Mostly I just posted this article because I've heard the term "postmodernism" a lot, especially in the current culture war context. Whenever I hear the term "post modernism" I can see and hear Jordan Peterson in my head. (And to be honest, I think I've only ever seen a handful of Jordan Peterson clips in my life, so I'm a bit weirded out by why I can conjure such a clear picture of this).
I also had a teacher in high school who was very into analyzing literature from a "post modern" lens. Interestingly, that teacher was "woke" over a decade before that even became a thing people talked about, particularly in how she viewed identity, race, gender and sexuality. We talked a lot about privilege and oppression in a way that I didn't encounter as an adult until grad school. It is kind of strange to think that I was introduced to those types of ideas 15 years before they hit the mainstream hard in 2020.
But despite those two exposures, I haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about what postmodernism is, or what it means, or what the implications are. So much of our current cultural discussions seem random and I wasn't really aware that they were connected to an underlying philosophy.
To respond to your comment, I agree that most culturally dominant ideologies have a trifecta going on of the true believer extremists, the grifters and the followers. The success of an ideology or religion really depends on being palatable enough to the followers so they don't start rejecting it en masse, and probably also thrives when true believers overlap with the cynical grifters.
As with any ideology though, it is only a matter of time before the pendulum starts to swing back. It's going to be a fun next decade!
Three Camps?
I think this is a recurring pattern that is broader than postmodernism. Perhaps postmodernism is the current manifestation.
A potential simplified model of the general scenario is dividing the population into a three camp taxonomy: true believers, status / power grifters, and everyone else who lives with the consequences.
The post mentions retreat from religion as creating a vacuum which postmodernism could fill partially. Interestingly, religion has the same dynamics. True believers who are sincere in their beliefs, grifters at the institutional level who are mostly after status or power, and then everyone else who maybe don’t fully believe, but kind of have to just go along.