I was recently reading about how the tools a person uses making sense of reality can be compared to how a map helps us make sense of a geographical space. Both a real map and the maps of the mind are crude approximations of reality. They have to be to be useful. A map that has all the detail of the real world is just the real world, and fails to accomplish its primary purpose: simplification, a distillation of information as to make moving through the world easier. Maps are useful indeed. It is important to remember, however, that, as Alfred Korzybski succinctly put, maps are not the territory. 

When we step into the realm of creating maps to help us make sense of the world, and the world is too complex not to partake in this practice, it is similar to stereotyping reality. The true goal of post-modernism to collapse our maps into reality itself. This is never really achievable due to the limitations of human perception, but this is the end to which post-modernism should be reaching for. Post-modernists fail and are easily mocked because they don’t heed their own methodology. We see this most often in the form of a post-modernist saying “how can we ever truly know something?” in one breath and some nice-sounding declarative statement like “America was founded on white supremacy” in the next. They fail to follow-up with the relevant post-modern questions of: how can America’s past or present racism really be quantified or attributed to which parties? What does “white” even mean? What does America really mean? Et cetera.

To be continued…