Morlockery
Morlockery
Note: It would be remiss of me not to mention at the outset that James Lindsay writes with more depth and breadth than this column covers on the issue here: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/09/first-amendment-case-freedom-from-woke-religion/
He is a writer I recommend, not because he says anything I myself have not been saying for years now, but because he says it with more clarity, more proof, and in more detail.
The Name of the Morlock
The Morlocks live among us.
The Morlock is a subhuman who imagines himself to be posthuman, that is, anointed as superior by fate or by evolution. The Morlock imagines men to be livestock. We, the vulgar, the lowly, the benighted, are lambs are to be shepherded and — for he too has a faith, albeit a perverse one — lambs to be sacrificed for the salvation of the world.
All these imaginations are vain, not merely inversions of the truth, but perversions of it. Deception and self-deception is the core of their mystery.
Morlock is not their name for themselves. They are an occult and parasitic tradition, that disguises its aims and means in layers of deception and self-deception.
The name for themselves are legion. None are true.
In times long gone, they were called the Illuminati, the Enlightened Ones; or the Gnostics, who possess the Inner Knowledge; or Sophists, who count themselves as Wise. From the alchemical writings of Hermes Trismegistus, comes the name Hermeticism. Within this broad and hidden tradition are many schools and sects and cults: Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry.
In the current generation, they are variously called, Leftists, Socialists, Progressives, and Woke. Again, there are various sects and cults, differing in only nuance or priority, but all part of the same social evolutionary process, all part of the same Dialectic: Totalitarians, Anarchists, International Socialists, National Socialists, Fascists, Antifascists, Feminists, Transactivists, LGBTQ, WEF, CNN.
Like a river delta, all these myriad stagnant streamlets issue from one broad stream. It is indeed a single and ancient tradition, as an examination of history will show.
Each of these names involves a lesser or greater degree of deception and self-deception, and none express the fundamental core of the motive and aim of these movements, which is antihuman, benighted, and buried from sight.
Despite that the current form of their faith is secular and atheistic, it has its roots in the esoteric religions of the West, and in the Gnostic heresies of the First Century, and in the Hermeticism of the Renaissance. Theirs is an ersatz religion but also a virus to religion, mimicking its host to vampirizes it life, cannibalize its parts, and destroy it.
That this is indeed a religion, albeit a perverse one, as comparison to honest religion will show.
I coin the name “Morlock” for them because no other so simply sums up their entire enmity with mankind, their degenerate nature, their posthuman ambition, and their aversion to the light.
Let me explain the name.
THE TIME MACHINE of H.G. Wells proposes a fictional race to arise after our species is done, called Morlocks, who are cannibal troglodytes, hidden in caverns beneath an ancient sphinx: and she is an ambiguous symbol for whose riddle the answer is man. Morlocks emerge at night from their buried crypts to prey upon the Eloi, fruit-eating children of the human race devolved into childlike docility by eons of luxury and privilege.
Further, the Morlocks of Wells are said to be cunning, and retain the ability to use tools and repair machinery, an art lost to the indolent Eloi. Their is no evidence in the text that Morlocks make anything, but their ceaseless underground toil allows wheels to turn and engines to run.
The name Wells invented may have been inspired by Moloch, the bellowing brass idol who consumes sacrificed children, or by the male witches, called Warlocks, who brew potions and poisons while pretending to possess occult knowledge and prophetic powers.
So, here: the Morlock of whom I speak is no fiction, but has been among us during all written history, from the magicians of Egypt or the sophists of Athens.
There have always been among us men who take falsehood as his principle of life, and himself as his own god. There have always been mountebanks and magicians, trickster and sharps, con-men ready to betray any confidence placed in them. The prime weapon of such tricksters is the ability to unwind an endless patter of humbug, snake-oil, jabberwocky and propaganda.
But when the mountebanks mimic scientists, theologians, scholars, and visionaries, the result is junk science, heresies, pharisees, utopians.
Self-anointed, deceived or self-deceived or both, they plunge headlong some variation of gnostic or hermetic heresy, into pharisaic hypocrisy, and into narcissistic neurosis, and attempt to erect their next utopia as soon as the eschaton is imminent. Vice becomes virtue and virtue vicious; truth is befogged, ugliness uplifted, perversion permitted, celebrated, mandated. The center does not hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world — and all this is by design.
Beware. When faith and reason quarrel, is Morlockery unleashed, and they emerge from their holes.
When faith buttresses reason, curtailing any skepticism inflated beyond madness back to its proper scope; and when reason informs and illuminates faith, giving structure and aim to visions and mysteries; then the charlatans have no opportunity to ply their tricks or play their trade. Heretics are called to heel by the exquisite clearly of the reasoning powers of Thomists, scholars, and schoolmen; and junk science is condemned by a healthy conscience, able to see it as a false religion.
But when reason is divorced from faith and faith severed from reason, then the mountebank arises as he did in ages past, sowing confusion and reaping its fruits: for junk science scorns the condemnation of men of faith, and claims eugenics, euthanasia, abortion and pederasty are scientific, modern, shiny and new; meanwhile heretics are given free reign by men of reason, regarding all opinions of the supernatural as equal, never bringing reason to bear to divide sound and sane religion from freakish cult.
He who claims the Siamese Twins of faith and reason, spirit and mind, are somehow at odds, mutually exclusive or even mutual enemies, creates an unnatural gap between the two. Into that unnatural gap an unnatural creature crawls, lamp-eyed and pale-skinned as an anglerfish, with fingers spiderly and clinging and damp.
In his sticky whisper, he hisses that he has a new and perfect version of your laws and rites and ways of life, which are intolerable and unredeemable. He lives on envy and discontent, and, where none exist, he foments it.
Such is the creature I call a Morlock.
His cannibalism is spiritual rather than literal, and the cryptical cave in which he hides is a matter of word-play, not a literal crypt under the soil.
The modern Morlock hides by mimicry, in a labyrinth of words, a swamp of perverted language. In his mouth, all definitions are reversed, all piety is blasphemy. He uses the same vocabulary as yours, but not the same dictionary.
The modern Morlock is more likely to occupy a faculty lounge, boardroom, artist’s garret, or mansion than a buried cavern: but he is as much a hermit as any cave-dweller, for he is separate from mankind, albeit only in the selfish solitudes of his maladjusted mind.
Mechanical cunning his ilk lacks utterly, for he and his distain manual labor with the refined distain of a Mandarin. However, the Morlock keeps a certain linguistic cunning about him at all times, and he can turn the wheels of faculties and administrations, and keep the engines of the media roaring forever. He playacts at making goods or providing services, but all he produces are words: an endless flatulence of words like a noisome fog, vast and dense as the atmosphere of Venus, and as deleterious to earthly life.
Nor does he literally hide beneath a sphinx, but Morlock is a deadly monster talking in riddles, and the answer to all his riddles is Man. God, for him, is never the answer.
The Prophet Daniel spoke of the Antichrist as a proud king of fierce countenance, versed in “dark sentences” — a phrase variously translated as meaning prophecies, enigmas, deceits, intrigues, riddles or perhaps occultism. This phrase applies the Morlock as well.
For the Morlock uses a special Orwellian jargon or jabberwocky meant to obscure his meaning, but which allows one member of the Morlock “Inner Circle” to recognize another. The meanings of the words and phrases are ever changing, to deter anyone who lacks the time and devotion to keep abreast of the latest fashion in argle-bargle from decoding the Inner Circle lingo, and entering their elite company.
As with all Morlockian works, his is not a language, but the opposite, a perversion of language. Language clarifies and conveys thought, or bring lyrical beauty to the ear. Antilanguage obscures meaning, chokes talk, promotes vulgarity, strangles laughter, births ugliness.
Unlike in the science fiction fable of Wells, our Morlock walks among us under the sun, and pretends to be like us, only better: a posthuman, a man of the future, more evolved than we. I select the name Morlock as a reminder that not all change is upward evolution. Decay, corruption, devolution also father progeny.
He says he believes in our faith and in our learning, but he claims to have a faith deeper and purer. Likewise he says his science is more expert and more socially active than mere empirical science. His is “woke” science, the science of scientific socialism. He says he is like Christ, in that he is not here to overthrow the old faith, but to elevate, fulfill, and complete it.
Like all he says, his claims are not merely inversions of the truth, but perversions of it.
The Morlock does not love the science but uses science to serve the ends of social reform or social engineering. His is not a higher science but junk science. His science is the mystical doctrine of an ersatz religion.
The Morlock does not fulfil nor complete any faith. His theology is secular and evolutionary, that is, in a condition of eternal self-destructive dialectic of confusion from which he hopes clarity and perfection will somehow arise.
His only gods are blind natural forces driving history and his only heaven is found in the utopia he vainly imagines to be the culmination of history. History, for the Morlock, ends in a paradise of man created by man in which man is the only god there is.
The Morlock, in other words, worships Man, who becomes as a god at the Eschaton.
The History of the Morlock
I have spoken of the Morlock in the singular, but he is legion, and has been with us through all ages. They are as a church rather than a tribe or race, for men of any background can fall prey to their mental virus, becoming addicted to vanity and deception, and be initiated into one of their myriad cults, cells, movements, sects, and fads.
Western tradition of scientific reasoning achieved its highest form among the schoolmen of the Thirteenth Century. It serves the convenience of antichristian political narrative to attribute the progress of this period to a later era, misnamed the Renaissance. In reality, the Renaissance was the heyday of heresy and hermeticism, a time of intellectual collapse and benightenment from which the West has never fully recovered.
This narrative holds that the very Christian Church who with such painstaking effort preserved the learning and lore of the Greek philosophers and mathematicians brought them to flower in the technical and scientific discoveries of the age, were in fact the enemies, not the fathers, of those discoveries, and that the predominance of Christendom was an interruption to Western Civilization, rather than its heart. As if Copernicus were not a churchman, nor Mendel a monk, nor Steno nor Lemaitre priests.
From public clockworks to eyeglasses to the heliocentric theory, Christian theology set free the reason of man, giving him aim and motive to investigate the cosmos rationally, discovering therein the evidence of a single provident Creator, rather than the multiple, whimsical and quarreling anthropomorphic figments of absurd pagan imagination.
The reason why the ancient Greek and pagan Roman, with all their cleverness with geometry and astrology and archways and aqueducts, their codes of law, their playwrights and platonic dialogs, could not systematize the investigation of nature into an institutional scholastic procedure, was because their theology did not admit the possibility.
A Neoplatonist regards the world the handiwork of a Demiurge or worker-spirit, lesser than and inferior to the immobile First God, called Nous or Mind. The First God is remote, unreachable, and the lesser spirits that clutter the Neoplatonic worldview exist in a concentric hierarchy of heavens of decreasing radius, each barring upward ascent, until, at the bottom, is the mundane sphere of man. The world of the Demiurge is illusionary and transient, a world of sleep from which the Enlightened must awaken. The physical body is regarded with disdain and disgust.
There is no room for rational investigation of an orderly cosmos in such a worldview: the Neoplatonic world is a debris or byproduct of a descending hierarchy of increasingly degraded spirits, of which man is the least.
A Gnostic takes this one step further. He regards the Demiurge as a devil who deceives the spirits trapped in the bondage of the world-system, luring them to love their chains by means of false pleasures and pomps, but most of all by pretending to be the unmoved First God whose throne he usurped.
In the Gnostic system, the tale of the garden of Eden is reversed, as the innocent parents of mankind, unbeknownst to themselves, are mere slaves of the Creator, who created the visible world only, the degrading world of matter. The serpent, in this telling, reveals the truth, and promises them a path back to their native godhood. For the heroic act of biting the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, the wicked Demiurge cursed the newborn godlings with sorrow, labor, childbirth, death.
The Demiurge next confused them with commandments, ordaining priesthoods, laws, rituals, and all the orderly mechanisms of society, whose only meaning is to fasten the gyves ever more tightly, and prevent the awakening in escape from the degraded condition of mankind back into godhood.
As in Neoplatonism, the unmoved First God of the Gnostics provides no path to salvation. For the Gnostic, salvation is neither by baptism nor repentance, neither by faith nor works, but by the esoteric knowledge of an incommunicable inner knowledge which guides and teaches him.
For both Neoplatonist and Gnostic, the meaning of life is enlightenment and escape from the world-system and the return to the Godhead, in which all individuality is lost, personality dissolves, and all are melted into one with all. It is only as a collective or communal spirit that we find perfection.
It ought not need be said that the Christian idea that grace perfects nature is utterly antithetical to this dismal vision of self-annihilation.
Hermeticism is closely akin to Gnosticism: For the Hermeticist, God broke himself into myriads of shards during his act of creation, and Demiurge hid or embedded them widely scattered in many different and deceptive forms of matter. Such as shard in man is his inner soul which seeks a return to his native godhead, and unity. All lost shards are to be recollected, and again, man will be dissolved into collective godhead.
There are differences: In hermeticism, God’s own knowledge of himself depends upon His creative activity, through the realization of that knowledge in mankind. By contrast, the Gnostic entirely separates God and creation, and refuses to allow God is in any way dependent on mankind.
Hermeticism, in other words, is evolutionary Gnosticism.
However, these are differences of denomination within a unity of one tradition: as Buddhism grows out of Hinduism, or Christianity out of Judaism. But it is not wrong to speak of a Judeo-Christian Tradition, nor of a Vedic Tradition: what makes such a tradition singular is the presence of a common core whose removal would destroy the teaching.
Hermeticism also gives rise to alchemy, which is often misremembered as being a nascent scientific tradition. Alchemy is no more science than the Race Science of the Nazis, the Lysenkoism of the Soviets, or the Climate Science of the Environmentalist death-cult. Alchemy is primarily a heretical religious or magical practice, based on the Hermetic principle that divine sparks of superior substances are trapped in the degraded substance of matter.
The Great Work of the Alchemist, to make gold out of lead, was an attempt to free the more perfect golden elements allegedly hidden inside the less perfect base matter; likewise to free the gold of the higher soul trapped in the sullen and leaden man’s existence, which, once freed, would open the path to external life.
The Philosophers’ Stone is the symbol of enlightenment which will restore Adam or Perfected Man who is also god. All the business of the alchemical workshop, with its bubbling cauldrons and smoking ovens, is an outward symbol (or, rather, a magical force linked by the law of sympathy and contagion) of the inward changes, through prayer and fasting, in which the Alchemist engages.
Azoth, or the Universal Medicine, which was an elixir to cure all ills and grant eternal life, is bread of the eucharist. Alkahest or universal solvent, which dissolved all matter, is the water of baptism dissolving sin. Homunculus, or living mannikin, is a symbol of the power to bring forth life from the dead, which is Resurrection in Christ. The Philosophers’ Stone another name for wisdom, but perhaps it is also the rock on which the wise man builds his house, while the foolish house built on sand is washed away. Other Alchemists explicitly say the Philosophers’ Stone is Christ, the cornerstone mentioned in Ephesians and Isaiah.
There is also an overlap between Alchemy and Cabbalism, since to seek the Philosophers’ Stone is also to seek the Adam Cadmon, the perfected form of Adam clothed in perfect light, who never entered the world of matter. Cabbalism takes forms and terms from Jewish lore, while Alchemy is largely Christian and Muslim, but, at heart, they are the same.
The Hermeticist, like the Gnostic, indulges liberally in syncretism. Hermeticism holds that all religions, if not all lore and learning, are the shattered and scattered remnants of the Ancient Theology (Prisca Theologia) which at one time all men knew.
Later generations of Theosophists amused and befuddled themselves inventing primordial lands, either sunken in the sea or hidden at earth’s core, and various pre-Adamite “Root Races” to inhabit them, which also shared in a stepwise progressive degradation from the one original master race. The Original Master Race possessed the secrets of Ancient Theology, hence knew various superscientific and psionic secrets now lost.
The Root Races include the Polarians, the Hyperboreans, the Lemurians, the Atlanteans. The fifth of these make-believe races of primal supermen were Aryans, who migrated from Atlantis, erecting the City of the Sun on a white island amid an inland sea in the Gobi desert, then verdant and lush, situated directly beneath the etheric city of Shamballa where dwells of guardian deity of Earth, called Sanat Kumara. Under his evolutionary direction, the Aryans settled Asia, Asia Minor, and Europe, giving rise in due order of time to the Hindu, Arabian, Persian, Celt, and finally the Teutonic.
If the concept of an Aryan Master-Race seems familiar, it is because the lineage can be traced through the various sects, schools, and cults of esoterism from Theosophy to Theozoology to the Thule Society, from Wotanism to Irmanism to Ariosophy, to an occultist named Karl Maria Wiligut, who was the private Magus of Heinrich Himmler. If these names sound unfamiliar, it is because they are invented cult and occult systems, allegedly related to prehistoric German folklore, runic and magical practices.
These are the Germanic impersonation or mimicry of Hermes Trismegistus, that is, a body of occult lore invented recently and locally, falsely claiming to be an ancient and universal secret history to be told only to the initiates. It seems the Germans were jealous of the classical mystery cults of Greeks and Egyptians, and wanted to backfill their own into convenient blank spaces in their history.
The anthropologically illiterate absurdity of swarms of primordial superhumans, Polarians and the Atlanteans and so on, fleeing sinking continents to live in beneath magical ether-cities, is rich material for some pulp novel penned by Robert E. Howard in the Hyborian Age: I regret that, as they ever do, the Morlock tradition reversed truth and fiction. What should have been an amusing phantasy about a lost master race, taken quite seriously by the Hitlerians, sparked genocide and world war.
The tradition running from Gnosticism to Hermeticism to Theosophy is a religion as old and influential as Christianity. But it hides from view by claiming never to be anything other than a perfection of that religion.
In this view, Christianity is not erroneous, merely incomplete. Hermeticism claims an older and more universal religion, a better version, and hence is available to elevate Christianity to regain an lost primordial wholeness. Christ will then be seen as one prophet among many, one god among many, all of which are masks or aspects of the unmoved First God, at which time, smothered in global unity, all religious quarrels will be extinguished.
Please note, however, that the Morlock Tradition running from Gnosticism to Hermeticism to Theosophy extinguishes many lives, but no quarrels. The world-wars and mass extinctions of man by man in the Twentieth Century were caused by Socialism, as was the Cold War. The Nazi denomination was one branch springing from German Theosophy; the Soviet denomination was another; the Red Chinese form the most menacing modern manifestation.
Communism was sired by Marx, who is sired from Hegel, who is sired from the writings of a mystic named Jacob Boehme.
The Heritage of the Morlock
Jacob Boehme (or Jakob Böhme) is a figure unknown to me. I was introduced to his writings by James Lindsay, whom I credit. My knowledge of him in superficial, but sufficient to make the point here. He is the link between Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, and he illuminates Hegel and renders his role clear.
Boehme was a Christian, if a heretical one.
According to the encyclopedia, his writing shows the influence of Neoplatonist and alchemical writers such as Paracelsus. His influence in turn inspired mystical and quietist movements, dissenters, pantheists, esoteric mystics and ascetic sects prohibiting marriage.
This legion of heretics departed Lutheranism: Radical Pietists, the Ephrata Cloister, and Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, the Quakers, the Philadelphians, the Gichtelians, the Harmony Society, the Zoarite Separatists.
Boehme’s influence can be seen in Rosicrucianism, Martinism, the Scottish Rectified Rite of the Freemasons, and various forms of Christian theosophy. Driven from Germany, a wave of utopians founded communes in Ohio to share all property in common, none of which lasted three years.
In Boehme’s cosmology, it is a divine necessity that the original unity between God and creation be shattered by the rebellion of Satan and the Fall of Man, in order to created needed division, chaos, and conflict that would eventually evolve into to a new state of redemption more perfect than the original state of innocence.
Like the Hermaphrodites of Aristophanes, Boehme’s primal Man was androgynous before the Fall, and afterward split into male and female. Note that confusion of male and female, glorifying androgyny as superior, is a recurring theme in esoteric tradition.
Rebellion by His creatures allows God to achieve a self-awareness, otherwise unobtainable. The war in heaven and suffering on earth serves to improve God, making him more perfect than his prior perfection. This new and more perfect perfection is impossible unless God interacts with a creation that was both part of Himself, and distinct from Himself.
I will not dwell on the blasphemy involved, but I will say that even an atheist can see the illogic of proposing a perfect being overcoming imperfections. As if one could ignite a lamp to illuminate a ray sunlight and see it better.
The adoration of androgyny is not the only sign of sexual neurosis from Boehme: he departs from Luther by denying the perpetual virginity of Mary.
Esoterics generally but Gnostics especially are wont to display an unsightly contempt for virginity, coupled paradoxically with a contempt for motherhood, so the vision of a virgin mother is one a Morlock feels must be demeaned and disputed.
As with everything in the Morlock tradition, the pattern is the same: the falsehood does not merely invert the truth, but perverts it; the heresy claims to be improving or evolving the orthodox institution. Moreover, the claim is always imprecise, baffling, written in riddles.
Boehme was also an alchemist, as many Hermeticists were. In several works he used alchemical principles and symbols to demonstrate his theological theories. Alchemical language is necessary to describe the metaphysical proposition forming the core of Hermetic and Gnostic thinking, namely, that matter is impregnated with spirit, which it traps and degrades.
The link between Hegel and Boehme is not soberly disputed. Hegel dubs Boehme as “the first German philosopher.”
In Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Cornell University Press 2001), professor Glenn Alexander Magee proffers an telling list of influences found in Hegel’s works: alchemy, Kabbalism, Mesmerism, extrasensory perception, spiritualism, dowsing, eschatology, prisca theologia, philosophia perennis, Lullism, Paracelcism, Joachimism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, the writings of Eckhart, secret systems of symbolism, vitalism, and correspondences and cosmic sympathies.
Magee goes on to say, “There are, furthermore, numerous Hermetic elements in Hegel’s writings. These include, in broad strokes, a Masonic subtext of “initiation mysticism” in the Phenomenology of Spirit; a Boehmean subtext to the Phenomenology’s famous preface; a Kabbalistic-Boehmean-Lullian influence on the Logic; alchemical-Paracelsian elements in the Philosophy of Nature; an influence of Kabbalistic and Joachimite millennialism on Hegel’s doctrine of Objective Spirit and theory of world history; alchemical and Rosicrucian images in the Philosophy of Right; an influence of the Hermetic tradition of pansophia on the system as a whole; an endorsement of the Hermetic belief in philosophia perennis….”
In other words, Hegel and Boehme are clearly within the antinomian and heterodox Esoteric tradition I am here calling Morlockery.
Hegel was not a philosopher any more than Boehme was a theologian. Both are more akin in thought and method to Paracelsus and Hermes Trismegistus than to Aristotle or Aquinas.
The Heresy of the Morlock
I have known since I was a youth in college that Hegel was not a philosopher. It was not until I read Lindsay that I knew what he was.
A Sophist is a poseur pretending to be a philosopher, but who pens only musings and mysticism, a type of droning and obscure self-flattery whose profundity hides crippling intellectual shallowness.
Hegel’s work has no resemblance to the writings of real philosophers. Hegel’s writings, or, at least, that small sample I have read, does not, as do the dialogs of Plato, show an argument of two sides, nor, as does the Summa of Aquinas, entertain counterarguments or cite sources, nor, as Hobbes, does Hegel define his terms.
Or, I should say, he does not define his terms except in terms of other terms also not defined. For example: “Logic is the science of the pure Idea; pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought.” — there are just enough words, just vague enough, that one might think this is profound, but just beyond one’s grasp. But such is the illusion of a sophist. This so-called definition does not differentiate logic from other abstract thought processes, and so is not a definition at all. Logic is reasoning conducted according to strict formal principles of validity.
His is anti-philosophy, in that too close a study, if one is persuaded of the esoteric worldview embedded in Hegelian dogma, benumbs and weakens the virtue of the rational faculty. One can reason one’s way into skepticism of reasoning, but one cannot reason one’s way out of it.
Mystics take speculation as prophetic truth, and call a halt to all further speculation and debate: such is the soporific charm of the true believer’s gullible belief. The Mystic regards it as treason to the party, or impiety to one’s inner god, to question the oracular utterances he himself uttered.
Socrates was named by the oracle of Delphi as the wisest of men, but he claimed otherwise. He knew he was not wise, Sophos, for in the humility of his heroic intellectual integrity, he said he was only a lover of wisdom, Philosophos, whence comes our word for philosopher. Philosophers woo wisdom, a coy and elusive lady, and none are so egomaniacal as to claim her as a private and exclusive possession.
This is the Sophist claim: to have achieved perfection of wisdom by some mystic shortcut unavailable to lesser men. To question a philosopher is a joy to him; but to question a sophist is an offense. You blaspheme the little god he imagines himself to be.
Hegel is a sophist, not a philosopher. He is one who knows, not one who seeks.
From the tone of his writings (which are obscure, imperative, preemptory, and final) it is clear he neither welcomes cross-examination of his ideas, nor even examined his ideas himself. He speaks as a prophet might, save without the authority of God, and without any signs and wonders to show on whose behalf he speaks. Such is the leper’s bell of the Sophist, the hallmark of the intellectual, the banner of the mountebank. He has an axe to grind, not a truth to find.
In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel himself says that philosophy’s task is not to discover new truths by reasoning; rather, it is to express explicitly the primordial unconscious wisdom already known to all men, albeit implicitly or unconsciously. This is the prisca theologica of the Hermetic, and the pansophy of the Rosicrucian: the pretense of universal wisdom.
To say Hegel is not deliberate in his humbug pretense of certainty, his lack of clarity, the lack of explicit demonstration of any theory or thesis he proposes, is to accuse Hegel of gross incompetence at the main task for which his life is remembered. But to say he is deliberate in his humbug merely identifies him as a Hermeticist, for riddle-play is the traditional Hermetic way of speaking, which they adopt because nothing else will serve them.
To say Hegel is not an alchemist nor mystic because he is writing about philosophy, not about religion, is to mistake the whole of his work. A single one of his ideas must suffice as an example for the rest.
Please reflect on the historicism and statism for which Hegel is famous. His two most repeated ideas, inverted (as is their wont, even when dealing with each other) by later Morlocks, are the ideas of the Eschaton and of the evolutionary Dialectic leading to it. Hegel frames these ideas in terms of a new and unorthodox trinitarianism.
The Eschaton is the end of history, both in the sense that history has an aim directing and motivating historical change; and in the sense that once history is achieved, it the tale is done, and no further historical change is needed or possible.
The foretold end of history is when theory and practice become one, all contradictions and conflicts in life are solved, man is god. The Eschaton is the Absolute.
In Christian lore, the Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, coequal and coeternal. For Hegel, following the mainstream tradition of Hermeticism, treading in the footsteps of Boehme, God is incomplete and comes to know Himself when Fallen Man, estranged from God, evolves to perfection, becoming one with God at the End of Time.
This evolution works through history by a series of successive stages, each revolting against the prior in endless conflict. History uses men, institutions, and states as needed, and then mercilessly discards them. So goes evolution. So goes the dialectic.
For Hegel, the Idea driving the world is the Father, the State is the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Age or Zeitgeist, what we would call the culture. The World-Idea creates the State, which is the institutional hierarchy of civilization, which creates the Spirit of the Age: but innate contradictions and conflicts between ideal and real trigger a revolution in the Spirit which bring the World-Idea into closer perfection, driving it toward the Absolute Idea, which starts the cycle again.
Civilizations rise and fall and rise again, each better than the last, until Utopia is reached, and the Absolute comes into being at the Eschaton. So the entire sideral universe, all the joys and woes of earthly life, are but the birth pangs of an imperfect god giving birth to himself.
Pause, please, momentarily to ponder the idea that God was the Prussian State, and the Prussian State was God, and all Germans had no other Father but this. That Hegel was not burned like Giordano Bruno is evidence not of the enlightenment of the age, but only of its sloth and indifference to ideas that will leads to world wars and world wars repeated, genocides and gulags and all the riots of the present season.
Hegel delighted in what one might call a motte-and-bailey obscurity, where anything he says can, when convenient, be interpreted to be an orthodox or even obvious statement: who can doubt that a man’s upbringing influences his personality? Who can doubt that the sum of all personalities of the generation inform the spirit of the age, or that the laws sometimes jar against this spirit, and sometimes give way to it, leaning to changes in our way of life? So much seems uncontroversial.
But the riddles are written ambiguously. When convenient, the same passage can be taken to mean that Man was not created by God but was created by himself, through a process of dialectic conflict between conqueror and conquered, where the enslaved becomes human by productive work, gains self-awareness, and this triggers a revolution leading to new conquests. Man creates man.
Once man realizes himself to be his own creator, the way is opened to create a superman, the man beyond man, by putting in place whatever laws and customs are needed to bring about the birth of this higher being. That superman, being imperfect, will suffer revolution in generations to come, and bring for the higher superman, the superman beyond superman. The State creates the Spirit that creates Man that creates the State.
This is not philosophy. Philosophy is the use of reason to investigate ultimate truths. This is not theology. Theology is the use of reason to investigate revealed truth.
This is alchemy: it is the daydream of using the Philosophers’ Stone to burn away the vulgar visage of material man and uncover the golden god sleeping beneath. It is the Gnostic quest to gather all the shards of the shattered god back together and erect them into a living idol or great beast, a world-ruler whom all shall serve and adore.
It is the lunatics’ exodus from sanity. It is Satanic rebellion against heaven.
It is the revolution of forevermore: endless uproar, eternal riot, unquenchable fire.
The Materialism of the Morlock
Karl Marx is the rebellious intellectual child of Hegel, who took Hegelian ideas and negated or inverted them — in his own words, Marx took the theory of spiritual dialectic of Hegel and “stood it on its head”, to create his famous theory of material dialectic.
The heretical Hegelian trinity of Idea-State-Spirit is inverted: in Marx, Man is the Father and the State, founded by man, is his Son. The State forms the Culture, which in turn makes Man self-aware, and defines his nature, creating in time a new man. The Culture is the Spirit of Man.
The new man is unable to endure the contradictions of the state, and must rebel and overthrow it, to create a new state that will bring forth a new culture: this will create the superman, and he will create higher supermen in turn, until utopia arrives.
The superman the Communal Man, or the Social Man, one who voluntarily lives without private property, donates his work to the common effort, takes only what he needs, and gives to each by their need. Supermen live without law or need for law, like angels.
In other words, as in Hegel, the trinity is restless, and source of all growing pains. Man makes State makes Culture make Man in an upward spiral directed toward the End of History, the Utopia where man is absorbed into the godhead of the collective.
The central conceit of this anthropomorphic and anthropocentric trinity is that Man is his own Father.
Man is God. This is the selfsame lie told to Eve by the Serpent, and repeated by the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions since time immemorial.
I suggest that if the Devil is an immortal spirit, understanding man in our every crooked nuance of psychology, he need not find new lies to tell. The old lies still work.
Marx is regarded as an economist, despite having never written a single word, not a jot nor tittle, about economics.
He is called an economist by the unwary because his mystical trinitarian vision of the end-times was obsessed with the contradictions and conflicts between man and state, which he took to be caused by the institution of private property. Following Rousseau, Marx identified all those conflicts as arising from the development of civilization, marring an innocent savagery.
Rousseau, and later Marx, regarded private property as the source of all evils promoted by civilization, and saw the purpose of history as reconciling savage and civilized natures in to one new form of human life, where, as in Eden, all would share all goods with all.
For Marx, all that is needed to produce goods and services in unlimited abundance is to eliminate the means of producing them: namely, laws protecting private property.
Marx carried this insanity one step further by preaching that the specialization of labor was in fact a trap that alienated man from himself. The alienation drains man of humanity and dignity. To regain this lost humanity, man must become a collective, eschew individuality, own nothing, and submit to being the well-fed wards of the World-State: which would then evaporate, all social problems having been solved, and all needs, earthly and spiritual, having been met.
In reality, specialization of labor is when each man becomes more skilled in his own field so as to make peaceful trade with neighbors increasingly mutually beneficial.
Having a mystical vision of the land of perfection where goods materialize without labor is no more part of the study of economics than daydreams about the hobo paradise of Rock Candy Mountain, where cigarettes grown on trees and hens lay soft boiled eggs; or medieval satires about the Land of Cockaigne, where fountains flow with wine and meat pies falls out of clouds into one’s open mouth.
Indeed, the whole point of the study of economics is that goods do not materialize without labor. As it once was said, There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. The work of economists point out the otherwise hidden costs and drawbacks of various policies attempting to evade this reality.
Marx is an economist in the same way an atheist is a theologian. Like the theologian, the atheist speak much about God, but only to say why He does not and should not exist. Likewise, Marx speaks about economics only to say it does not and should not exist.
Ironically, however, Marx grounds this materialistic theory on a metaphysical vision, which, properly speaking, is a theology.
Dialectic of the Morlock
The Eschaton is the goal, and the Dialectic is the means. Dialectic is most commonly described as the clash or contradiction of a thesis with its opposite antithesis, resulting in a synthesis of the two ideas.
An oft-cited example is the thesis of Heraclitus (that the world is ever-changing) with the antithesis of Parmenides (that the world is unchanging) whose clash gives rise to the synthesis of Plato (that there are two worlds, an ever-changing world of matter, and an unchanging world of ideals).
What makes the Hegelian idea of a Dialectic appealing to magicians and mountebanks is that it is false. Plato’s refinement of the two ideas, each simplistic and silly in its own way, into something more wise and more clear was due to his close examination of the weight of the opposite arguments. It was not due to the fact that the arguments came to opposite conclusions: The conflict did not cause Plato’s insight. The examination would have been equally needed had the conclusions aligned. The contradiction is insignificant.
For in this example the opposite ideas did not contradict, once defined properly, each to its proper sphere. The appearance of a contradiction was due to the informal logical error of ambiguity, that is, to the lack of discrimination. An undiscriminating argument conflate ideas that wisdom takes the time to distinguish. In this case, Heraclitus and Parmenides treat the mental and material aspects of the world as if they are one and the same, and each comes to a conclusion that is simply absurd on its face.
For the magician, however, the clash or contradiction is paramount, for it grants him excuse to affirm paradox. It grants him excuse to spread chaos, in the vain hope that a synthesis will somehow inexplicably arise of it own power out of the ashes of the confusion. Such is the whole theory of evolution: the idea that death and destruction, not growth and reason, refine simpler organisms or simpler theories into more complex and complete ones. The reason why Morlocks since the dawn of time have toppled institutions, scorned traditions, and burned civilizations is in this vain and childish confusion of creation with destruction. Sadism also forms a major aspect of their tradition, of course. See the French Revolution for details.
Some unwary souls even mouth a popular phrase, creative destruction, summing up the idea that one competition in capitalism, or survival of the fittest in Darwinism, need destruction in order to create. Nothing in reality, nor in the writings of Adam Smith or Charles Darwin, supports this odd interpretation.
The idea of creative destruction is the idea that one man’s victory needs another man’s loss: as if the fastest runner in a footrace would have lost velocity had the slowest runner not been so slow. In evolution, or any competition, the least favored competitor fails before the more favored: but his performance is not necessarily enhanced by the absence of the failed competitor, unless the game is zero-sum, where the winner has nothing to gain save for resources taken from the loser.
Morlocks, it must be noted, make exactly this idiot mistake perennially. The Morlock, to be a Morlock, must be a man who assumes each and every instance of competition is zero-sum. There is no exception. In Morlockland, the only way for a bridegroom is be happy in marriage is to inflict woe on the bride; the only way for the White Race to prosper is to trample and enslave the Black; the profits of a business are theft by the owners from the ever-shrinking purses of the workers.
And on and on. The self-evident mutual benefit of cooperation is impossible in their worldview, as is the mutually non-aggression of non-competitors. All joy for you is woe for another.
It should come as no surprise that the Cultural Marxists who are the rebellious children of Marx do the him as he did to Hegel before him, turning the Marxist material dialectic on its head to create the theory of cultural dialectic. For Cultural Marxists the “means of production” are not economic institutions, but social institutions, whose product are all the imponderables. The social institutions, according to this theory, create the errors and evils of human nature: society assigns sex at birth, grants privileges to races, suppresses perfectly natural and harmless deviant sexual orientations, and so on.
In the great dialectical scheme of the Morlocks, each revolution crushes and absorbs the products of the prior. Feminism, for example, was a theory useful to undermine Christian sexual morality, but Gender Theory undermines Feminist theory.
The dialectic of the Morlocks is not a pattern of growth. Growth is when an immature organism develops into a mature one, and the blueprint of what each shall become is innate in his blood. Whereas there is no blueprint here. Dialectic is as if animals were to mate by fighting, turning into whatever prey they eat, or whatever predators eat them, and the two then merge and meld, becoming a chimera composed of parts of each. The imaginary many-headed scaly and befeathered lizard mammal amphibian beast is promised to be a god, who will bring eternal prosperity and peace.
This is not a theory of economics. It is a lurid retelling of the Apocalypse of John, merely one lauds the the Beast, and promises final victory for him.
The Religion of the Morlock
The United States is a nation founded on mutiny, and our founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, give explicit reasons to justify and limit when mutiny is lawful.
In that spirit, the First Amendment, by putting certain things beyond federal power (and, after the Civil War, beyond state power) in effect, grants citizens the right to disobey American law in the name of divine law. On our soil, not even Caesar in all his glory can command the citizen to disobey the higher law of heaven. Hence it is necessary to define where the boundaries of that higher law falls.
However, the Supreme Court caught in a paradox. As one branch of the federal government, their duty is to avoid saying what is and is not officially a religion. It is not their place to drawn the boundary line beyond which heaven may not step.
But the matter is made unavoidable in cases where atheists wish not to affirm faith in a Supreme Being or where pacifists ask for exemptions to the draft, albeit not themselves members of denomination holding pacifism as dogma.
In Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961), the Supreme Court abandoned the use of a belief in God as the touchstone for religious belief, when it invalidated a Maryland law which required all public office holders to declare a belief in the existence of God. The Court stated that the government may not “aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.”
In United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965), the wording of a statute grant exception to compulsory military service was limited to “”an individual’s belief in a relation to a Supreme Being involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation” and the wording of the statue excluded “essentially political, sociological or philosophical views or a merely personal moral code.” Legislating from the bench, the Court negated the plain meaning of the statute by holding that a “belief that is sincere and meaningful [and] occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God” but without a “belief in the relation to a Supreme Being” was the same as such a belief.
This prompts the question of what place is occupied in the life of its possessor by the belief in the relation to a Supreme Being?
Ben Clements, Defining Religion in the First Amendment: A Functional Approach , 74 Cornell L. Rev. 532 (1989) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol74/iss3/4 attempts to reconcile the various Supreme Court cases addressing what is covered by the First Amendment. He ventures an answer in the following terms:
Religion can be defined as a comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience.
This is a legal and not a theological definition, but let us entertain it for the sake of argument.
The Theory of Marxism fits this definition, whereas the economic theories of Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises or Gerard Maynard Keynes most certainly do not. Likewise, philosophical theories, as Aristotelianism or Utilitarianism, more certainly do not. Let us examine each element in turn.
- Meaning of Life and Death
For Marx, the meaning of life is achieve enlightenment, and usurp power in order to overthrow the systemic oppression of current institutions, economic, legal and cultural, whereupon Utopia can bloom. Death, as for all materialists, is oblivion, hence the sole meaning life can have is the lasting social changes one’s legacy of activism leaves behind—as will be judged by the Eye at the End of History.
- Man’s Role in the Universe
Man’s role in the universe is simple: to create Utopia. This is done by criticizing, disrupting, and dismantling all hierarchies of power. How this is to be achieved is left unsaid. It is a mystery of faith.
Man’s role is one of unending woe, for the need to labor for his daily bread hinders his awakening into enlightenment needed before he can envision and then create utopia. For Marx, the laws and customs of civilized life, particularly specialization of labor and private ownership of property, create the scarcity they are meant to alleviate. Hard work produces poverty, not prosperity, and alienate man from himself. To remake man’s nature into a higher nature, property must be communalized. This is the decree, the aim, and the course of history.
- Nature of Good and Evil
The nature of good and evil is even simpler: the righteous man is on the right side of history. He also seeks to confess (in groveling penitent self-abasement painful to behold) every evil he did by unthinkingly upholding the systemic oppression allowed him to benefiting from these ancestral sins.
Note that no man is good or evil by himself. All are judged by the collective identity assigned to him.
- Duties of Conscience
Duties of Conscience, from the legal point of view, involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation. Neither prince nor priest, scholar nor doctor, captain nor company, ancestor nor father nor any earthly authority whatever, may justly tell a man to break divine law.
For the Marxist and Neomarxist, the duties owed to the March of History override all human oaths and obligations. Children are to betray their parents, students their teachers, servants their masters, priests their parishioners, princes their subjects. Police are to betray civilians they previously protected. Fidelity is impossible, because loyalty to any human person is loyalty to a hierarchy of power which is always oppressive by definition.
Only party loyalty matters. Everyone betrays everyone. No human law, no custom, no institution, has any moral imperative requiring it be followed.
Morlockery excuses and justifies every an any violation of human and divine law. This may explain its perennial appeal.
See Drag-Queen story hour for a current example of multiple obligations of decency, civility, chastity, pedagogy, parenthood, and protection of innocence all being violated at once, as well as an insolent impiety and blasphemy.
Conclusion
In sum, Neoplatonism begat Gnosticism begat Hermeticism begat Alchemy begat Boehme begat Hegel begat Marx. Cultural Marxism manifests in various modern guises as Identity Politics, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Environmentalism, and the Great Reset.
All the illuminati of history and the sophists pretending to be wiser than philosophers are the ancestors of those self-anointed prophets of enlightenment calling themselves, with the angular ungrammar of Orwellian Newspeak, “Woke.”
It is an unbroken tradition of misbegotten mountebanks pretending secret wisdom: the awakened masters of a world of sleepwalkers.
It is one religion, with many cults and offshoots, but all preserving its core elements through intergenerational changes, maintaining forever the same vision.
First, man is sleeping god, and must wake or evolve into godlike perfection.
Second, life on earth in material body (including honest labor needed to maintain that life) are irredeemably evil. Good consists of rebellion against reality in the name of a higher or hidden reality.
Third, escape from evil is by means of the expert knowledge of the elite, who know the future path of history hidden from the low and vulgar.
Fourth, the meaning of life is the rebellion against creation, against the world or the world-system, until godhead is reunited, or, what is much the same thing, all mankind is united into a manmade paradise on earth.
Every element of this narcissistic self-worship of the would-be godlings is false. Their faith is hidden from common eyes, not because it is esoteric, but because it is silly. All things are inverted: man is god and god is devilish, vice is virtue, ugliness is art.
The religion of the Morlocks not merely inverts the truth, but perverts it.
When I speak of perversion of the truth, I mean more than to assert a claim is false. I mean that in the same way the Marquis de Sade substitutes the nature desire of young men for the kisses, caresses, and sweet intimacies with fair young ladies for a sick craving for scenes of horror and screams of pain as a source of erotic satisfaction — a mental illness called sadism — so here the Morlock takes the desire of men for truth, virtue and beauty, and substitutes a sick craving for the secret truths of Gnosticism, the special vices of sexual abnormality, and all the ugliness, distortion, and desecration from cubism in painting to brutalism in architecture.
The Morlock takes a desire for holy and heavenly things, claims to have found a better and higher heaven, and substitutes unholy hells instead.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
