In other words, your position on stupid people was crafted for you, before you ever thought about finding a seat. And once you took that seat, all the evidence available to you reinforced your position. Everyone around you sees what you see. It's obvious, as it should be.
This is the post-modern perspective. The individual can not achieve consciousness outside of the field. Particle/wave. The meritocrat will eventually come to choke on his own affluent just like the industrialist. Etc. etc.
I don't have a modernist/post-modernist/meta-modernist model in my head. So I can't think of an answer along these lines.
....
I have a friend who is a huge fan of HP Lovecraft. While I'm not a horror aficionado, I'm not a fan of Lovecraft. When I read Lovecraft, the ending is telegraphed halfway thru, and there is no anticipation for the
italicized, shocking ending!
Now, I know I'm not some psychic who can predict how a story will end, but I have also grown up in a society that has reinvented Lovecraft's stories in many different venues and mediums. So the
Italicized, Shocking Ending! has been presented to me in many banal ways throughout my life.
So now I have a very hard time seeing the original works as original, in any way. This robs me of the experience of discovering Lovecraft, along with any appreciation I would have developed, had I started with the curriculum of Lovecraft Appreciation 101. This doesn't make me superior to Lovecraft fanboys, it simply makes their experience inaccessible to me.
...
I have a similar experience with Modernist/Post-Modernist thinking. I find it banal. A simple model that only points out the most obvious, used by white-belts on other white-belts.
But I don't know if this is because I grew up in a post-modernist world, or because the whole value of the model is to point out the very obvious to the most oblivious. I do know that if one doesn't pay close attention it is easy to not see the way one's way has been cleared to reach approved viewpoints. I haven't found any reason to investigate further, but I am open to the possibility that greater meaning is available, if I go thru the trouble to acquire it.
To check, I dug a bit into Metamodernism. Not much, a few vids I couldn't stomach, and a bit of reading (none of the books, just online).
What I found was that Hanzi describes "what he thinks of as gold" in terms I recognize:
You may recognize the figure above as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What the figure conveys is that our traditional welfare society seeks to guarantee only the most basic human needs of food, survival and security. In contrast, there is no explicit purpose to guarantee us a warm, meaningful community, a good sense of self and opportunities for fruitful personal development throughout life’s long journey.
The listening society, then, is the endeavor to include higher human needs in the guarantee that we give ourselves and each other. This is, of course, no easy task and must be seen as a long-term goal comparable to the building of the traditional welfare society—a process that went on for over a century. It is not self-evident how we should go about ensuring that the higher needs are met. What is needed here is a joint, long-term effort to find solutions in the various areas of social life: in public health and healthcare, in schools, in work-life, in social services, in every area we can think of.
...
Far from everyone feels part of a meaningful community. Many children never experience good and reliable friendships growing up—we all know the stories: the adolescence boy who gets stuck at home in front of the computer, does not develop important social skills, cannot get a girlfriend, and then has difficulty adjusting to adult life. When we send our children to school, there is no guarantee that they will have friends and be allowed to form the social bonds they need for their development. But the same applies not only to children, but also to adults. Many adult men, in particular, lack deep friendships and go on long lonely paths through life, never talking about feelings or deeper issues with anyone, even though they may have a job and a family. Many adult women feel different and alienated, suffer from loneliness—especially in later life. Both women and men go through long, difficult years of being involuntarily without a life partner or other positive sexual relationships. Even within marriage, our relationships often do not exhibit genuine closeness. A similar situation exists in the world of work. Many people’s professional lives are devoid of truly rewarding cooperation with other people. Others struggle to even enter the labor market, to participate in social life: the unemployed youth, the tuckered out old man, the socially awkward and deviant. The lack of community is a companion of so many people. And the fear of exclusion is a driving force in so many people’s lives. Many of us die alone.
How do we ensure that no one goes through life involuntarily without good friendships? That as many as possible have a life partner, if they want one? How do we keep families together? How do we ensure that people feel part of society and have a sense of community at work or in their neighborhood? That no one has to grow old and die alone? A wide range of actions are needed, from pre-school age, through the school years, in adult relationships, in the workplace, and in health and social care for all ages. So many concrete situations need to be changed to better promote the formation of positive bonds between people. Emotional and social intelligence need to be developed at all levels.
But our approaches are entirely different. I agree, that is gold ore. But then I go off in my own direction talking about historical gold mines, refining techniques, geographical mapping, and exploitation patterns. See my journal for examples of this dry writing, if you have trouble sleeping.
Whereas Hanzi has a different method of harvesting gold. He seems to be a huge fan of the Philosopher's Stone method. It looks like:
It is not enough to have societal development that gives us “more of the same” that we already have: more jobs, more welfare, more day-care places, higher wages. We must create something new, develop what we already have, take it to a new level. What we need to change to develop our economy is how we interact, how we talk and relate to each other—both personally and politically.
We need to develop a language, a way of thinking and doing politics that allows us to talk together about the really difficult and deep issues of social life. We need to develop a new political culture. The democratic culture we have today deserves our respect and is admittedly good at solving many problems. But there are also sufferings that our current political culture simply cannot cope with. That is why a new political thinking is needed.
Which to me, reads like a complaint that he can't create gold from lead, because we need better lead.
...
I don't remember where I ran into this link, but it is worth the time to read and ponder:
https://donellameadows.org/archives/lev ... -a-system/
which includes this gem:
The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”
This is the part of systems thinking that causes me the most confusion. That people are capable of mapping systems, and identifying the leverage points. But for some reason can't seem to perceive that every one of those leverage points is contested, and currently set at a compromise point that represents the net interest of concerned parties.
I.e., None of these leverage points are directly leverageable. Forces applied to contested levers are simply oppositional. There was a time when that lever did something useful, but its usefulness attracted vested interests, who then compete for control of said lever. The competition for lever control leads to subsystems being created to negate the effectiveness of opposing forces. And those subsystems will be used by both sides trying to control the lever, negating nearly all effort to move the lever.
In other words, if one understands a societal system, and its feedbacks, and is thinks there is some controllable lever that could be used to fix anything, ever, maybe spending some time identifying all the current interests already trying to use that lever is in order. Perhaps some more reading, or more thinking could help. I don't know.
What I do know, is that I have never seen a lever that was still connected to anything, that wasn't also contested. And that nobody I have heard talking about that lever ever acknowledged the other, contesting interests, except as outgroup indicators.
....
All that was a long and convoluted way of saying "I don't know" about a post-modernism framework, because I never built a postmodern framework; and your comment has had me wondering why, for a while, now.