Preface; I have become so obsessed with Alan Sokal that I learned tough lessons about myself.
I am stupid.
That is –
I tend to make mistakes and not learn so easily from them. I detest parts of myself so much. These are not the things I should detest though. I pretty sure I have some learning problems and I hate it. I make too many errors. I am frivolous. I cannot type. I cannot spell if I think too much about the words and their structures. I cannot pay attention. I am messy and it hinders my writing.
Those are not the stupid things about me but here are my stupidities. I can be arrogant and I am not very nice. I can be very moody when I think I am above something. This is just the top of “iceberg.” I always want to be right about everything. I am too fragile about taking criticism. I am a ultra self-aware “um, actually” guy.
I do everything to hide the fact that I probably have ADHD. I hate the weird things I do because it makes me abnormal. These weird masks makes me seek validation that I am normal. It makes me base and stupid. It makes me both the Inquisitor and the Martyr. I do not seek love, but just a good nod that I am just boring and more normal. The more I seek to be normal the more self-destructive I become. I start hate myself and become toxic.
I came to this realization because, I became obsessed with an obsessed person. Alan Sokal has been driving me up the wall for decades. I think he is wrong why the humanities are wretched studies. They are simply useless because there are no jobs for them. Instead of aspiring a love of life, they hate everything. I studied the humanities. He claims they are post-modern. There is no such thing as postmodernism. It doesn’t exist. He claims he is doing it for the left. He is “saving the left.” He is saving the left from whom?
He has gone down a dangerous path. He has fans like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. He is still obsessed with Judith Butler. He still is obsessed with Bruno Latour. He does it proudly. Look at his website: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html . He rather be right than face his own anxieties.
Steven Pinker is not really a scientist but rather some weird misanthrope who is stuck on proving eugenics is right- on accident. Why does Pinker do this? Simply because of a dumb debate of nurture vs nature. It somehow supports his concept of the language instinct. He is popularizer of science, so to speak, and makes money from selling books. He is a better college debate club debater than a honest thinker or scientist.
Why does Dr. Sokal continue to retread the same thing over and over- because is he obsessed. He most likely made money from his book and he became quite famous for his hoax. He seeks to live through the past and instead of being a professor and a mathematician. He has become what he hates. He has become his anxieties and dread.
Recently, Dr. Sokal supported a position that is really anti-left. He sacrificed science, math and reality to support conversion therapies in the UK. He was given this opportunity from an organization called Sex Matters. They are a “feminist” organization that is against transgender people. They are an explicitly anti-transgender group. Of course, they blame postmodernism. Dr Sokal has put his career and NYU in a tough bind because the last thing any group or business wants is to be on Fox News. He just does not learn from his stupidity.
I was going to do a lot of dumb things because of this but then I realized his stupidity is just like my own stupidity. It is something I should learn from and move on.
I never could move on because of my weird ego. My frail ego gets in my way. I become obsessed because my anxieties take over. I want attention but I hate it. I want to be praised so deeply that I am more self-destructive than productive. It is ironic that I called this website, praxispolis, because I wanted to write about cities. I never did write about cites really. Praxis is the worst word for me because I do not do anything. I am a poseur- a poser- a fraud. It is because I want to fit in. I can make the world philosophical but I cannot change it. Those who can change it, I want to be close to them only for the fact I am around people who are doing things.
I cannot base myself on other people. Most importantly, I cannot be base and stupid. I should value my errors and my mistakes as my animal self. I am an animal too. I am not Mankind or Humanity. I not only have to accept my learning disorder, ADHD, but love it. I came to grim realization that I don’t know too much about the world. I don’t know anything except the fact- of course- I do not know anything.
P.S. More to come. I will define stupidity soon too. I might want to change the name of this website but I don’t know how.
The Praxis Polis 