9 – Wisdom vs. Power: Postmodern Paradigm Part 2

Welcome back to our series, Wisdom and Love vs. Postmodern Power. We’ve been talking about why we have so much conflict in our society and unhappiness in our lives.

In this session, we’ll discuss postmodern ideas about relationships, power, rules, freedom and how we develop the young.

Remember the three keys to understanding the Postmodern Paradigm:

There is no Truth or Morality or facts. Everything in life is In-the-Eye-of-the-Beholder.
There is no purpose or meaning in Life.
All that matters is Power. All relationships are power relationships.

Communities, Leaders and Power
In postmodern thinking, since there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, the only thing that matters is power.

Some people have power.

Other people don’t have power.

Those with more power prevail over those with less power.

There are lots of ways to gain and use power.

Power can be something as obvious and crude as threatening or killing someone.

Power can be something as nuanced as using schools to program toddlers the way you want them to think.

Power gets exercised through the government, justice system, financial system, the education system, the media, churches, advertising, fashion and internet search results.

Power gets exercised by what questions are asked and not asked, and how those questions are structured to emphasize certain viewpoints and de-emphasize others.

The deepest power is in the hands of those who control the social construct programming.

Marriage and family may appear to be about love, but they are nothing more than a social construct that controls power in a relationship.

The husband has power over the wife. Parents have power over their children.

The Wisdom Paradigm says that all relationships are fundamentally covenant relationships where the good of the individual and team are the same.

The Modern Paradigm says all relationships are fundamentally contract relationships. What is good for the worker is bad for the company—and vice-versa.

In the Postmodern Paradigm, all relationships—no matter how they appear on the surface—are nothing more than power relationships.

Imagine that a person goes into a school and massacres 50 children.

In the Wisdom Paradigm, it is a fact that the massacre is evil.

In postmodern thinking, while people might really dislike the massacre, there is nothing objectively wrong with the massacre.

Society values security from massacres. The killer values killing people. One value isn’t factually better than the other. They’re just different values.

When the police capture the killer and the state puts him on trial, the state doesn’t do it because they are objectively right and the killer wrong.

The state does it because they are exercising power over the killer just as the killer exercised power over the children he murdered.

In the Postmodern Paradigm, the police may say that the massacre was “unjust” or “evil”, but that is just using the power of rhetoric to publish a narrative to program people to think their way.

If you are a cunning leader, you get control of the schools, the media, the churches and other influential aspects of life, and use them to program the social constructs of the rest of society.

If you can achieve that, then you don’t need to use much violence to keep control.

You keep the people under control by convincing them, perhaps through religious beliefs, education and media campaigns, that it is a fact that (insert desired belief or behavior) is  “right” and it’s a fact that (insert undesired belief or behavior) is wrong.

As a postmodern leader, you understand that people really don’t want to know the nature of reality. They don’t want to know that there is no purpose or meaning. It is too terrible and depressing. They would rather live under the illusion that life has meaning and will embrace the leader that gives them that illusion.

The bottom line about relationships in the Postmodern...