How postmodernist thinking became the intellectual contagion undermining science, agency, and Western civilization itself.
See the evidenceThe Enlightenment gave us the scientific method, verifiability, and provability as the foundation of all modern progress. Postmodernism is rotting it from the inside. This is not a philosophical disagreement. It is the Black Plague of modern civilization.
Multiple perspectives are not multiple truths.
They are facets of one singular truth.
The entire scientific method rests on convergence: if we investigate long enough, research deep enough, and argue honestly enough, all must arrive at the same conclusion. A fundamental understanding of the nature of reality. Postmodernism promotes every perspective to the status of truth, and in doing so, makes science impossible. If "my truth" is as valid as "your truth," evidence becomes optional, proof becomes optional, and the centuries of hard-won methodology that separates knowledge from opinion dissolves into just another "perspective."
How a legitimate critique of power metastasized into a wholesale rejection of reality
Self-criticism is a core aspect of the Enlightenment, just as an immune system keeps a body healthy. But when calibrated too sharply, it attacks its own body and destroys it.
Philosopher Maarten Boudry's central metaphor: the Enlightenment created and licensed the tools of its own critique — freedom of thought, skepticism, questioning of authority. When those tools are turned not against specific abuses but against the entire project of modernity, Enlightenment values collapse from within. The tradition that made the West self-correcting has been weaponized into self-destruction.
When scientists tested whether postmodern academia could distinguish nonsense from scholarship
This is not abstract philosophy. The effects of postmodernism's assault on truth are quantifiable, replicable, and accelerating. Trust is collapsing, science is failing to reproduce, concepts are expanding beyond meaning, and academia has become a political monoculture.
Public confidence in scientists, higher education, and media over time
When researchers tried to replicate published findings, the softer the science, the worse the results
Haslam (2016): six concepts expanded both horizontally (new subtypes) and vertically (lower thresholds)
Faculty Democrat-to-Republican ratios across disciplines
Obesity and health are one example of a greater trend. The postmodernist project doesn't just corrupt abstract philosophy. It systematically dismantles the belief that you can take control of your own life. It turns every personal challenge into a structural condition, every individual into a victim, and every attempt at self-improvement into "internalized oppression."
1970 British Birth Cohort: internal LOC at age 10 vs. health outcomes at age 30 (n=11,000+)
Crystal L. Hoyt et al. (2014): Tell people obesity is a disease, watch what happens
Behavioral intervention (builds agency) vs. pharmacotherapy alone
Here is what makes this impossible to dismiss as right-wing culture war: the critics of postmodernism span the entire political spectrum, from Marxists to libertarians, from physicists to clinical psychologists. This is not ideology. This is convergent evidence from independent minds.
"Much of postmodernist work is just posturing... it's a way of gaining power within the academic community, and it has nothing to do with understanding the world." Called Derrida and Lacan intellectually fraudulent.
NYU physicist. Proved postmodern humanities couldn't distinguish real physics from deliberate nonsense. His 1996 hoax paper and subsequent book "Fashionable Nonsense" exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the field.
"Postmodern intellectuals use language obscure enough to provide a smokescreen for nonsense." Consistently argued that postmodern relativism is corrosive to scientific inquiry and public understanding.
"Enlightenment Now" (2018). Made the empirical case that Enlightenment values — reason, science, humanism — have produced the greatest gains in human welfare in history. The data is overwhelming. The postmodern assault on these values threatens everything they produced.
"Explaining Postmodernism" (2004). The definitive genealogy. Central thesis: postmodernism arose because the empirical failure of socialism required an epistemological retreat. Can't win on evidence? Attack evidence itself.
"Verraad aan de verlichting" (2025). Ghent University philosopher who diagnosed the Enlightenment's "autoimmune disease": the tradition of self-criticism that made the West great has turned against its own body. Progressives have betrayed the very values — reason, science, free speech — that originally defined progressive politics. In 2011, Boudry pulled his own Sokal-style hoax on a theology conference, proving intellectual vacuousness is not limited to postmodern humanities.
"Cynical Theories" (2020). Traced the evolution from postmodernism to applied postmodernism to "reified postmodernism" — where theoretical skepticism of truth hardens into dogmatic assertion of ideological claims.
"The Coddling of the American Mind" (2018). Three Great Untruths: what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, life is us vs. them. Documented how universities adopted "reverse CBT" — teaching students to be fragile.
"Capitalist Realism" (2009). Coined "privatization of stress." A Marxist critique: therapy culture depoliticizes structural problems by turning them into individual pathology. Postmodernism serves capital by eliminating collective action.
Marxist essayist. Identity categories "build up a prohibition about subjecting any given argument about one's identity to criticism." The left's embrace of postmodernism has made material change impossible.
Discovered learned helplessness (1967). Spent his career proving it could be overcome. "Helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter." The definition of postmodern agency.
"Antifragile" (2012). Systems grow from stress. Eliminate challenge and you eliminate growth. The postmodern safetyism project is producing a generation that is not just fragile but anti-antifragile: they break AND don't recover.
There was a time when Western civilization believed humanity could be better. That through discipline, resilience, and perseverance, we could aspire to something greater. That belief is not naive. It is the single most productive idea in human history. And it is under siege.
Postmodernism claims there is no objective truth.
It presents this claim as objectively true.
This is not a minor logical inconsistency. It is the fatal flaw at the heart of the entire project. If all truth claims are merely power plays, then the claim that "all truth claims are power plays" is itself a power play. If there is no objective reality, then the assertion "there is no objective reality" cannot be objectively real. Postmodernism eats itself. And yet its adherents never seem to notice — or care. As John Searle observed: "They want to deny the existence of objective reality while still receiving their salaries in real dollars."
The empirical case for the project that postmodernism wants to dismantle (Boudry, 2025 · Pinker, 2018)
The belief that animated Western civilization at its best
This is not a culture war.
This is a truth war.
Postmodernism has infected every field it has touched. Psychology, where only 36% of published studies replicate. Sociology, where hoax papers built on fabricated data pass peer review. Education, where universities teach students to be fragile rather than resilient. Medicine, where disease framings that undermine agency are preferred over interventions that build it. Public discourse, where disagreement is "violence" and evidence is "just one perspective."
When the evidence is this clear, this cross-partisan, and this well-documented, the question is not whether postmodernism has corrupted science and society. The question is why anyone is still defending it.
The Enlightenment is the heritage of every human being on this planet. It gave us the tools to cure disease, feed billions, explore space, and understand the universe. Postmodernism offers nothing in return except doubt, fragility, and the comforting lie that nothing is your fault because nothing is real.
Choose agency. Choose reason. Choose the difficult, demanding, exhilarating belief that truth exists, that you can find it, and that what you do with your life actually matters.
Postmodernist ideology is like a rot at the core of modern civilization. A cancer which eats away at everything that made us great — science, reason, and the belief in objective truth is at the heart of science and all great achievements of human civilisation. If we do not stop this rot, this cancer inside our civilization, it will not just lead to the end of science, it will lead to the end of civilisation as we know it.