Hi guys. Any body read/reading this? "Fashionable Nonsense",

>>9752742
Of course it's reliable. No one in the sciences takes Lacan seriously

>>9752747
Judging from the excerpts quoted in the book, I can see why.

I just can't believe a massively respected intellectual like Lacan could be such an immense gibberish-spouting buffoon. I mean, how don't most people notice? There are thousands of PhD students that read him religiously and write thesis about him every year, for fuck's sake. He's one of the most influential thinkers of the last 50 years. He has DISCIPLES, Christ.

>>9752759

You can get a degree in homeopathy, dude.

>>9752767
But not in REAL universities. Lacan is respected everywhere, from Harvard to rural colleges. And yet, he writes like a schizofrenic on LSD that only had an introductory math book to fuel his delusions.

>>9752759
Critical theory appeals to the young and inexperienced. Tearing structures down and being the one to discover contradictions in a widely-held notion makes you feel smarter and more powerful than the common man, which is what every young man wants to feel. It's punk rock for squares.

>>9752791
I can understand that. But Lacan is simply unintelligible. Alien speech. And thousands of people build their entire academic careers on that. It's a bit shocking.

>>9752774
Real universities also claim that the distinctions between men and women are due to socialization rather than an inherent psychological difference. The discredited Guns, Germs, And Steel won a Pulitzer Prize. Growing up is realizing that institutions don't have a monopoly on truth.

>>9752804
True, universities can say pretty dumb things, but at least Guns, Germs and Steel was intelligible. Flawed, biased theories, but understandable ones.

>>9752800
I'm shocked every day by what I read. Psychological studies that have a replication problem; anthropology books that look at culture as the root cause for social conditions as opposed to a combination of culture and biology; womens studies departments that teach people that ingrained human instincts are the result of patriarchal brainwashing. Universities are not in a good place

>>9752813
If it's too complicated to understand it must therefore be deep, and if it's deep then there's truth in it. The Catholic Church used to exploit this mental bias when it forced all copies of the Bible to be written in Latin.

>>9752843
True. Sociology for example is dominated by a cultural reductionism: everything is decided ONLY by culture, and culture is born out of a vacuum, not out of our biological needs or anything.
To even suggest that our biology has something to do with our behavior means to be literally shouted down by cohorts of angry femi-socio-nazis. Cultural reductionism is dogma.

>>9752861
Right. I just didn't expect the effect to be so powerful.

Guess I'm still too optimistic.

>>9752843
>>9752892

Sorry, but where do you go to school?

>>9752899
Best you can do is watch out for it in your own thinking. Human beings are believing animals, which is why religion is so ubiquitous. And in a post-religious society that innate need for meaning manifests itself in stuff like the cult of Lacan.

>>9752904
Two different guys there. I'm the second one.

I had the awful idea, years ago, to pursue sociology. Goddammit what a cesspool of cultural relativism, extreme leftism, etnomasochism and general bullshit.
Goddammit.

>>9752915
>post-religious society
No such thing. Any society is religious. Our myths and legends are movies and comic books and novels. Structurally identical to the myths told around the fires millennia ago. Our religions are now political, social, economic theories and ideologies.

And sometimes an actual religion, but only in the case of the dumbest of us (like muslims). But whatever the case, the psychological mechanisms are the same.

>>9752917

But where did you go?

>>9752929
Italian university. I'm not american.

>>9752923
You're reiterating what I said. The phenomena we refer to as 'religious' finds expression by other means in a society where revealed truth is no longer taken seriously.