The academic sphere has long since discredited this trend. It is useful for generating models of macro cognition, giving us new insight into how we produce ideas themselves, since we are given a glimpse of our very ideas being born, but taken to an extreme it becomes a weakness, a nausea that mounts as if we have been churning about in the washing machine for too long.
But our popular culture still seems to be in this phase. Why would it leave the phase otherwise? Just look at the entertainment being produced. Ironically self-referential works of art, sequel after sequel, remake after remake, all insincere products rubbed out by cynical people looking to hit that next pocket of wealth. Look at our political discourse: people referring back to historical statements and ideas for guidance, not even knowing what these things mean! These things in themselves aren't pure postmodernism, they are symptoms. Postmodernism is the intellectual framework behind these phenomena.
For those wealthy and comfortable, recycled ideas keep them in power. Wealth has become an end in itself, and ideas mere means to those ends. Their mistake is in thinking that old ideas can be milked again and again indefinitely. They can't.
Because there are always people who either believe in the old ideas themselves, and become enraged at their debasement, or there are people that have new ideas and want to see them realized.
The fundamentalists, the regressives, cling on to the old ideas and live by them without understanding their essence, like an inverted cargo cult. Instead of latching on to new ideas in a primitive context, they latch on to old ideas in a modern context. They will do damage if they are given control. They are already doing so to an extent. Witness the Tea Party.
New ideas are produced by the only people who are truly free. The birth of these ideas produces huge surges of energy. Civilizations are created and then harden, becoming frail over time as old ideas dissolve in a changing world. And so we repeat.
It feels good to articulate these thoughts, though they are still only partially formed. And then tomorrow its back to work, where my silent hostility makes others uncomfortable. I can't help it. It is hard hiding the physical effects of knowingly living a lie within those walls.
