Lemme Break It Down For Ya

[Pt. 1]

Being a contrarian as an end in itself will get you nowhere in life. But if I’ve learned nothing from else from my liberal arts education, it’s that you will also go nowhere without the ability to think critically.

For millenials in a postmodern age, we’ve taken critical thinking to mean hyper suspicion of everything. We don’t believe product reviews, we don’t buy into traditional advertising methods, and we certainly don’t trust people in leadership. The only thing we know certainly is that facades are ubiquitous.

The political arena is the perfect case study for this hyper-awareness. Over the course of the next five pieces, I’m going to use a mixture of Jacques Derrida’s method of deconstruction, Jean-François Lytoard’s understanding of metanarrative, and Michel Foucault’s philosophy of hierarchy to illuminate the assumptions pervading the political conversation in America today.

My hypothesis? We all work from a similar set of assumptions about the way the world is. But something about the way we communicate our solutions causes more division. Perhaps if we can break down the inconsistencies in work from conservatives, liberals, and moderates alike, we can start a new conversation around the reason we all care about politics in the first place—human flourishing.

The next posts will be deconstructions of the following:

• A Buzzfeed article about Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

• A speech from Rand Paul
• An episode of Scandal

Not that there’s a “proper” way to deconstruct something, but there’s certainly improper way to do it. I’ll be looking for any privileged terms, information that’s delegitimized or overlooked, and conflicting meanings. I don’t want to illegitimately twist the language of the works to mean something it doesn’t; rather, I want to understand how these artifacts could be understood from a different perspective or in a different context. I want to remove the veil and see the natural consequences of what people declare are truths.

Dr. Cornell, a deconstruction and feminist theorist, said in a Yale Law School piece that deconstruction necessarily contains the ethical imperative to both question our own beliefs and understand the views of others.

So let’s get to it!

Let’s go about finding justice in the only way we know how—drawing people together around the stories and ideas that connect us to our humanity.

vérité et de grâce

truth and grace