Consequences of Postmodernism

One of the assumptions of the authors in this book is that quite often the media intelligence appears misleading—e.g., little attention is payed to the check on the sources of the news, let alone the cases of intentionally trade a fake news for a genuine one. It is difficult to pinpoint the real causes of this state of affairs, but I think that the needed explanation should focus on the general structure of our culture. This is why I would rather refer to that frame of mind which sometimes is called postmodernist and amounts to a disparagement—if not a denial—of truth. In fact, the basic postmodernist idea is that the certainties the so-called “modern” era took as an indisputable prerogative of the humankind are nothing but illusions. Human beings are just incapable of affording firm foundations for what they think and say, so that notions such as truth, fact, world and the like, which in the modern era have been taken to ground rationality, are actually devoid of content. At best, they are human constructs. “There are no facts, only interpretations” is the by now well-known leitmotif put forward by people subscribing to this point of view. Granted, the way in which the moderns interpreted the “firmness” of the foundations is unacceptable as well—we cannot avail ourselves of beliefs endowed with absolute and universal validity. But ‘no absolute and universal foundations’ does not mean ‘no foundations at all’. Accordingly, in the paper I show that the ideology of postmodernism is polluting our mental, intellectual, theoretical and physical environment. This happens just because this ideology has obliterated the vital distinction between being right and thinking one is right. In particular, I try to show this by giving an analysis of the notion of post-truth, one of the postmodernist’s favorite notions.