Netflix and the End of Deconstruction ｜ 12⧸11⧸25
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
149.8319
Summary
Postmodernism has been around since the early 20th century, and its influence is still felt across every facet of society. But is it a symptom of the end of postmodernism, or is it the beginning of something new?
Transcript
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Netflix just announced its next animated children's film, Steps, a Cinderella inversion in which the Stepsisters are the real heroes.
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The platform is also releasing Queen of Coal, a film about a transgender woman overcoming the patriarchy in his small Argentinian town.
00:00:20.500
Reports of the demise of wokeness were greatly exaggerated.
00:00:24.560
Its adherents remain committed to pushing it across every domain of society.
00:00:28.960
What's notable, however, is how boring it's all becoming.
00:00:33.380
Deconstruction has been the default mode of modern culture, but it's running out of things to deconstruct.
00:00:39.940
The transgression has lost its power as the taboo fades, and in that exhaustion, something new, perhaps something true, stirs.
00:00:50.080
Some call Friedrich Nietzsche the first postmodernist for announcing that God is dead.
00:00:54.940
Whether he is a precursor or ground zero, the genealogy of the movement clearly flows from his work.
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You can argue about whether he unleashed several horrors into the world or merely acknowledged their arrival,
00:01:07.760
but Nietzsche at least understood the seriousness of his claim.
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He understood that having the blood of a god on your hands wasn't a clever academic parlor trick.
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With the creator of the universe declared dead, modern man felt free to dismantle the order that once bound him.
00:01:28.060
Postmodernism launched its assault on the good, the beautiful, and the true.
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The breaking of sacred bonds releases immense energy.
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The leftist revolution that consumed the West drank deeply from that well.
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The church, the community, the family, marriage, gender roles, gender itself.
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Each time the left destroyed one of these natural structures, it seized the power trapped inside and wielded it against its enemies.
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Transgression requires something sacred to violate.
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As I've written before, you eventually reach the point where there's nothing left to transgress.
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When every movie, show, novel, game, and song subverts the traditional Christian norm,
00:02:15.680
That's why these Netflix offerings feel so lifeless.
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They follow the same trajectory towards the same boring inversion.
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Fifty years ago, critics would complain that stories were predictable because the squeaky clean hero always triumphed.
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Today, they're predictable because the villain is always some poor, misunderstood victim of bigotry
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So what happens when postmodernism has inverted every hierarchy,
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and squeezed the last drop of power out of attacking Christianity?
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The philosopher Alexander Dugan offers a compelling answer.
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the end of postmodernism is the exhaustion of subversive secular culture.
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Instead of proclaiming that God is dead, people start asking,
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The old order fades so completely from their minds
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that secular man forgets what he was rebelling against in the first place.
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Postmodern man has lived his entire life in a world re-engineered from the top down by
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man imagined that he would shape the world through his own individual will.
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But the modern secular man discovers instead a moral wasteland.
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He finds that he is captive not to his own liberated self,
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but to the darker forces that were once held at bay by the divine order he dismantled.
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He no longer remembers what that order looked like,
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or why he rebelled against it in the first place.
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And in that moment, the opportunity to rediscover the spiritual returns.
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People have forgotten the object of their rebellion,
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and now they look at the miserable world secular man has made.
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These things begin to look far more promising than the ugly,
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pointless chaos modern man has created for himself.
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People once again thirst for a world where the good guy wins,
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Modern man tried to replace the divine with science and reason.
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As deconstruction loses its revolutionary energy and becomes stale,
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the desire to re-embrace the sacred order returns.
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It can only spoil and destroy what good forces invented or created."
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A barren, thirsty culture begins searching for the living water
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Modern culture is bankrupt and everyone feels it.
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The attempts at transgression now read as hollow conformity to a corrupted system.
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We're not the masters of our own world or our own truth.
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We don't have to live in the nihilistic abyss we created.
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The natural order waits just beneath the surface,
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The creative future won't come from a relativistic Hollywood
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It'll come from those willing to embrace the transcendent,
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from those who understand the world is held together,
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