Failed Transmission

2026-04-10

Recently I got into a heated debate with a Psychology student, my stance was quite firm, I am not a big fan of most Post Modern literature and academic work, despite being congruent to Post Modernism. The simple reason for this being, anytime a post modernist tries to write non fiction, they never fail to ensure that a good majority of their works are piles of text which barely say anything. I do not necessarily hate someone like Irigaray, no, I am quite fond of her take on neutrality and linguistics, however her constant use of random jargons from other academic fields trying to pretend they mean anything really gets annoying at some point, and, of course, its not just her, I think most post modernists are subject to this problem. Conceptually it is one thing to deliberately abuse language if your post structuralist case is related to linguistics, however doing all this larping spreads like cancer and before you know it, most of the literature is gibberish which becomes completely inaccessible to the intrigued layman. They will tell you clarity is a myth invented by the capitalist to sell more books or how stating the "obvious" actually hides assumptions about power and what not, but the reality is most of these people failed logic classes and anytime they try to demonstrate a theorem they will hit you with the most poorly written rhetorical attempt to prove something. My point being, there are many minds who deserve recognition in its purest form. Often times we find ourselves saying, "I thought about it when I was 14" or "It is something I could have come up with, what makes them so great?" when studying some of the most foundational texts in Philosophy, failing to realize that the said philosopher made such a dent on the "human gheist" that their ideas are now so imbued into society to a point where their ideas are now trivial wisdom. I believe this is the most purest form of recognition, which of course, most post modernist will never get.

The rant so far is mostly over exaggerated on the inaccessibility of their works, however, something to be notated is, how miserably their ideas have failed to enter the general consensus, on the surface everyone loves them, we claim to respect them, but a good majority of us are not literate on what they have expressed, a well known fact about the general philosophy subculture and not just post modernism on the internet is that most of our exposure is very much limited to wikipedia summaries and youtube video summaries, most Marxists of today do not read Marx they watch a 30 minute video summary on youtube, the gym bro poster on twitter who claims to be Nietzschean takes a picture with Thus Spake Zarathustra and continue his day being the untermensch, and the Hegelian E-girls snort cocaine from their copy of the phenomenology after they are done posting a suggestive picture while posing with the copy. I could go on and on about the larp culture, the classical literature reader on Instagram has bookmarked more reels about romanticizing a miserable life portrayed in existentialist literature, than having read the said literature. In principle it is clear we all want to stand for something, and we want to be able to express our ideals through an aesthetic that we have deemed to fit our ideals, with little comprehension. Of course, I do not care about the larping pandemic, maybe it is how things are meant to be and I am just being sore about people choosing on how they express themselves. But what does annoy me is how so much gets buried during all the larping. One thing that me and my friend constantly discuss about is, how internet "Hegelians" constantly keep misinterpreting what "THESIS-ANTITHESIS-SYNTHESIS" means and no one bothers to cross check their claims.

To put it simply, I do think philosophy has been split into inaccessible academic theory which demands you read all the presequent philosophers and oversimplified internet aesthetics, and both distort the transmission of ideas.