, I have often invoked—and endorsed—the Aristotelian concept of the "Golden Mean" as an ideal philosophical construct for conceptualizing absolute Truth and virtue as a perfect balance existing between opposite extremes that extend outward to the left as deficiencies and to the right as excesses.
Structuralism and modernism are terms given to the philosophic era preceding post-structuralism and postmodernism. While the latter prefers to deconstruct capital "T" Truths into individual lower-cased truths that are arbitrary, subjective, and non-absolute, the former favors realism and at least a semblance of rationale structure upon which to categorize objective reality.
It should be noted here that our utilization of these and other related terms (i.e. modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism) is purposely applied loosely and generally without undo regard to the endless details and countless nuances concomitant to these multi-dimensional philosophical movements. As such, attempts to counter our definitional purposes by means of intricate explication of said philosophical derivatives miss the point of our plain utilization thereof.
At Freedom Focused, our role is to define simple, concrete generalities from which individual students may then draw their own rationally informed conclusions and make their own conscience imbued decisions. In so doing, we openly acknowledge the liberty we have taken to co-opt certain mainstream philosophical concepts and terms with the explicit intention of putting our own carefully constructed spin on their generally understood premises.
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| Like light from the SUN, absolute truth as found in Aristotle's Golden Mean shines forth in resplendent and illuminating majesty. |
The following statements provide abstract explication of the difference between postmodernist philosophy (and the postmodernists who embrace it) and pre-structuralist philosophy (and the pre-structuralists who champion it). Afterward, additional, concrete examples will be provided to further contrast and illuminate the difference.
If postmodernism heralds the non-existence of absolute truth, then pre-structuralism heralds the absolute deification of outright lies.
Postmodernists herald an "anything goes" mentality. Pre-structuralist champion evil practices as the "only thing that goes."
Postmodernists are often personally irreligious and condescending towards persons of faith. Pre-structuralists are often radically religious; in extreme cases, they will even sanction senseless killing in the name of their god(s).
Postmodernists often pursue unbridled hedonism and exhibit unrestrained narcissism on the premise that there is no such thing as sin. Pre-structuralists will put people to death for exercising their God-given agency if that agency commits what they believe is a sin.
Postmodernists are overly laissez-faire with regards to moral compunctions, since, to a postmodernist, morality is absolutely relative. Pre-structuralists, on the other hand, are overly fanatical about their own deluded (and often evil) conceptions of truth, since, to a pre-structuralist, one's self-crafted morality is absolute.
We will now consider four (4) concrete examples of postmodernism, post-structuralism, and structuralism at play throughout different junctures of world history. First, we will illumine the role that postmodernism played in the moral entropy and physical attrition of the Roman Republic and Empire. Second, we will examine how the American Revolution utilized a Freedom Focused brand of structuralism to defeat the British and set up a successful Republic that would stand the test of time up until the present day. Third, we will look at how a pre-structuralist, anarchist, mob-mentality led to a very different result for the citizens of France in the French Revolution. Fourth, and lastly, we will attempt to consider the interplay of all three philosophies during the World War II period. First, we will consider the ways in which postmodernism and pre-structuralism led the world into war. Then just as importantly, we will discuss how a renewed structuralism that sprung up among the Allied powers ultimately saved Europe, America, and the rest of the world from evil conquest.
Example 1: The Roman Empire
The Roman Republic was the most orderly, disciplined, and prosperous empire the world had ever known... until it gave way to the entropic forces of postmodernism (personal prurience and dissolution) and pre-structuralism (unjust military aggression). The result was the fall of the Roman Empire, which, with the exception of a relatively feeble, pre-structuralist attempt by the evil dictator, Benito Mussolini, never rose again.
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| Cornwallis surrenders to General Washington following the Battle of Yorktown (Virginia) October 19, 1781. |
The American Revolution, while containing vestiges of postmodernism and post-structuralism (all societies do), ultimately ended in the creation of a political, social, and cultural STRUCTURE undergirded by a Declaration of Independence and Constitution that affirmed man's divine right of personal agency and delivered political, administrative, and legal power into the hands of the collective populace.
Despite her salient advantages in resources and geography, the rise of the United States as the greatest superpower the world has ever seen was a direct result of—and directly rooted in—these historic and unprecedented structures that have, so far, passed the test of time. In the words of William Gladstone (1809-1898), the former 4-time Prime Minister of Great Britain during the later nineteenth century:
"The American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."
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| The Reign of Terror and the Horrors of the Guillotine |
Following chronologically on the heels of, and inspired in part by, the American Revolution, serfs from France joined forces with the proletariat in taking what they hoped would be a productive stand against the idle and debauched, yet nonetheless powerful monarchy of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
However, unlike the American Revolution, which made only minor forays into postmodern and pre-structural behavior, the French Revolution took an extreme pre-structuralist, blood-lusty turn. As a result, the disgruntled, disorderly, undisciplined, and unprincipled masses ended up with a vacuum of power that was filled by a narcissistic dictator—Napoleon Bonaparte—who caused far more death and destruction in the ensuing generation than any previous French monarch had even imagined causing.
Thanks to Napoleon, Frenchmen and women were, for a period of time, worse off than they had been under Louis and Marie's monarchy. Following Napoleon's rise and fall, France and her Empire would never again seriously compete with Britain for geo-political hegemony. Despite their Allied victory in World War I (despite devastating losses) they were embarrassed in World War II when Paris fell on June 17, 1940—a mere 37 days after German forces invaded the French border on May 10, 1940. France would have to rely on Britain and the United States and her Allies to eventually liberate her from the Nazi war machine in 1944.
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| Nazi flag flies ironically atop the "Arc de Triomphe" in Paris during World War II. |
During the lead-up to World War II, Italy, Japan, and Germany were the active and fanatical pre-structuralists while the Western Powers (including the United States) were the distracted, passive, dissolute, and impotent postmodernists. While they initially set up two structures following World War I (the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations), the terms of the former were too pre-structuralist (austere, warlike) in nature and the political will of the latter proved feeble and ultimately impotent. The Treaty predictably embittered the vanquished, exacerbating a vendetta that was already planting the ruthless seeds of an even greater, future conflict, while the League of Nations stood idly by, powerless to do anything about the rise of fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, or Nazi Germany.
To make matters worse, instead of enforcing the terms of the Treaty of Versailles—one of the few international structures the Western Powers did have—they blindly allowed their former enemies to "live and let live" while they themselves grew steadily inebriated under the influence of their own postmodern pleasure seeking and prosperity, which led them into the calamitous delusion that World War I really was "the war to end all wars." They would pay dearly for their moral and political lapses during the 1920s and 30s.
Germany, on the other hand, desperately clamored after economic, cultural, and political revival following its disastrous fall from grace during the Great War. In the midst of such fetidly fertile ground, is it any wonder that a smart, patient, well-spoken, supremely (albeit delusionally) confident, and epically narcissistic pre-structuralist führer would arise to create a phoenix out of his conquered land and people and then seek to conquer everyone else who would not bow to his perverse, sadistic, and utterly diabolical ideology?
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| Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference of the Allied Leaders. January 14-24, 1943 |
Led by Churchill and Roosevelt (and ironically Stalin too), the Allies, driven by a commitment to principle rather than the mere pursuit of power, were able to become "men and women of valor" [1] whereby they became a committed, disciplined, unified force that was organized and strong enough to win another total victory in the epic conflict and once again make the world "Safe for Democracy." By so doing, they were able to regroup, rebound, and ultimately reclaim the divine rights that are available to those who follow the course that is right—the one and only course that leads to individual and collective freedom—the pathway of the Golden Mean.
Thus we can mine from the earthen pages of history ample evidence of postmodern, pre-structrualist, and structuralist philosophies; and thus we can behold that only the latter of the three leads to long-term liberty, peace, prosperity and freedom.
Sadly, it seems collective humanity cannot, or simply will not, learn from the egregious and devastating lessons of the past. As a result, postmodernism and pre-structuralism are both alive and well in our day. Worse still, they are perhaps as bad as they were in the 1930s or the 1910s or the 1850s or any other period of time preceding a major conflict destined to change the course of history. Thus it is that we are almost certain to repeat another epic worldwide disaster in the coming decade.
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| John Greenleaf Whittier One of America's "Fireside Poets" 1807-1892 |
Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: it might have been!
"The Greatest Generation" must be very disappointed to behold how poorly their posterity learned the lessons of history, and how increasingly close we are to replicating the very conflict they sacrificed their youth (and in many cases their very lives) to overcome, ensuring the peace we have enjoyed—only to watch us squander it!
Yet it is happening right before our eyes! Pre-structuralist China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS are preparing for and pursuing imperialistic aims as we speak! And postmodernist America and Western Europe are drowning in their own self-constructed pool of hedonistic narcissism while concurrently accommodating and appeasing the devil just as Neville Chamberlain and his Western European milieu did four generations ago. It is deplorable! It is despicable! It is dishonorable! But it is reality, and we and our children and grandchildren will have to pay whatever steep and heavy future price that natural law will exact from our imprudent and unwise behavior of the past and present.
In our current global climate, radical Islamic terrorists and other terror-sponsored groups are the most obvious pre-structuralists of the twenty-first century. Those who are too sophisticated and narcissistic to employ the term evil to describe them—those passive, impotent, ignorant forces who believe social and economic inequality is not merely a cause, but the cause of their radical ideology and evil acts (and pretty well all other woes domestic and foreign as well)—are the most obvious postmodernists of our day.
Going a step further, those who believe the key to rooting out evil lies in steel-fistedly "carpet bombing the hell out of the enemy" are clearly in the pre-structuralist's camp, while those who believe that evil in any form fails to rise to the level of a potential existential threat remain comfortably ensconced in a luxurious postmodernist penthouse—where a prurient milieu mingle, drink, and get ever higher on the thick, wafting vapors of their own delusional sophistication.
In mentioning these general, nameless examples, it should be noted that they are not meant to create strictly partisan alignments. To the contrary, both pre-structuralists and postmodernists can be found among ALL American political parties, although it is true that those who lean too far to the left invariably lean to far to the left of the Golden Mean and postmodernism while those who lean too far to the right inevitably lean too far towards the right of the Golden Mean and pre-structuralism. The farther that any person or group leans toward either extreme, the further they advance to predictable catastrophe and potential ruin.
Thus it is that the unprecedentedly political polarity that presently permeates our nation is positioning itself as a highly flammable fuse attached to a growing powder keg of ideological extremities poised to receive an impending spark of calamitous disaster in the not-too-distant future. And thus it is that moderate, structural, and morally minded Americans are rightly concerned with her upcoming election, which is set to feature a profoundly opportunistic and perennially untrustworthy postmodernist situated too far to the left with a deviously pragmatic pre-structuralist careening too far to the right with no sanity-restoring figure of homeostasis on the immediate horizon who can restore balance to American politics.
For some time now, Freedom Focused has been issuing caveat after caveat for Americans to "come to themselves" and recognize the extraordinary polarization of our country's current social and political climate, and to comprehend the dire consequences that predictably lie in our near future based on Aristotle's astute philosophical observation as well as history's terrible tale of extreme trends gone unchecked by Self-Action Leadership.
Unfortunately, it is likely too late to avoid many of the catastrophic consequences that are due from our collective drift into such polarized ideologies since the end of World War II. Thus it is that a world-war esque trial by fire will predictably and cyclically result to refine humankind's eccentric ideological proclivities and return us once again to the safe and peaceful zones of the Golden Mean.
Click on link to read more about how we arrived at our conclusions concerning this impending calamity...
The Paradox of War and How to Prepare for Coming Conflicts
We at Freedom Focused are largely powerless to prevent or circumvent the approaching storm. We will, however, do everything in our power to prepare structures, structuralists, and structuralism in hopes—and a fervent faith—of developing a metaphysical army of authenticists who, when weighed and measured by our postmodern and post-structuralist enemies (both at home and abroad), will once more prove themselves "men and women of valor" [2] counted worthy to meet our fate successfully and thereby claim the ultimate victory—and a far greater prosperity and future than that which has ever gone before.
If you liked this article and would like to read other, similar articles, click on links below to read similar, recent posts on corresponding topics.
An American Bible and the Dangers of Presentism
Truths, Facts, and Predictions: A Freedom Focused Vision of the Future
Postmodernists vs. Authenticists: An Existential Comparison
TRUMP v. CLINTON: Americans are Getting the Leadership They Deserve
The Paradox of War and How to Prepare for Coming Conflicts
The VISION and MISSION of Freedom Focused
Click HERE to learn more about Postmodernism
Click HERE to read more about the AGE of AUTHENTICISM aiming to replace it.
Notes:
1. A reference to a comment in a speech delivered by Winston Churchill and broadcasted by the BBC on May 19, 1940 during the Battle of France (9 days after Nazi forces invaded France's eastern border).
God Bless the United States of America—a blessed land of promise—now, and always.
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