Nilsi

This is a masterpiece of contemporary art, embodying what I would call "post-rap." In contrast to rappers in the 90s who were unconsciously acting out their sociocultural reality, Westside Gunn in this song wears his historical awareness on his sleeve. He refines gangster rap to its core elements, amplifying them to the extreme, while also demonstrating keen avant-garde sensibilities.

My claim is that postmodernism began to become the dominant sociocultural reality in the West over 100 years ago, yes, and I've given you many examples that illustrate this.

So everything that you can't find on CNN is "nutty," or even better, just flat-out "wrong"? For someone who claims to be the "most open-minded person on the planet," your mind is quite dense. You still want to push this point? An Amish person wouldn't necessarily be able to describe themselves as conservative, but could still intuitively hold the epistemic positions inherent to that "philosophy." Also, I don't care what Trump thinks or how he views himself; his actions speak louder than a thousand words. Hasn't psychoanalysis taught us anything here? Your most fundamental philosophical positions are totally unconscious, and thus a true postmodernist wouldn't be able to describe themselves as such.

I claim there was no real con-artistry before postmodernism. Con artists rely on certain psychological dispositions in the general population to exploit. If people did not believe in concrete appearances and objective truth (as is at the core of modernity), these could not be exploited by the con artist. The con artist also requires this psychological development in himself, just as the child using formal logic relies on having internalized concrete logic, so there is no way this could have existed from the dawn of time. A figure like Donald Trump can only exist within the context of contemporary mass media, where everything is pure surface and spectacle, and a Machiavellian psychopath (also a key figure emerging from the postmodern condition) can exploit the general tendency of the masses to believe their eyes and ears. A stage red ruler (at the dawn of civilization) would be incapable of such intellectual weaseling because his mythologized sense of morality (e.g. divine right of kings, blessing of the gods, etc.) is literally what makes up his identity. Anything that threatens this moral construct is brutally exterminated. What logic is that? So a dog is not a dog because it is incapable of telling you what a dog is?

Which is precisely what makes him the quintessential postmodern president.

Again, you are asserting a false causality between stages of development and moral terms (which, if I were to be maximally polemic, I could describe as stage purple magical thinking). You would agree that a very intelligent psychopath can cause more havoc than a very unintelligent one, wouldn't you? In the same sense, capitalism, operating through relativism, pluralism, etc., is much more insidious than the plain old industrial-era capitalism, where the factory worker has a clear image of this capitalism (e.g. factories, bourgeois capitalists). Today's capitalism is so decentralized and nebulous that most people don't even realize they are enslaved by it and, at best, can concoct some conspiracy theories to imagine where the center of oppression lies (e.g. deep state/elites, silicon valley, etc.), which is nothing but a coping strategy for the radically fluid and faceless reality of capitalism and the market forces that dominate their lives today. I have made my point elsewhere. I'm not going to argue in circles with you. On a slightly unrelated note: did you know that many of your so-called "green liberals" and most of the 1960s counterculture went on to become the loudest and proudest supporters of libertarianism (e.g. Steve Jobs) in the 1970s and 1980s? Quite the ironic, but predictable twist. Libertarianism, in many ways, is the ultimate conclusion of green liberalism in a world that still hasn't addressed the underlying economic and psychological realities of capitalism. This is textbook stage orange hubris. First of all, let's not confuse capitalism with the economy (more on that later). Secondly, and most importantly, there is no guarantee of some utopian future; the future is radically open, and unless humanity takes full responsibility for it, I can guarantee you that the future we will create (or rather, let happen) will be dystopic, and much worse than what we have now. (See Joseph Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies," Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West," or Manuel De Landa's "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History" to dispel yourself of any such naive readings of historical progress.) Not a pedantic side point, but rather the central point of this discussion. You can define capitalism the way you did, but here I insist on a more metaphysical definition of the term: capitalism, at its core, is the systematization of human desire. René Girard has put his finger right on the spot with his Theory of Mimetic Desire, which claims that our desire is by default insatiable since we precisely desire to possess for ourselves whatever object is desired by the other, and thus there is inherent conflict embedded in this desire. This dynamic runs like a continuous thread through the entire evolution of economic (or symbolic) exchange from our tribal past to our postmodern present; and this dynamic is precisely what drives capitalism. This is also precisely the point of discussion in the famous conversations between J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm, in which they, I think correctly, conclude that there has to be a fundamental shift in perception (i.e. perceiving reality as a continuous whole, rather than individual parts, which necessarily must be in conflict with each other). So yes, in some sense, there cannot be capitalism at the holistic stage of development, but there certainly can be much worse forms of it just before it.

Notice that the example I provided are just symptoms of an underlying sociocultural reality; they are not in themselves what is meant by postmodernism.

Wow, what a load of crap. Postmodernism is not merely an „aesthetic and philosophical movement;“ it is the state of the world we’ve been living in, I claim, for over 100 years. This would be like saying „classicism is merely an aesthetic and philosophical movement starting with the Renaissance,“ when actually it is a reference, a gesture to classical antiquity, which did ACTUALLY happen. People try to pretend like postmodernism isn’t an actual thing, which is insane to me. Some of the core tenets of postmodernism are: Blurring of the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary; this already started with characters like Edward Bernays (early 20th century), the father of public relations. The death of the meta-narrative; this is Nietzsche's infamous proclamation about the death of God (in the late 19th century). Fragmentation and decentering of meaning; you can start seeing this happen in art with Pablo Picasso and cubism (early 20th century). Irony, parody, and pastiche; James Joyce’s 'Ulysses' (1922) creates an ironic conglomerate of various writing styles and historical periods that makes it obvious that we have arrived at the end of linear history already. Besides that, I have already characterized postmodern capitalism in a previous post. We could also analyze this psychologically through things like mental illnesses and such, but that’s not my forte, and I don’t think it’s necessary to drive the point home. Your move is the equivalent of quoting some random Christian YouTuber in a debate about God. If that’s your epistemic standard, I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation.

What logic is that? So, by extension, is the post-World War II era yet to come because "post" always implies the future? Lolz. Postmodernism is simply what came after modernity. The central myth of modernity, that of the Enlightenment (the progressive liberation of mankind through scientific discovery), has been disintegrating for a good while now. The first theorists to truly grasp this were Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their classic "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (a topic for another day), published in 1944 and obviously conceived only after modernity had already started to fall apart (i.e. after postmodernity had already begun to emerge).

Postmodernism isn't some futuristic possibility; it has been taking over Western society for over 100 years already.

Yes, my point is that capitalism can take over any spiral stage and becomes even more pernicious the higher up the spiral it moves.