You want society to collapse so that you can become a raider-survivalist murderhobo enforcing a neofeudal order.

I want society to collapse so that I can become a travelling sage passing on knowledge of the Old World without having an M.A.

We are not the same.

Yesterday I found out that an intelligent, tolerant, and generally laid-back friend of mine believed in the whole "cultural #Marxism" #conspiracy. I was floored and gutted that I had lost another person to the rightwing dogma machine. The wild thing is that he showed me a very thorough paper trail of his research, which included hundreds of books and papers discussing how DEI measures were racist and destroying the economy, how the Left had conspired to overrun academia, and how countless public figures and officials had been indoctrinated into it. At one point, he even told me how impressive it was that Marxism was able to infiltrate and parasitize any structure or idea in its vicinity, which is crossing firmly into genocidal psycho shit.

He *had* done his research. The problem was that he did the research in an entirely fictional world precision engineered to appeal to his sense of victimization. He had been inculcated with the idea that a misguided Lefty cabal was seizing control of our culture, I suspect through Jordan Peterson, and then just ran researching the claim - and it worked specifically because the far right controls our culture and has published a massive ecosystem of completely made up shit to reinforce the illusion. We're living in a 3D hologram projected from 2D text.

I don't know how to deal with this. He knows how I feel but for now we're just "agreeing to disagree". He called me an ideologue because I refused to acknowledge DEI programs as evidence of the plot. I'm just so tired.

Does anybody have any suggestions for introductory readings for poststructuralism in general?

Not sure what hashtags to use with this uhhhh #philosophy #criticaltheory