Cynical Theories

[review of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (2020), by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay]

After Nazism, Communism, another very bad Western idea: applied postmodernism. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay did a brilliant job describing, conceptualizing and structuring this new ideology that is taking over universities, businesses, politics, museums, media, tech and, ultimately, society. As far I am aware, this is the very first work that correctly conceptualizes what is happening right now, in the 202o's West. A return to the primitive, the final deconstructing of the West, where the universal and the individual are rejected, and the tribe (specially, the race tribe) is elevated to the "de facto" sociological and existential unit. As the authors admit eventually, in the end, this is an attack on everything White, Male, Heterosexual. What the authors disappointingly fail to make, is the connection between the demographic transition happening now in the West, from white homogeneous nations to multiracial, multiethnic ones. Maybe this ideology is rising precisely because now there are many other ethnic groups competing for resources, wealth, power, prestige, in the same limit physical space of the old White ethnic tribes? Also, this book is brilliant at denouncing it, but it is also a testimony to why the fight against postmodern Critical Theories will ultimately fail: Helen and James spend several paragraphs explaining themselves, denouncing the "obvious oppression, racism, sexism" of modern western societies and complaining about the evil far-right. In other words, they are weak and feeble. Something that postmodernists are not. The Bolsheviks are getting closer to the palace.