I've been fighting against postmodernism longer than most people on this app. When I transferred from my community college to Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995, I got a workstudy job in the library and started reading everything. I was already a big reader as my mother was a reading specialist and teacher, so I just dug in. The first books I pulled off the shelf two weeks before classes started were Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae", Jean Genet's "Our Lady of the Flowers", and Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil." Those three books were sent to me at that moment to prepare me for the shitshow that the arts and higher ed was going to be for me. All throughout my undergraduate experience, my interim time in the Minneapolis art and theatre scene, all my time in Los Angeles, and my amazingly stupid woketard graduate experience at CalPoly Humboldt from 2008-2010 when my wife and I got in at the same time for theatre, and all the way up to getting my SAG card in 2020 I've been fighting against postmodernism. I probably could've gotten a lot farther in the arts much sooner if I would've just nodded along but its not in my personality. Not long after I got my SAG card in 2020 I threw it all away because I wouldn't go along with the clowns in the industry over COVID and BLM.
All throughout this time I would assiduously read philosophy, Western and Eastern occultism, and even study the postmodern and Intersectional writers. In order to fight the cult, you have to be very erudite.
One of the most underrated American philosophers is Ken Wilber. I don't agree with all of his assertions or his concept of the holon, but he was a big influence on me at Minneapolis College of Art and Design when I was dealing with the postmodernists at the school. He was one of the authors who very clearly pointed out the absurdities I was learning in the theory classes. Here is one of his critiques of postmodernism and its specious notion that there is no such thing as a Universal Truth and mind you this was written in 1999:
"It would be a long time- almost two decades, really- in "liberal" academia; before anybody could murmur the phrase "is better than" and not be brought before the postmodern tribunal and publicly branded a traitor to the cause. For the core of extreme postmodernism was the notion that all values are culturally relative; all realities are socially constructed; all truth is a subjective preference in the face of an essentially truthless world. Unfortunately, all of those statements are said to be true for all people and for all cultures, without exception. In other words, the extreme postmodernists were guilty of exactly the same horrible sins they accuse everybody else of: they pronounced a long list of universal truths, but with further embarrassment that the universal truths were all self-contradictory. They claimed, in fact, that their position was superior in a world where nothing was supposed to be superior at all. Critics would eventually spot this duplicity and give it a technical moniker- "the performative contradiction" - but others would simply call it by its simpler name, hypocricy" Wilber, "A Sociable God and Eye to Eye" pg. 15
In 2026, the "performative contradiction" is deeply embedded in Leftist thinking. This same contradiction exists with the Christians on the Right but in a different manner. Wilber was one of the first Perennialists I read, even though his psychological models of spiritual reality as exhibited in the holon are another materialist horizontalizing of our perception of Supranatural consciousness. However, he is very worthwhile and has a good sense of humor. Interesting note- I had this friend from Sweden at MCAD who introduced me to Wilber's work. I was friends with the President of the College who was a conservative, and my friend and I tried to get Wilber to come to our campus because he was in town, but the President put a stop to it and told us "we don't want to confuse the retards any further."
I often find that actual discussions of postmodernism never occur anymore on this site since Peterson went away and Paglia busied herself with other things. I'm hoping to analyze it further here, as there has been a dearth of people talking about it and instead seem to be getting fixated again on Christian fundamentalism or being hypnotized by deceptive postmodernists like Alexandr Dugin who poses as a Traditionalist.
The "performative contradiction" is an insidious thing.