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For thanks to these folks, rational discourse is becoming increasingly impossible.

"Irrelevant."

It's very concerning, true. But as for the philosophers such as Hegel, and Derrida whom you cite (and the vast number of philosophers) how much do they drive culture compared to reporting it by its rationale? They may mean to cause, but are they more effect?

Who is driving our culture lately? The brunt of it seems to be the practitioners, the Hugh Hefners, John Lennons, Martin Scorseses etc., who lean an elbow on the rationale of their philosophy of choice.

So I don't know how much the philosophers are to blame, compared to a basic (or base) "market appeal" which provides both the market drivers that "entertainers" command and the lure for those most prone to be pop-culture, media movers, shakers, and celebrities (frothier, more groundless people, whether in entertainment, "news," "self-help," etc.).

I tend to think that our cultural decline if you will, is in large part an effect of the easy froth of pop culture and the lure this has for those most prone to be "postmodern" by attitude: entertainment marketeers.

I think that "Gypsies" if you will, are driving our culture, based upon powers of mass Gypsie shows. They have the gambling booth under one tent, the veil dancer in another, the snake-oil salesman under another, the opium merchant under another, the loremaster under another, the fortune teller... and so it goes for a people with the newer more powerful and newer still technologies to bring idle people into the tents.

I think this creates a spread of groundlessness and people look for rationale that matches their sense of life, driven by this desire for titillation, quick fixes, and escape from accountability.

But as for the philosophers such as Hegel, and Derrida whom you cite (and the vast number of philosophers) how much do they drive culture compared to reporting it by its rationale? They may mean to cause, but are they more effect?

I think they are more cause than effect, unspun. For they shape the very "climate of opinion" in which everything else happens. If I had said "Karl Marx," instead of Hegel or Derrida, my point probably would have been instantly grasped.

Marx got most of his "bright ideas" (i.e., his "dialectical method") from Hegel. He is too early on the historical timeline to be a full-blown "deconstructed self"; but he has been an incredibly influential thinker of the modernist, so-called "disinterested spectator" type, and (arguably) a true gnostic. He literally transformed the world.

He sees the world as something completely "objective" to himself -- that is, as already "complete" in time and "apart" from himself, as something he has the power to "master," to transform into shapes more pleasing to himself -- he's "free to rearrange the furniture" anyway he wants to, to his heart's content, in the interest of "perfecting" the institutions of human existence and, along with them, the human condition. (I assume he had a heart -- it's just not terribly obvious, given what his "students" -- among them Hitler and every communist living or dead) have done to society over the past 150 years or so.)

The fatal fallacy he commits, however, is to think of the world as something subject to his direction in the first place, as amenable to his will. Yet he is only a part of the world, not a directing genius that somehow stands outside of the world. That is to stand in the role of God (which is why Marx had to bump Him off to begin with). The part does not and cannot constitute the whole of which it is a part. The world is not our private "toy" to play with. To think that the part can do this is a total fantasy.

Yet a compelling fantasy, as it appears: Marx's "followers" are legion. His "thought" has been thoroughly internalized by many people, some of whom are incapable of even analyzing or critiquing it. It's just become part of the Zeitgeist -- or the "Kultursmog" -- the "climate of opinion." And it relentlessly continues to undermine human liberty and civil society, everywhere it gains a foothold.