As readers of my articles know, I have written frequently, perhaps ad nauseam, on the doctrine of moral relativism. This doctrine dominates the social sciences and humanities in democratic countries. I have shown how moral relativism undermines conviction in the justice of a nation’s cause. This in turn saps the spirit and steadfastness of democracies vis-à-vis Islamic and other tyrannies. I shall now probe more deeply into this phenomenon.

Defining moral relativism

Moral relativism is the denial of universally valid or objective standards of good and bad, of right and wrong. It also denies justice and injustice. As such it represents a theory of knowledge or epistemology. This theory denies that the human mind can ascertain objective or empirically verifiable knowledge of the good and the beautiful.

From this relativism we derived the Cold War adage,

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

The same relativism has fostered the democratic madness that same-sex marriage is as valid as heterosexual marriage. This democratic madness appears in the campus adage,

I’m okay, you’re okay.

More generally stated, one man’s opinion about the good and the beautiful is as valid as another’s. This holds whether his IQ is 60 or 160, hence whether he’s an ignoramus or a genius.

This is the upshot of epistemological relativism. Relativism justifies the democratic principle of one-person-one vote. Indeed, it justifies lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18 to 15 to 12 …. And this is not all.

Epistemological relativism places in question the concept of sanity. Not only does one person’s opinion of sanity differ from that of another, but there are a dozen and more schools of psychotherapy, professing divergent opinions on how to remedy various mental illnesses. And as one scholar has observed, the remedy of a witch doctor may be as effective as that of licensed psychiatrist!

Postmodernism

Besides, as post-modernism would have us believe, all opinions, regardless of subject matter, are sociologically and/or psychologically determined. To illustrate, let’s consider Paul Ernst’s 1998 book, Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics, which represents the thinking of “post-modernism.”

According to Ernst, no matter how strong your intuition is that 2 x 3 = 3 x 2, this belief simply a sociological phenomenon. Hence it’s doubtful that a postmodernist would appreciate the parable current in Russian institutes of mathematics, which tells us that “A drunkard may not know which number is larger, 2/3 or 3/5, but he knows quite well that 2 bottles of vodka for 3 people is better than 3 bottles of vodka for 5 people!”[1]

The postmodernist attack on rationality thus extends even to mathematics. Mathematics, the gold standard of knowledge, has succumbed to feminism. A surreal essay, “Toward a Feminist Algebra,” is analyzed by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel with Science.[2] Of course, by “Higher Superstition” the authors mean “Higher Education,” where epistemological relativism flourishes.

It follows from the preceding that even the law of non-contradiction – that something can’t simultaneously be both one thing and another – is not objectively valid. This makes rational discourse impossible and blurs the distinction between sanity and insanity!

Pandemic schizophrenia

Now, consistent with the analysis of schizophrenia by logician and psychiatrist Matte Blanco (which I have elaborated in my book Demophrenia), I contend that the epistemological relativism predominant in the social sciences and humanities, and which is prevalent in contemporary democracies, is symptomatic of pandemic madness. This madness is a reduction of conscious thought to the unconscious, where the law of non-contradiction does not exist, and which of course is distinctive of Freudian psychoanalysis of which Dr. Matte Blanco is an expert.

It thus appears that postmodernism is a manifestation of insanity. This insanity is purveyed by the moral relativism prevailing at all levels of education in the democratic world!

Only consider the madness implicit in Israel’s policy of “land for peace” with the terrorist organization, the PLO-Palestinian Authority. Now ponder America’s nuclear weapons agreement with Iran, a regime animated by the malediction “Death to America”!

Both cases can be attributed to the psychological impact of moral relativism permeating the modern democratic era, even when relativism is not explicitly pronounced by the democratic statesmen of this era. ☼

[1] Adapted from Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of a Hidden Reality (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 64.

[2] Paul R. Gross & Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 114-116.