Nihilism lost the war, but it won the peace; the West became relativist, although in the context of American culture. As Bloom argues, it became superficial and personal, rather than totalistic and political:  "American nihilism is a mood, a mood of moodiness, a vague disquiet. It is nihilism without the abyss." Elsewhere he writes: "We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending."  But its political implications are not minor.  We ought to keep in mind that this kind of postmodernist thinking is exactly opposed to the commitments of the Founding Fathers; if Americans take seriously their patriotism around the principles of the Revolution, if they really think Jefferson and Lincoln were mostly right, then they must reject postmodernism root and branch.

So back to the pharmaceutical industry and academic medicine: it is all about money and power only if you place no value on anything else, namely an objective truth. When I said that a lithium level of 4.0 is toxic and kills, and this is a truth that is not relative or a matter of opinion, I was trying to make the point that medical practice, of all places, shows that postmodernism is false. A lie is not really a truth when the patient dies. Larry added that Ritalin also makes cognition better, and said that these facts did not impress him because we have overlooked psychosocial approaches. I agree with him on the clinical point, but he misses the conceptual point. (I too avoid amphetamines as much as possible and advocate psychosocial treatments for ADHD). The issue is not that this or that matter is true; the point is there are truths, and it is not all about the pharmaceutical companies manipulating us, or physicians seeking wealth. (As an aside and in reply to Larry's post: My book the Concepts of Psychiatry - http://www.nassirghaemi.com/work1.htm - makes these points and argues for an alternative way of thinking that is neither nihilist nor traditionalist; Paul McHugh wrote the foreword to the book, which is the same in the recent paperback version; I attack the biopsychosocial model because it is relativist and leads to the same harmful consequences as postmodernism. To provide the full context of my critique, I am writing a sequel, tentatively titled The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model, which is to be published by Johns Hopkins Press next year. We can discuss these matters more also.)