Also there is such a thing as pre-logical thinking that Lucien Levy-Bruhl mentions in his studies of primitive people and how they thought in his book How Natives Think. They didn’t think in categories or worry about contradictions. The picture nowadays that you mention in this article could be called post-logical, which is the same at bottom, a kind of taking over of nature and impulses that Lewis described in Men Without Chests.
This is a great essay. Just a few days ago I encountered someone who told me that mathematics was socially constructed. This essay has helped me on how to understand their take and how to respond.
Here’s a quote that this essay reminded me of:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Thanks Jake. Yes, becoming complicit in a lie is a way of becoming or increasing evil in oneself. But as I point out in the essay, the real issue is the relation between the one who gives into the lie and the one who is encouraging the lie, i.e., between the suborned and the suborner. The one who is suborned comes under the control of the suborner. It's like taking a bribe. Once you take it, you are owned by the those who bribe you. And of course, denials and further lies then come into play because no one wants to admit being complicit with evil. That's why I write in the essay that to be complicit in a lie is to be owned by those for whom we lie.
Bill, thank you for putting this into print. It is so encouraging to read that others have analyzed the evidence and have come to the same conclusions as we have, even if it is contrary to "the narrative."
Thanks for sharing this link, Bonnie -- I just read your piece. It's shameful what happened to you and your family for simply taking a reasoned and measured response to c19. But this was a time of national insanity (not that it's past). I've heard that expression before -- "not a hill to die on." Eventually, the enemy occupies all the hills and dying on a hill accomplishes nothing -- it's suicide. Better not to give the enemy any hills.
I think source of the woke war on math (and biology, and the rest of reality) goes even deeper than what you describe here, and I think you'll agree with me on this: It follows from the very materialist, Darwinian reductionism that you rail against.
From materialist reductionism follows radical nominalism, and from radical nominalism follows social constructivism of all knowledge: Nothing in nature has any essence according to this view, no irreducible powers, no inherent purpose or natural end. All that exists is blind, undifferentiated, particles in mindless, mechanistic motion, and all the ways we "carve up" various aggregates of particles into the objects of our experience - planets, tables, living things, males and females, and even human beings including ourselves - are mere social constructs: patterns that we are merely imposing on the world with no mind-independent reality.
*Even our own rational intellects* can be nothing more than social/mental constructs according to this view. Our rational intellects and our very selves do not objectively exist, and hence they cannot have any inherent purpose, function, or natural end. There cannot be any inherently "correct," "right," or "rational" way for us to reason, nor any objectively "wrong," "incorrect," or "fallacious" way for us to reason. Hence there is no such thing as objective truth, and all knowledge is utterly subjective (even the existence of subjects), socially-constructed, and illusory.
This is why the confused, flailing attempts of "anti-woke" atheists like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher or Colin Wright to constrain the monster they have created are futile and doomed to failure. It is the woke, and not they, who have correctly followed the logical implications of their materialist reductionism by abandoning logic and truth altogether.
The continued regard for the concepts of reason and objective truth in academia was always a holdover from the Christian theism that Dawkins and company spat on and worked so hard to eradicate. There is simply no way to justify or reassert it from within the confines of materialist reductionism.
And that means that the Western academy will continue to collapse in on itself under the influence of woke activists and other rejectors of reason and truth until it can bring itself to collectively reject reductionist, Darwinian materialism.
Thanks The Deuce. I actually made that connection to materialism in another post, this one on my blog before I joined Substack: https://billdembski.com/science-and-technology/woke-ideology-as-scientific-materialisms-legitimate-offspring/. Interesting the connection you make with radical nominalism. Nominalists like Occam were theists who believed in omnipotence unconstrained by essence. At least such a God could construct reality as he pleased. Today's social constructivists live in a fantasy world, merely imagining they are constructing reality. My philosophical sensibilities are anti-nominalist -- no surprise here.
Yes, I agree that Ockham was basically well-meaning, but I think he was badly misguided and that nominalism both entails and is entailed by materialist reductionism when the implications are drawn out.
For after all, if the entities we observe in the physical world do not objectively exist as entities in their own right, but this is merely a result of us imposing our own subjective categories onto it, then it follows that all that really exists is random aggregations of undifferentiated, purposeless matter at the lowest level in the void.
Likewise, if all that really exists is random aggregations of undifferentiated, purposeless matter at the lowest level in the void, it follows that entities we observe in the physical world do not objectively exist as entities in their own right, but only as impositions of our own subjective categories onto the world.
And if you apply that premise to the entity known as the conscious rational human subject, you reach the absurd and circular conclusion that the conscious rational human subject does not exist objectively as an entity (and so cannot have any natural end, such as reasoning in a correct way to ascertain truth), but that it is exists only as a subjective projection of the conscious rational human subject. And that in turn collapses into the even more insane conclusion that the conscious rational human subject does not exist at all, since obviously an objectively nonexistent entity cannot project its own existence onto the world.
Thinkers who built on Ockham's line of thought, such as Descartes, understood and teased out the materialist reductionist implications of nominalism for the physical world, but attempted to avoid the absurd implications that view holds for the rational human self by locating the rational human self completely outside the physical world, where it could continue to be thought of as an objectively existing entity with a rational natural end.
But that separation was so radical, and left the rational human self with such a complete absence of any "point of contact" in common with the physical world as conceived by nominalist-reductionism, that it became unintelligible how the rational self could gain any sort of knowledge about the physical world at all, or act on it in any conceivable way.
And that naturally led to the radical skepticism about, and eventual wholesale deconstruction of, human knowledge and the human self by subsequent individuals like Hume, and to the attempt by Darwin to subsume all purpose and natural ends in nature, including the rational human self, to the operation of blind matter.
Incidentally, related to all this, I've been pleased by the increasing sophistication, especially on the philosophical end, that I've been seeing from the ID community and those close to it in recent years. I'm thinking here of Neil Thomas and others pointing out the incoherence of the very concept of "natural selection" as conceived by Darwin as a grounds for biological function for instance, or various authors of works like "Minding The Brain" pointing out the incoherence of denying the real, innate function of the rational human intellect as required by Darwinian reductionism.
Imo, the strongest approach is a holistic one-two punch that first points out the incoherent unintelligibility *in principle* of denying real biological function (especially as pertains to the human intellect) or attempting to reduce it to materialist-reductionist terms, and then with that philosophical backdrop in hand goes on to point out the absurd improbability of practically every observable example of biological function, from the mammalian eye to the bacterial flagellum to even a single functioning protein, ever coming into existence sans intentional choice even granting a purely materialist-reductionist conception of those things (which, again, is previously shown to be incoherent rather than the mandatory "default" position).
This is from chapter 1 of my book BEING AS COMMUNION. You'll instantly see the relevance:
Compelling reasons to doubt the truth of materialism have existed from the start. Democritus, a pre-Socratic atomist philosopher, was one of the earliest figures of recorded history to hold to materialism. He held all reality to be constituted of atoms, which he understood as tiny indivisible particles. Thus, like Feynman, he embraced an atomic hypothesis: “By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: in reality atoms and void.” Yet Democritus also recognized a difficulty in this position: these very conventions, drawing on appearance and opinion, though ultimately reducible to a materialist substratum, were also the logical and evidential grounds for thinking materialism true in the first place. The deep truths of reality might all be material, but they could only be known through conventional truths provided by the senses. Which, therefore, is more fundamental, matter or a mind capable of apprehending matter? Democritus understood the tension and put it this way: “Poor mind, do you take your evidence from us [i.e., the senses] and then try to overthrow us [i.e., by reducing all sense impressions to atoms and the void]? Our overthrow is your fall.”
Because the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers exists only in fragments, and thus is largely lost to history, it’s hard to say just how seriously Democritus took this challenge to atomistic materialism. This challenge raises a self-referential paradox: how can knowing subjects composed only of matter know that they are only composed of matter? Matter, it would seem, has no intrinsic capacity to produce agents that think, much less that can form representations about the world, much less that can know that these representations are true. More recent thinkers such as C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga have developed these thoughts into a full-blown critique of materialism, charging it with self-referential incoherence. One sees in materialism’s self-reference problem the possibility of idealism, in which the mind that employs the senses to infer that all objects are composed of atoms comes to regard these very atoms as an expression of mind. It seems, however, that Democritus never took this line. He is regarded, along with Epicurus, as one of the two premiere materialists of the ancient world, a fact underscored by Karl Marx’s choice of dissertation topic: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” Marx, of course, was himself an avid materialist.
I think C.S. Lewis was, as usual, perceptive and on the right track with his consideration of idealism.
For the reasons given above, I don't think that the main problem with modern materialism is that it holds all of reality to be material (though, that is a problem with it).
The main problem is the reductionist concept of *matter itself* that materialism holds - in other words, the part of materialism which entails and is entailed by radical nominalism.
So the solution to materialism's incoherence would have to be a metaphysic that conceives material reality itself a non-reductionist way, such that entities of our experience exist objectively as entities and not just as our own subjective projection of patterns onto the world, and with powers and properties of their own that are not mere shorthand for the aggregate of the behavior of their disparate components.
As I see it, there are two basic types of metaphysical view that provide this: idealism and hylomorphic dualism. Arguably, less extreme versions of idealism (eg. ones that aren't so idealistic that real physical causation is denied altogether) might be thought of as types of hylomorphic dualism, and some types of hylomorphic dualism (eg Thomism with its incorporation of Augustine's idea of universals existing as archetypes in God's mind which He creates the material world by actualizing) might be thought of as moderate forms of idealism.
This is an interesting and informative article but completely misses the point.
The ones pulling the strings don’t believe in relativism or socially constructed truths. On the side that supports the strange new world of the illusion of gender and racism are Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They will certainly never reject 2+2=4 or anything close to it.
The ones who preach queer mathematics, gender fluidity, racism etc. are just their useful idiots and will be eliminated when it’s time. In the mean time we are focusing on them which is the point. Like the visual trick in the color video, we are not seeing what’s actually happening.
It seems truth needs to be asserted where it is contradicted. Those pulling the strings may believe that 2+2=4, but they are in a minority. Moreover, I'm not convinced that any efforts on their part to queer mathematics etc. is a distraction. What if it's the actual endgame? I.e., make humanity so confused that they'll swallow anything. In that case, it seems two approaches are warranted: (1) remove the string-pullers from power directly (how?); (2) remove their influence over the masses by refuting their lies.
Look to power as what is behind this. Do you see criticism of any of the woke agenda coming from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Deep State or Global organizations? These are the people with power and lots of it. So they must by their inaction be supportive of this. But certainly not as the end game.
They are definitely not a minority especially in economic power. Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street control more money than the US economy. Does anyone believe that they see the end game as queer mathematics etc. I would look to another end game.
Nothing wrong with refuting lies or writing insightful articles like this one!
I too wonder about this. My standard line is that as we stand over the ditch that will soon contain our machine gun riddled bodies, the social constructionists standing to our left and right at the edge of the precipice will be quivering and shrieking “but we are the ones who ushered in the revolution, why us?” So then what is the motivation of the powerful to let these fools destroy society? Is it merely the lust of power, for surely a destroyed society is of no use to anyone.
“ what is the motivation of the powerful to let these fools destroy society?‘
World government!
My guess is that they are trying to eliminate petty geographic and ethnic squabbles to reach a more modern world for all. The last bulwark against their objective is the United States. Look how the EU behaves. Once the US is gone, the useful idiots will be dealt with in order to eliminate chaos. At least that is how they think.
What they cannot eliminate is the basic human desire for power. This will prevent their utopia from happening which is more corporate than socialist and built on science. They do not understand that Christianity and freedom built the current world. If anything, they believe both are impediments.
"If all knowledge is socially constructed, then the claim that all knowledge is socially constructed is itself socially constructed, which means that it is pretending to an objectivity and universality to which it has no rights."
Very well reasoned. It's this sort of reasoning that shows that those who say we don't have free will cannot be taken seriously because whatever they say is just a result of the laws of physics.
Also there is such a thing as pre-logical thinking that Lucien Levy-Bruhl mentions in his studies of primitive people and how they thought in his book How Natives Think. They didn’t think in categories or worry about contradictions. The picture nowadays that you mention in this article could be called post-logical, which is the same at bottom, a kind of taking over of nature and impulses that Lewis described in Men Without Chests.
This is a great essay. Just a few days ago I encountered someone who told me that mathematics was socially constructed. This essay has helped me on how to understand their take and how to respond.
Here’s a quote that this essay reminded me of:
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
- Theodore Dalrymple
Thanks Jake. Yes, becoming complicit in a lie is a way of becoming or increasing evil in oneself. But as I point out in the essay, the real issue is the relation between the one who gives into the lie and the one who is encouraging the lie, i.e., between the suborned and the suborner. The one who is suborned comes under the control of the suborner. It's like taking a bribe. Once you take it, you are owned by the those who bribe you. And of course, denials and further lies then come into play because no one wants to admit being complicit with evil. That's why I write in the essay that to be complicit in a lie is to be owned by those for whom we lie.
Bill, thank you for putting this into print. It is so encouraging to read that others have analyzed the evidence and have come to the same conclusions as we have, even if it is contrary to "the narrative."
I wrote this a year ago... https://truthmatters2023.wordpress.com/2023/05/06/it-just-didnt-add-up/ The c19 debacle was just one part of a bigger agenda, as you clearly showed above.
Thanks for sharing this link, Bonnie -- I just read your piece. It's shameful what happened to you and your family for simply taking a reasoned and measured response to c19. But this was a time of national insanity (not that it's past). I've heard that expression before -- "not a hill to die on." Eventually, the enemy occupies all the hills and dying on a hill accomplishes nothing -- it's suicide. Better not to give the enemy any hills.
I agree! Except for one particular hill...one hill was taken at great cost and victory was secured: https://numberstory.wordpress.com/2021/11/11/the-hill-to-die-on/
Hi Dr. Dembski,
I think source of the woke war on math (and biology, and the rest of reality) goes even deeper than what you describe here, and I think you'll agree with me on this: It follows from the very materialist, Darwinian reductionism that you rail against.
From materialist reductionism follows radical nominalism, and from radical nominalism follows social constructivism of all knowledge: Nothing in nature has any essence according to this view, no irreducible powers, no inherent purpose or natural end. All that exists is blind, undifferentiated, particles in mindless, mechanistic motion, and all the ways we "carve up" various aggregates of particles into the objects of our experience - planets, tables, living things, males and females, and even human beings including ourselves - are mere social constructs: patterns that we are merely imposing on the world with no mind-independent reality.
*Even our own rational intellects* can be nothing more than social/mental constructs according to this view. Our rational intellects and our very selves do not objectively exist, and hence they cannot have any inherent purpose, function, or natural end. There cannot be any inherently "correct," "right," or "rational" way for us to reason, nor any objectively "wrong," "incorrect," or "fallacious" way for us to reason. Hence there is no such thing as objective truth, and all knowledge is utterly subjective (even the existence of subjects), socially-constructed, and illusory.
This is why the confused, flailing attempts of "anti-woke" atheists like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher or Colin Wright to constrain the monster they have created are futile and doomed to failure. It is the woke, and not they, who have correctly followed the logical implications of their materialist reductionism by abandoning logic and truth altogether.
The continued regard for the concepts of reason and objective truth in academia was always a holdover from the Christian theism that Dawkins and company spat on and worked so hard to eradicate. There is simply no way to justify or reassert it from within the confines of materialist reductionism.
And that means that the Western academy will continue to collapse in on itself under the influence of woke activists and other rejectors of reason and truth until it can bring itself to collectively reject reductionist, Darwinian materialism.
Thanks The Deuce. I actually made that connection to materialism in another post, this one on my blog before I joined Substack: https://billdembski.com/science-and-technology/woke-ideology-as-scientific-materialisms-legitimate-offspring/. Interesting the connection you make with radical nominalism. Nominalists like Occam were theists who believed in omnipotence unconstrained by essence. At least such a God could construct reality as he pleased. Today's social constructivists live in a fantasy world, merely imagining they are constructing reality. My philosophical sensibilities are anti-nominalist -- no surprise here.
Yes, I agree that Ockham was basically well-meaning, but I think he was badly misguided and that nominalism both entails and is entailed by materialist reductionism when the implications are drawn out.
For after all, if the entities we observe in the physical world do not objectively exist as entities in their own right, but this is merely a result of us imposing our own subjective categories onto it, then it follows that all that really exists is random aggregations of undifferentiated, purposeless matter at the lowest level in the void.
Likewise, if all that really exists is random aggregations of undifferentiated, purposeless matter at the lowest level in the void, it follows that entities we observe in the physical world do not objectively exist as entities in their own right, but only as impositions of our own subjective categories onto the world.
And if you apply that premise to the entity known as the conscious rational human subject, you reach the absurd and circular conclusion that the conscious rational human subject does not exist objectively as an entity (and so cannot have any natural end, such as reasoning in a correct way to ascertain truth), but that it is exists only as a subjective projection of the conscious rational human subject. And that in turn collapses into the even more insane conclusion that the conscious rational human subject does not exist at all, since obviously an objectively nonexistent entity cannot project its own existence onto the world.
Thinkers who built on Ockham's line of thought, such as Descartes, understood and teased out the materialist reductionist implications of nominalism for the physical world, but attempted to avoid the absurd implications that view holds for the rational human self by locating the rational human self completely outside the physical world, where it could continue to be thought of as an objectively existing entity with a rational natural end.
But that separation was so radical, and left the rational human self with such a complete absence of any "point of contact" in common with the physical world as conceived by nominalist-reductionism, that it became unintelligible how the rational self could gain any sort of knowledge about the physical world at all, or act on it in any conceivable way.
And that naturally led to the radical skepticism about, and eventual wholesale deconstruction of, human knowledge and the human self by subsequent individuals like Hume, and to the attempt by Darwin to subsume all purpose and natural ends in nature, including the rational human self, to the operation of blind matter.
Incidentally, related to all this, I've been pleased by the increasing sophistication, especially on the philosophical end, that I've been seeing from the ID community and those close to it in recent years. I'm thinking here of Neil Thomas and others pointing out the incoherence of the very concept of "natural selection" as conceived by Darwin as a grounds for biological function for instance, or various authors of works like "Minding The Brain" pointing out the incoherence of denying the real, innate function of the rational human intellect as required by Darwinian reductionism.
Imo, the strongest approach is a holistic one-two punch that first points out the incoherent unintelligibility *in principle* of denying real biological function (especially as pertains to the human intellect) or attempting to reduce it to materialist-reductionist terms, and then with that philosophical backdrop in hand goes on to point out the absurd improbability of practically every observable example of biological function, from the mammalian eye to the bacterial flagellum to even a single functioning protein, ever coming into existence sans intentional choice even granting a purely materialist-reductionist conception of those things (which, again, is previously shown to be incoherent rather than the mandatory "default" position).
This is from chapter 1 of my book BEING AS COMMUNION. You'll instantly see the relevance:
Compelling reasons to doubt the truth of materialism have existed from the start. Democritus, a pre-Socratic atomist philosopher, was one of the earliest figures of recorded history to hold to materialism. He held all reality to be constituted of atoms, which he understood as tiny indivisible particles. Thus, like Feynman, he embraced an atomic hypothesis: “By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: in reality atoms and void.” Yet Democritus also recognized a difficulty in this position: these very conventions, drawing on appearance and opinion, though ultimately reducible to a materialist substratum, were also the logical and evidential grounds for thinking materialism true in the first place. The deep truths of reality might all be material, but they could only be known through conventional truths provided by the senses. Which, therefore, is more fundamental, matter or a mind capable of apprehending matter? Democritus understood the tension and put it this way: “Poor mind, do you take your evidence from us [i.e., the senses] and then try to overthrow us [i.e., by reducing all sense impressions to atoms and the void]? Our overthrow is your fall.”
Because the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers exists only in fragments, and thus is largely lost to history, it’s hard to say just how seriously Democritus took this challenge to atomistic materialism. This challenge raises a self-referential paradox: how can knowing subjects composed only of matter know that they are only composed of matter? Matter, it would seem, has no intrinsic capacity to produce agents that think, much less that can form representations about the world, much less that can know that these representations are true. More recent thinkers such as C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga have developed these thoughts into a full-blown critique of materialism, charging it with self-referential incoherence. One sees in materialism’s self-reference problem the possibility of idealism, in which the mind that employs the senses to infer that all objects are composed of atoms comes to regard these very atoms as an expression of mind. It seems, however, that Democritus never took this line. He is regarded, along with Epicurus, as one of the two premiere materialists of the ancient world, a fact underscored by Karl Marx’s choice of dissertation topic: “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature.” Marx, of course, was himself an avid materialist.
I think C.S. Lewis was, as usual, perceptive and on the right track with his consideration of idealism.
For the reasons given above, I don't think that the main problem with modern materialism is that it holds all of reality to be material (though, that is a problem with it).
The main problem is the reductionist concept of *matter itself* that materialism holds - in other words, the part of materialism which entails and is entailed by radical nominalism.
So the solution to materialism's incoherence would have to be a metaphysic that conceives material reality itself a non-reductionist way, such that entities of our experience exist objectively as entities and not just as our own subjective projection of patterns onto the world, and with powers and properties of their own that are not mere shorthand for the aggregate of the behavior of their disparate components.
As I see it, there are two basic types of metaphysical view that provide this: idealism and hylomorphic dualism. Arguably, less extreme versions of idealism (eg. ones that aren't so idealistic that real physical causation is denied altogether) might be thought of as types of hylomorphic dualism, and some types of hylomorphic dualism (eg Thomism with its incorporation of Augustine's idea of universals existing as archetypes in God's mind which He creates the material world by actualizing) might be thought of as moderate forms of idealism.
This is an interesting and informative article but completely misses the point.
The ones pulling the strings don’t believe in relativism or socially constructed truths. On the side that supports the strange new world of the illusion of gender and racism are Wall Street and Silicon Valley. They will certainly never reject 2+2=4 or anything close to it.
The ones who preach queer mathematics, gender fluidity, racism etc. are just their useful idiots and will be eliminated when it’s time. In the mean time we are focusing on them which is the point. Like the visual trick in the color video, we are not seeing what’s actually happening.
It seems truth needs to be asserted where it is contradicted. Those pulling the strings may believe that 2+2=4, but they are in a minority. Moreover, I'm not convinced that any efforts on their part to queer mathematics etc. is a distraction. What if it's the actual endgame? I.e., make humanity so confused that they'll swallow anything. In that case, it seems two approaches are warranted: (1) remove the string-pullers from power directly (how?); (2) remove their influence over the masses by refuting their lies.
Look to power as what is behind this. Do you see criticism of any of the woke agenda coming from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Deep State or Global organizations? These are the people with power and lots of it. So they must by their inaction be supportive of this. But certainly not as the end game.
They are definitely not a minority especially in economic power. Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street control more money than the US economy. Does anyone believe that they see the end game as queer mathematics etc. I would look to another end game.
Nothing wrong with refuting lies or writing insightful articles like this one!
I too wonder about this. My standard line is that as we stand over the ditch that will soon contain our machine gun riddled bodies, the social constructionists standing to our left and right at the edge of the precipice will be quivering and shrieking “but we are the ones who ushered in the revolution, why us?” So then what is the motivation of the powerful to let these fools destroy society? Is it merely the lust of power, for surely a destroyed society is of no use to anyone.
“ what is the motivation of the powerful to let these fools destroy society?‘
World government!
My guess is that they are trying to eliminate petty geographic and ethnic squabbles to reach a more modern world for all. The last bulwark against their objective is the United States. Look how the EU behaves. Once the US is gone, the useful idiots will be dealt with in order to eliminate chaos. At least that is how they think.
What they cannot eliminate is the basic human desire for power. This will prevent their utopia from happening which is more corporate than socialist and built on science. They do not understand that Christianity and freedom built the current world. If anything, they believe both are impediments.
You wrote:
"If all knowledge is socially constructed, then the claim that all knowledge is socially constructed is itself socially constructed, which means that it is pretending to an objectivity and universality to which it has no rights."
Very well reasoned. It's this sort of reasoning that shows that those who say we don't have free will cannot be taken seriously because whatever they say is just a result of the laws of physics.
This is a very important article