The man behind the curtain is a priest. The curtain obscures the fact that what you’re looking at is a religion, and everyone comes away thinking that it’s a “science;” no it’s not. – Lewis Barton
Well friends, I missed last week’s post because I had the flu and I didn’t feel like doing anything particularly taxing. Yes, despite largely being displaced by the coof, influenza is still around and still infecting patients at dentists’ offices. Anyway, enough about that, I have an extremely esoteric topic to share with you today. While the Yanks are busy stuffing their faces with turkey and pumpkin pie (or sweet potato pie if they live south of the Mason-Dixon Line), the rest of you will be thoroughly entertained… I hope.
Postmodernist philosophy is far older than most people realise, with its roots going back to the rise of modern western civilisation: the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a “revival” fuelled by the discovery of ancient writings, so a good deal of “Renassiance” philosophy can actually be traced all the way back to Ancient Persia. However, postmodernist philosophy didn’t really begin to take shape until the end of the Enlightenment at the 18th century, and the word “postmodernism” itself didn’t appear until the mid-20th century. In some ways, postmodernist philosophy is a reaction to enlightenment philosophy, but in others, it is an attempt to parasitise said philosophy. Hegelian philosophy, which is very much alive today, is a synthesis of both. At its core, Hegelian thought is a feeble attempt at reconciling apparent contradictions, be they natural or philosophical. It does this by means of syncretism, the process of combining two inherently incompatible things, and in the context of religion, is the fusion of gods. It actually comes from alchemy, and while combining fire and water to make steam is incredibly useful, that’s about the limit to the usefulness of alchemical synthesis. However, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to use it to formulate ideas.
I have previously discussed the ideological method, a.k.a. motivated reasoning, in contrast with the scientific method. This is going to be somewhat repetitive as a result, but synthesis is much more specific than motivated reasoning in general. The word “hypothesis” is a compound word, “hypo,” meaning “lesser,” and “thesis,” meaning “proposition.” A hypothesis is a guess, and through data analysis, it will either become verified or falsified. A verified hypothesis is a thesis, and a falsified hypothesis is an antithesis. Antitheses have no use in science, save to show what has already been falsified, and therefore what we shouldn’t bother wasting our time with.
Whatever is inconsistent with the facts, no matter how fond of it we are, must be either discarded or revised. – Carl Sagan
The scientific method itself is a thesis; it works. The ideological method is the antithesis; it doesn’t work. Now then, in order to explain why the ideological method is still so widely used and even justified by academia, you’ll have to put yourself in the position of an alchemist. In alchemy, the three prime elements are salt, sulphur, and mercury. The first represents stability and the body, the second represents combustibility and the soul, and the third represents fusibility and the mind. They form a triangle, within which is inscribed a square representing the four Aristotelean elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Remember this?
Anyway, there is another set of analogies for the three primes, respectively: perception (nous/razum, from the Greek word for “mind’s eye” and Russian word for “reason”), faith (pistis/vera), and knowledge (gnosis/znanie). Thus it is possible to create a diagram using the three primes alone to illustrate the two ways of thinking:
Since alchemy cannot be used to accurately make predictions the way that modern chemistry can be, there is simply no way to know which version is actually correct using the alchemical method. Scientific realists know which one is correct, but alchemists don’t. The fact that scientific realism corresponds to Paracelsus’s original thesis is nothing more than a coincidence, especially bearing in mind that he didn’t come up with the idea to compare elements to aspects of thought; I did. However, alchemy still serves as a useful illustrative tool to show how bad ideas propagate. As I mentioned in the article I just linked to, beginning in reality and constructing an interpretation based on what is observed is called “scientific realism,” but beginning with a mental construct and skewing one’s interpretation of reality to adhere to that mental construct is called “dialectical materialism.” Dialectical materialism has no value whatsoever, but the alchemists had no way of knowing that. Both the thesis and antithesis are equally valid to them, because they have no real way of verifying or falsifying either position when it comes to certain unknowns. Back in the day, the god of the gaps basically served to keep the antithesis alive: science can’t explain everything, therefore goddidit. Modern science has since left the old alchemical ways behind, hence alchemy and other esoteric “ways of knowing” being kept on life-support in exclusively non-scientific academic fields, which are becoming frustratingly more prolific. It is these fields, mostly the grievance studies, in which alchemy is alive and well, and the antithesis of science is practised. If the highest truth is “your truth,” meaning whatever mental construct you’ve invented, that isn’t scientific, it is purely dialectic.
In an attempt to legitimise unscientific thought, largely as part of a reactionary movement against rational societies that shed the shackles of religiously-justified monarchies (yes, I am in fact talking about the American and French Revolutions here), alchemists and theologians such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel figured that they could combine both philosophies in order to both preserve the status quo and protect the “natural liberties” that were becoming more and more popular. Using my diagram, this is what that would look like:
Obviously, synthetic thought is totally nonsensical even compared to normal dialectic thought. How can you possibly start and end with the conclusion? Truth be told, synthetic thought, a.k.a. syncretic thought, is just as reliant on circular reasoning, but it’s meant to be even harder to follow in order to prevent anyone but the anointed representatives of the Cathedral from ever catching on that the new dialectics are just as full of shit as the old ones. In other words, these bizarre ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist purely to justify the existing power structures (and yet they accuse science of doing just that, how ironic). The people in power embrace syncretism, otherwise known as dialectical insanity, in order to pretend that they alone have all the answers; anyone else simply “doesn’t have the whole picture.” What follows is a simplified version of how this works.
Thesis: 2 + 2 = 4
Antithesis: 2 + 2 = 5
The scientific realist accepts that one of these is true, the other is not. The dialectic doesn’t, and instead sees these contradictory statements as “an irreconcilable conflict.” According to the dialectic, the antithesis is just as valid as the thesis, and the thesis is just as apocryphal as the antithesis. In other words, 2 + 2 equals neither 4 nor 5, rather 2 + 2 equals 4 and 5.
Synthesis: 2 + 2 = 9
No, I’m not making this up, that is quite literally how dialectics think. Granted, I’m fairly certain there’s no such thing as dialectical mathematics (because dialectics overwhelmingly reject mathematics itself), but if there were, it would be impossible to understand unless you were a member of the cult, and even then, there would be no coherent way of figuring things out; it would be pure memorisation, as no mathematical formula would have any predictive power in such a system. In fact, no natural principle has any predictive power in a dialectical field of study; rather, all knowledge comes via decrees from the anointed philosopher kings, whose own words are above question.
Many scientists and proper scholars, such as Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Norman Levitt, Gad Saad and Peter Boghossian, to name but a few, have long lamented the misappropriation of scientific terminology by fields that are not remotely scientific, but are instead religious doctrines, and this is by design. The misuse of scientific rhetoric is no mere smokescreen, it is a direct consequence of synthesis; postmodern syncretic ideologies are an alchemical fusion of scientific realism and dialectical materialism, the problem of course is that scientific realism is subordinated to the dialectic, ergo when you pull back the curtain, you are left with pure pseudoscientific bullshit. Anything “scientific” about postmodernist theory is nothing more than a thin veneer meant to obscure a religious cult. Dialectics may call themselves “militant atheists,” by which they mean they are metaphysical nihilists, but that doesn’t mean they are rational. They worship a doctrine, as shown by their devotion to certain sacred cows that cannot stand on their own merit. The only “science” that they accept is that which in no way threatens their ideology; this is why they overwhelmingly reject Darwinian Evolution (the best-supported scientific theory, I’d remind you) in favour of Lamarckism, even to this day. They may claim to accept Darwin’s version of evolution, but if you actually press them on the issue, what they put forth as their “understanding of evolutionary biology” is clearly something else. Do not let them fool you, educate yourself.
Hopefully now you have a greater understanding of what is meant by “synthesis” in the context of philosophy. I’ll be linking back to this article wherever the term comes up, this way you aren’t left with unanswered questions… even though this insanity probably raises more questions than it answers. Na shledanou!
Sasha V's Sesquipedalian Soliloquies 
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