Identity truncated: a contemporary phenomenon

Even those who remain largely 'sincere' and earnest about their intellectual work often seem to have internalised bourgeois values to the extent that they seem genuinely incapable of grasping and processing a perspective that does not affirm the status quo (with the slightest deviation from it, only, being permissable). It's like the way that Samuel Beckett is most commonly understood, according to bourgeois values and expectations: the assumption is that we are "all" universally disintegrative and unable to fulfil our highest aspirations -- and that this is 'human nature'. In fact, Beckett was making fun of philosophical idealists and the way that substantive reality seems, like sand sifting through the fingers, to escape their grasp.

Alternatively, you have the faux radicalism of postmodernism -- a version of Christianity's 'name it and claim it': I THINK I am a radical revolutionary and therefore I am one.

Nobody is more hurt than a postmodernist if you deny their claim their identity ... due to adoption of a fragile philosophical position.