Hey Brian, welcome to the wilderness my friend. I have been yelling about this for many years, but basically talking to myself. All the knowledge in the world about surveillance capitalism, postfordism, and neoliberalism doesn’t help much (a little with concepts of alienation and its other treks into psychology) when the question is best answered by the history of religion and comparative religion. My education was certainly deficient in these topics, although I have been trying to remedy this situation. Even while I witnessed the rise of the religious right at closing decades of the last century, I never thought it to be more than a political problem. Now it’s clear that the “political problem” is much more than that as we witness religious illiberalism taking over nations all over the globe, and unfortunately, the left doesn’t have the categories to understand this at the grass roots level, let alone act against it in any reasonable manner. We do well at understanding this phenomenon in terms of power constellations at the top of the hierarchy (our traditional comfort zone), but as to the rest of it the critique seems to consist of “Why are people acting crazy?”
I am the first to admit I have no systematic analysis of this “crazy,” but I do have a few scattered thoughts that I am trying to order. First, we have seen this crazy before, and have seen it for centuries. I believe what we are witnessing (particularly in the US) is a Gnostic revival. It’s just not in a form we are used to, or we wouldn’t see it as crazy at all, but just as another religious faith. The devoted are out fighting the demiurge—the experts, the deep state, scientists, and others rulers of the false real in an effort to get beyond the flawed knowledge of authority to that of deep esoteric knowledge derived from personal transcendental experience and shared in fellowship among those who know (those who have been red-pilled). Many outlets for this way of being are readily available. It’s best if it’s able to survive virtually as social media platforms will help with expanding the fellowship over vast territories and with its separation from the forces of the demiurge. Gnostic groups do not require a messiah, although it’s fine if there is one. The cult of Trump is evidence of that. But they can also be decentralized groups such as in the yoga and wellness community* where an aristocracy of influencers lead the flock, or a distributed network like Qanon, which is fundamentally leaderless. All of these groups, and we must include the Evangelicals, LDS, and conservative Catholics, are concerned most with the elimination of ignorance even more than the elimination of sin. In fact, in this century sin has become much more tolerable than ignorance. (I should note that this list of groups is very intersectional and probably should also include the virtual social justice warriors cancelling people who don’t understand the difference between sexual orientation and sexual preference. Just not woke—the left’s equivalent of the red pill.) The reason knowledge is so important is that it can function as a virtual glue to build community and a way for many members to say I may not be educated like the members of the demiurge, but I am more intelligent and better informed, but most importantly, the goal is transformation—to be a part of a constellation that gives you the power to transcend the limits of a false given. Take the red pill and emerge anew. I don’t want to play down the former two reasons for becoming a part of the Gnostic front. They are significant. For Evangelicals and other conservative Christians the breaking of the spiritual consensus in the West in the 60s was traumatic, and the erosion of a national spiritual life has continued ever since. From their perspective, Gnostic revelation could bring back the consensus. The fact that yoga and wellness can commune with evangelicals through Qanon or anti-vax seems to be an indication of this possibility from a Gnostic point of view. For the greater Trump cult, being viewed as ignorant rubes by their educational superiors (now more than ever as Trump continues to loot and grift this class) has been a source of aggravation. Gnosticism proves their greater intelligence and their superior knowledge that in turn acts as a real power lift to their pride and well-being. The elite of the Republican Party understand this desire and are taking advantage of it. In part, this is why the Republican Party is becoming the working class party in the US. We do need a new ecological aesthetic (CAE just did a book on that), and we do need a new political theology. I can’t help but think of the anti-vax motto—“You have data, but we have stories.” But none of that does any good if it is not accompanied by a massive intervention campaigns into the Gnostic networks of alternative reality. This is such a significant site in the lives of millions, and we ignore it at our own peril. *I want to make clear that with the exceptions of Qanon and anti-vax I am not indicting every person who participates in these various groups—only a variable subsection is a part of the Gnostic front. Membership tends to happen in spiritually-oriented groups since they are most of the way there already.
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