While many people can grasp what postmodernity looks like in people and society, even if they have no name for it, most fail to realise its significance both for ourselves and for humanity at large.
Most people associate these postmodern traits with certain types of people, like activists, hippies or residents of Boulder, Colorado. If you have these traits, you may have been the victim of this dismissive pigeon-holing. Many people who are yet to experience postmodernity will brand you as weird, quirky or hippy, treating you as malignant or misguided.
After studying tonnes of psychology, I realised that these characteristics aren’t a result of life choices or personality traits. Postmodernism is actually a fundamental layer in our growth as individuals and the growth of society at large.
In its purest form, the ability to step back from our cultural surround and view it as a system, as a tangled web of mutually reinforcing practices and habits, actually represents a jump in human development, and it’s called postconventionality. Virtually all models outlining the major levels at work in human beings contain a level that resembles this.
From this perspective, it’s inaccurate to say that a person is postmodern, countercultural, or anti-mainstream. Rather, they’re passing through a certain stage in their developmental path. We could say they have downloaded a new operating system, which they’re now living out.
Essentially, if we look at an individual and their psychology, postmodernism is like a mind structure with many nodes and connections that mutually reinforce each other. That doesn’t reduce a person to stereotypes or typical traits, but it does mean that this stage has certain common markers, as we have discussed.
In terms of complexity, this postmodern structure is higher than those that have dominated human life throughout history up to the present day. For that reason, most people are simply unable to handle it. It’s over their heads, so they file it under “weird”, “malignant”, “unimportant”.
This means it’s a genuine improvement on the stages that precede it. We should celebrate our move into postmodernism. In fact, it can only emerge after the previous, conventional structures have emerged – it sits on top of them, so to speak.
It’s crucial you know this, not only for your own self-knowledge, but for your knowledge of the world at large. When the conventional mind views postconventionality as a personality type or a personal choice, it appears rebellious, cynical and irresponsible. You may well have experienced rejection from people who aren’t postmodern – I know I have. But viewed as a fundamental stage in our flourishing as adults, it looks beautiful, alive, full.
This was a huge source of relief for me. At some points in that great surge into postmodernism, I felt I was going crazy. I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t know who I was any more. My old self had almost completely disappeared, and my family and friends were dumbfounded. But knowing that this is to be expected in growing adults, I relaxed. It helped me normalise the situation.
Beyond helping us to accept this transition as a normal and healthy phenomenon, there’s another benefit. When we’re dominated by a stage of development, we usually believe that it’s the best one, and we’re unaware of doing so. This is symptomatic of postmodernism, as we’ll see.
But once we know, even theoretically, that it is merely a stage and not a final destination, the possibility of further growth becomes open to us. No longer do we believe we’re at the top of the tree, at the pinnacle of human life. While we’ve transcended the mainstream and should be proud of it, we still have much more growing to do. We’re also more disposed to accept non-postmodernists, realising they’re simply experiencing different mind structures to the ones we are.
So we can then ask: How do I incorporate the earlier ways of being into my postmodernism? And: are there further ways of being? How can I move into them?
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