When I think back to my own situation of needing others' help, which was a very long time ago, the one element I was always craving — but never actually got — was simple moral support. The one form of academic training that just about undid me in terms of effectively combating any form of abuse was philosophical idealism, which was taught very strongly as a form of moral solipsism that we were all obliged to embrace in order to be properly intellectually trained and psychologically well-adjusted. The academically espoused form of moral solipsism, taught as postmodernism, really confused me more than anything else could have done. It made out that everything came down to various differentials in terms of “perceptions”, such that a negative situation ought to be resolved either by adjusting one’s own perceptions or by persuading the offending party to adjust theirs. This ideology of postmodernism, which suggests from all sorts of angles that nothing exists except the mind, is constantly reinforced by academics not matter how hard you fight against it.
The more you fight it on intellectual and ideological terms, the more the postmodernist ideologues will tend to dissolve your arguments so that they appear to be mere psychology postures, with no ability to point beyond themselves to any actually existing reality. The default assumption is that we are all absolutely free and therefore any unwanted behaviour is either subconsciously desired or a product of fantasy and “all in the mind”.
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