It´s Gnosticism all the way down

 

From John Michael Greer´s blog. Somebody called Corax writes on the debate thread:

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Around the (v)blogosphere I’m seeing more and more of the misapplication of the term “Gnosticism” toward secular ideologies like woke leftism, something is a rather conspiratorial manner. I know this has been brought up and addressed here on these blogs on several occasions, but I think I might know what’s driving this bad idea.

To me, the obvious first question to ask is why this hysterical fingerprinting is now coming from secular/atheistic people? As opposed to the usual assortment of fundamentalist Christians who typically peddle these kind of paranoid ideas.

My theory is that this mostly has to do with a new type of cognitive dissonance that’s now swimming around the intellectual end of the Religion of Progress. Many of its adherents can’t seem to deal with the notion that Progress isn’t exactly what it cracked up to be. There’s been a growing number of atheist liberal thinkers who have come out against wokeism. I call them “yesterday’s liberals.” I think some of them call themselves “the Intellectual Dark Web” (this label kind of reminds me of the semantic accuracy of ‘Holy Roman Empire’). They seem to want to wind the clock back to the 90s, back when Progress still had an optimistic and open-minded collective ethos; back when very few adherents to Progress thought anything other than the Star Trek Future We All Deserve was right around the corner. Rather, the emergence and mainstreaming of wokeness has clearly shown that Progress can actually lead down some rather scary and fanatical paths. Instead of Star Trek, anyone who is moderately-perceptive can now see that Progress has morphed into a totalitarian establishment ideology, and on the social and economic end of things, Progress has resulted in the enshaleification of everything.

But no, that can’t be the REAL Progress! Wokeness must be due to some weird aberration from deep antiquity that has somehow bubbled up to the surface once again. First it was the atheist intellectual James Lindsay (of the postmodernist academia prank fame) claiming Woke Leftism is actually a modern rehash ancient “Gnosticism,” despite these two things having very little in common besides both beliefs rejecting of material reality in some form, though of course in very different ways. He (and a few copycats) have doubled down on this absurdity and have extended the “connection” to Marx, Hegel, Hermeticism, and of course Occultism. I’m pretty sure next up, Plato will be pegged as the grand conspirator behind all of this (I’ve already seen this conspiracy theory floating around the more fringe corners of social media).

What this all says to me is that Progress has fallen such a state of deep doo doo, that the “circular firing squad” phenomenon is now warming its engines. Anything remotely weird or too complicated/nuanced for the Western rationalist-materialist mind to understand is now suspect, and thus now be part of the grand conspiracy to undermine and destroy Material Progress. This seems to be mirroring the same exact type of paranoia that consumed much of evangelical Protestant Christianity decades ago. Really, it’s what happens when any dogmatic ideology is in its death throes. Star Trek ain’t happening, therefore every non-believer must be attacked and demonized!

What do you make of all of this? I’d say it’s best to just ignore people peddling this idiocy. But I’m afraid these ideas are going to spread to more people should there be a successful cultural backlash against Wokeness and anything perceived to be adjacent to it. I’m particularly worried about the label “Occultism” becoming terrible optics in the eyes of the masses; not that it’s particularly great right now. I’m worried about a day where I have to hide my beliefs and practices. Perhaps I’m just being paranoid.

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