For whoever is interested, here is an good text called The Death of Utopia Reconsidered by Leszek Kolakowski whose work I've discovered only recently and whose analysis of marxist thought seems the most thorough and up-to-date to my knowledge (see Main Currents of Marxism.)

This journal entry was inspired by the on going trend of political correctness, demagogy and general inability to hold on a thought for a second without automatically subscribing to it that appear on this website as best examplified in the threads concerning religion in any shape or form, or more generally threads that contain morally or aesthetically loaded themes.

Most people on this website will agree that taste is something that cannot be debated, since everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It is only logical to claim that American Pie is as good a movie as Persona, or that the latest record by a random rapper is as good music as Bach's English Suites, since everyone's appreciation is different. Despite the fact that everyone's opinion differs on every piece of art, it is wholeheartedly accepted that all pieces of art are of equal value. It is thus an evil deed to consider the possibility of questioning the axiom of aesthetic relativism. The obvious corollary to this is that every person making a judgment is also of equal value. No consideration of capability in judging of a certain matter can be taken seriously when it comes to art. It is all relative!

Aesthetic relativism has become the new attitude to adopt. Any remark about the worth of anything is a threat to the general equality that has to be maintained no matter what.

Maybe I went a bit far when I said that the same observation could be made on subjects dealing with morality : the thought of relativism on this subject has surprisingly not yet arrived in the minds of our greatest posters, who find that the usual set of attitudes and values inherited from their culture and never questioned are sufficient to judge every possible problem. The most important of all values, as anyone knows, is tolerance.


Now let's think about this for a minute. Since aesthetic relativism, as all variants of relativism claiming such idiocies as "everything is relative", is such a moronic - and logically contradictory - concept, when is it that people are going to wake up and realise that there is such a thing as people having terrible taste in art? People promoting the unbearable demagogy that tries to confort people that are ignorant of art in their taste by telling them their taste is worth any other should re-examine their role. The only thing that can explain the anger expressed in regards of people criticizing others' taste would be a love for mediocrity and a total lack of critical thinking, both of which replaced by a divinization of tolerance. I'm not blaming tolerance so much as the modern idea of it. Tolerance, in its voltairean sense, used to be thought of as simply giving equal chances to everyone to express their ideas so as to debate them afterwards. The modern idea of tolerance has found a great expression in the works of the late french social critic Phillippe Muray: "Modern tolerance is tolerance that can't stand anything beside it". Tolerance isn't only the main value defended by people on this website, it is the only one. It has become impossible to issue a judgment contradictory to someone else's opinion without having some tolerance thought-police following your every move and comment on how nasty you are.

Not only is the degree of critical thinking bordering zero, but all of its consequences make appearances every now and then. For example, people have somehow become unable to temper statements. It is thus impossible to be at once interested in religion while remaining atheist. Either you hate the Bible and proceed to congratulating everyone posting anything blaming the idiocies of religion without thinking about it, or you're a Christian fanatic. You're either a Christian fundamentalist on the side of obscurantism and thinking science is completely evil, or you're a socialist utopianist atheist in favor of general progress. It is only comical that people fighting so strongly against anything pertaining to religion always adopt the Good and Evil battle posture. I guess this kind of manichean thinking must really help today's politicians rotten rhetoric get through.

Logical thinking going hand in hand with critical thinking, both are going out of the window. Not only people have become unable to make judgments, they've become unable to think logically, thus resorting to ceaseless invectivness whenever the itch for the fragments of the required logical thinking becomes too violent.

The champions of mediocrity are these people. They feel threatened their opinions may be in jeopardy of being overtaken by someone else's and thus erect values to protect them. Of course they're right to feel their opinions are threatened, since the abscence of any critical thinking made them completely baseless. Their complaisancy and pride for this new monument of political correctness leads them to go into crusades against the Forces of Evil anti-modernism to spread the word of their ideals : "Thou shalt love mediocrity!"

This has to be updated!!

After rewatching Citizen Kane, I realised it was a long while since I had checked its imdb board and so I went there and found that thread:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/board/thread/687080

I'm speechless.