Neo-Gnostics, Pathocrats, and Pathologic Sexuality
A ponerology roundup from the past month or so
With Christmas, New Year’s, and the obligatory end-of-year number-crunch out of the way, I’m back to reading Dr. Arthur Versluis’s American Gnosis: Political Religion and Transcendence (review still coming soon). But in the meantime, we published part one of our interview with Arthur on MindMatters. Here it is:
The ancient idea of spiritual gnosis has evolved and branched to reflect the time and place in which we live. Nowhere is this development more evident than in the writings and scholarship of author Arthur Versluis. In his groundbreaking new book, Versluis takes an in-depth look at the varieties of modern “neo-gnosticism.” These include cosmological gnosticism – the worldly effort to escape from archons of darkness or hostile beings that would seek to subjugate the world through politics and other power structures. Another is metaphysical gnosis, or transcendence that is less a reaction to the perception of evil overlords than movement towards divine knowledge for its own sake.
Join us this week as we delve into the realm of cosmological gnosis with Arthur, and look at the plethora of ways in which some really old ideas have been reinvigorated (alongside some newer ones). How do these ideas present themselves in literature, TV and movies? Is there is a crossover between “political awakening” and “spiritual awakening”? And what, if anything, may this have to do with some developments we've been seeing with the so-called dissident right in the U.S.?
Part two (and my review) will be coming soon, when I finish the book. But as a little preview, let me point out that Arthur uses Political Ponerology as an analytical and conceptual framework for understanding political gnosis. Seeing ponerology used to such effect in a book published by Oxford made me quite chuffed. As Arthur hinted in our interview, he injected quite a few red pills directly into the Matrix system with this book.
I also mentally meme-cheered Arthur for this bit on page 167:
In Voegelinism, gnosis must be imagined to have nothing to do with inner spiritual life so that it can be deployed as a pejorative label for dissidents. This is ironic because the dissident right is the primary home for dissidents in the contemporary American political world, and is itself often deeply neo-gnostic. But these Voegelinian “anti-Gnostic” authors on the putative right would be unable to see this, because they have constructed the bogeyman “Gnosticism” as a descriptor of Marxism, communism, and the left in general. Having done so, they are caught, like Voegelin himself, in their own terminological confusion and are unable to dissociate themselves from it or to recognize that “Gnosticism” or even more importantly, “gnosis,” might be valuable for the right itself, indeed, might already be embedded in many dissident right narratives. However, I would not be surprised if many such Voegelinian authors, having been apprised of all this, turned upon those in the right as “Gnostic” “heretics” worthy of an inquisition.
And speaking of ponerological pills dropping, Michael Shellenberger over at
continues to publish pieces inspired by Lobaczewski’s work. Check them out below:
Finally,
reviewed Cleckley’s The Caricature of Love over at . (I’ve written about it here.)
Here’s a highlight:
It’s remarkable to read The Caricature of Love, and recognize that so much of the current ascendance of transgender ideology and the disseminating and propagandizing of it to the public by radical ideologues in academia, media, and entertainment was well underway decades ago before its emergence into the public consciousness. The seeds from which the liberatory foundation of transgender ideology sprouts can be seen as a larger more profound sense of ‘anti-sexuality’ and the rejection of the heteronormative expressions of sexuality and love between a man and a woman that Cleckley so vividly describes.
That’s it for ponerology news, I believe. Now, I’m off to work on my next piece, on how different pathologies might shape the expressions of religion in different times and places. In other words, what might the religion of an anankastic god look like? A schizoid god? A psychopathic god? To find out, make sure to subscribe!
It’s important to realize — and allow for that realization to deeply sink into the forefront of one’s conscious mind — that organized religions attract psychopaths to leadership positions.
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
A line of thought, and of non-thinking, runs from Friedrich Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" to the events of the late 19th c to the chaos of our time. Destructive forces, present throughout evolution, have been helped along by advances in weapons of war, from the industrial revolution to the 21st century's environmental, political and sociological breakdowns.
It seems that as long as kings, emperors and popes ruled kingdoms and empires, life for most people may have been short and by modern standards brutal, but the rise of democracies bred evils in different forms.
A dominant theme in the writings of The Federalist Papers was the awareness of the need to prevent political factions from overwhelming democratic majorities, overrunning the new American democracy itself. They were astute to attempt to prevent the rule of factional party politics, but was it naive on their part to believe in the possibility of a common good? They cannot be faulted for not envisioning how societies would evolve.
We however are naive if we don't see that class structures that "kept the peace", that prevented bloody revolutions or re-established peace and quiet after revolutions, always required an oppressed class, or to use a less Marxist vocabulary, peasants and with seafaring traders the inevitable oppressed colonized groups. The enslaved people in the American colonies or the destruction of colonized peoples worldwide allowed for a naive view of the inherent potential for justice to rule within a democracy of agreeable white male property owners, farmers and factory workers, as one example of argumentative men sweating out a way to live with the greatest reward for each self-made man.
Nationalism of the sort that led to the assassination of the late 19th c Tsar Alexander (a liberal autocrat who had freed all Russian serfs), which led to the most vicious pogroms and the Russian Zionist reaction, the nationalist fervor that triggered the Great War of the 1910's with the assassination of Austrian royalty were born obviously out of rebellion against authority, rebellion fueled by beliefs in self-actualization. In 18th c France and the American colonies, rebellion was aided by guns and ideas. By 1900, humanity had ever bigger and better bombs, naval and then air power.
In my humble opinion, capitalism and even empire building ultimately benefited mankind, but democracy as an ideal is of no merit without the knowledge of good and evil within a religious context. The Founding Fathers of the Baby United States were Deists, not Christian, not in any sense other than maybe the name of a new American church name .
In Judeo-Christian Theology, God created evil, as noted in the Biblical Book of the Prophet Isaiah,
chapter 45 verse 7:
"I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things". The concept does not mean that God is evil. It is understood by the faithful that God is good, that Creation is good, and, that in giving mankind free will, the option to rebel against the goodness of God necessitates the existence, the possibility of the opposite of the nature the goodness of God, the opposite of God's will, that is, evil.
In modern democratic parlance, what's good for you might be evil for me and vice versa and therein lies the rub for modern man for whom morality is relative. I intuitively think that this relativism arose not only from Nietzsche's summation of the Enlightenment but out of humanity's need to grapple with the kind of warfare waged in the trenches of World War I between nations that were related to one another through centuries of royal weddings, the destructive forces poured down upon civilian populations in the Second World War and the genocide of European Jews by the Third Reich.
In an ironic twist of fate, democracies have led to the kind of death on the rampage in American cities, destructive forces waiting to implode in European cities, held together by a hair's breadth of common decency in Britain which is imploding politically. What is the common denominator between the unemployed former citizens of French colonial Africa in the suburbs of Paris and the homeless addicts in cities on the American West Coast? How can the British PM's plan to transport many 1000's of migrants to a Rwanda that can receive only a few hundred be the best of miserable options?
Humanity stands on the threshold, in my opinion, of the central challenge of evolution: will we survive through mutual cooperation or will the few survive while recycling dead organic human matter, ever seeking habitable planets in outer space? Or will we be destroyed as the earth grows hotter and agriculture continues to fail? Are we really alone in the universe with no return to Noah's Ark? Can the ancient wisdom texts, including the foundations of religions, give guidance to humanity as we seek to find common understandings of good and evil, affirmations of life and well being even if that would require an acknowledgement of a higher power, a higher love and a higher perception of reality than that which mankind has created since the time that, as Nietzsche had said, "God is dead and we have killed him"
?