Episode #203 ... Why the future is being slowly cancelled. - Postmodernism (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks to everyone who supports the podcast on Patreon. Thanks for giving me and my family a life every episode. Always gonna keep doing my best here for you. I hope you love the show today. So I highly recommend listening to last episode on neoliberalism because everything on this episode is gonna build off of that one. We're gonna talk about how the hyper focus on the individual, the use of competition as the main organizing principle of society, the primary goal of getting the government out of the way of people innovating, how all this gets combined with postmodernism in a way that leaves us in a spot that Mark Fisher thinks is incredibly difficult to move away from if you wanted to. And to just begin with an example of the type of instincts postmodernism brings about in people, let's talk about ethics for a second. Maybe one of the most fundamental questions you can ask in philosophy, what is it that makes something right or wrong? By the way, gonna be sprinkling in some episodes here soon on ethical reasoning, hoping it'll be helpful to demonstrate for people what philosophy can bring into these conversations, which is a lot. But the question for now is, what do you think the average person living in postmodern society would say if you ask them, how do you determine what right or wrong is in a given situation? And I think most people, a good percentage of specifically young people alive today, if you press them hard enough on it, would say that they think that morality is something that's relative. They'll say, who am I to claim that one culture is better or worse than any other culture? Their values make sense to them. My values make sense to me. I I can't appeal to anything objectively better about mine than theirs. And and I certainly, as someone born into a postmodern type of subjectivity, have to be very skeptical of any sort of grand narrative that's been constructed out there that tries to make claims about moral objectivity. Those don't exist to me, so therefore morality is relative. And then if you ask those same people, okay. Well, if that's the case, then how should we be treating other people or cultures that see things differently than you do? And And again, for a lot of young people living in postmodern society, their answer is often that we should treat people with tolerance. And it makes sense. See, because in a world where every moral conclusion is equally valid to you, then, of course, you should be tolerant to people to be able to hold whatever positions they want to. And with this tolerant relativism that's super common these days, well, it all sounds really great. And, yes, there's people who would say that this is the pinnacle of moral wisdom. Everybody else out there is just a …