Unhumanity: Part VI The Darkness of the Inner Light
Continued from prior columns.
We have seen that Christian civilization has adopted a suicidal worldview, whose current name is Wokeness. It is one ideal, and ideal of death, with many manifestations (Hegelian, Marxist, Cultural Marxist) prompting many cults and causes (Feminism, Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, Climate Panic Theory) leading to several types of activism (Intersectionalism, Globalism, the Great Reset). This ideal is the modern version of an unbroken tradition of esoteric thought leading to Hegel from Boehme, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism. This tradition is theosophy, not philosophy, for it is not based on reason, nor is it theology, for it is not based on revelation.
The civilizational suicide of Wokeness is a tradition of mystagogues forever seeking to synthesize all faiths into a unity, replace God with man, and create heaven on earth, or abolish earth altogether. It is a tradition of unreason, inhumanity, and antichrist.
Let us ponder the path of unreason: the politics, the theory, the history, and the modern fruition.
1. The Inner Circle and the Outsiders
Historically, Christendom can be pictured as a river fed by two streams of tradition: the philosophical tradition issuing from Athens and the spiritual tradition issuing from Jerusalem. Unseen, but everpresent, is a third stream issuing from Alexandria, a nest of Neoplatonists, Cabalists, Occultists and Gnostics older than Plotinus, Trismegistus, or Simon the Magician. Alexandria, home of the Gnostics, is the wellspring of Wokeness.
Theologically, Wokeness is modern Gnosticism, the assertion of inner enlightenment bestowing a right to rule if not exterminate lesser mortals, and to anathematize any disagreement without debate.
Politically, Woke activism is the Elite or Inner Circle appealing to Outsiders, who will combine against the Middle. The Middle here means the Bourgeoisie, Natives, White, Males, Hale, Fit, Sane, Chaste and Christian, who are the scapegoats blamed for any evil ever suffered by the poor, migrants, minorities, women, handicapped, obese, lunatics, perverts, or Muslims. History is conveniently forgotten and rewritten to affix all historical blame for all ills befalling the Outsiders on Christendom.
The Outsiders are cast as the victims of inaudible dogwhistles, invisible glass ceilings, impalpable micro-aggressions, systemically interwoven hence concealed within the fabric of social norms and the laws of civilization. These hidden injustices the Elite alone are awake enough to see — from this comes their insolently silly self-anointed name of “Woke” — and the ability to see the unseen is sole proof and passkey of their Elite and superior status. The stain of ancestral shame does not apply to them, because they alone can see and renounce it.
The Elite demand others make reparations to repay the posterity of ancestral victimization, even in the same fashion, with the same perfect hypocrisy, that they fly private jets to world conferences from which they issue demands that others sacrifice their livelihoods to curtail imaginary contributions to global warming.
In the same fashion, they stand behind lines of armed bodyguard which issuing demands all other men disarm; or loll in ease within gated communities while issuing demands that others displace themselves to welcome the crime-ridden and disease-rattled hordes of third-world migrants. Hypocrisy is not an accident or lapse of the Woke worldview; it is the heart and soul. Wokeness is hypocrisy. Wokeness is vice pretending to be virtue, or, to use the modern term, virtue-signaling.
No pragmatic cure to the alleged injustices is ever offered: only the wholesale rejection, root and branch, of all norms, laws, customs and traditions. The promise is worldwide bloodbath, the hope is to burn all civilization to ashes.
The promise, of course, is false. Once the Middle is crippled or exterminated, the Inner Circle unceremoniously shoves the Outsiders back to the outside, tightening the fetters of penurious serfdom from which alone the Middle offered any hope of escape or upward mobility.
Contemplate the fate of the student agitators no longer useful to Bolsheviks once the Czar is overthrown, or Occupy Wall Street rioters to the Plutocrats funding them once the banking industry was centralized, or Black Lives Matter agitators to the Democrat National Committee once local police were demoralized, and the election stolen. The human evil was replaced by a satanic evil: The Czar became Commissar; the defunded and demoralized police abandoned ghettos to gangland; and those beaten with whips were now beaten with scorpions.
Hypocrisy is the soul and summit of Wokeness, because Wokeness is modern Gnosticism, and Gnosticism is the presumption that inward certainty is better than outward reality, transgression better than tradition, man better than God.
These three propositions each rest on a double standard, if not an insolent self-contradiction. All stink of rank hypocrisy.
Let us examine unreason.
It stands on a principle of condemning doubt as evil, but not answering nor alleviating doubt; it issues from an unbroken tradition of esoteric worldviews asserting inner certainty; it culminations in Marxist rejection of reason altogether; and produces modern Cultural Marxism, or Wokeness, as its final fruit.
2. No Answers
The Woke are Gnostics, and Gnostics do not use reason to seek truth. Instead, the truth is an inner certainty, called gnosis, which arises from nowhere for no reason: to keep faith with this inner certainty is an act of the will. The Gnostic believes as he believes because he wishes to believe.
That the Woke do not engage in debate, but instead ignore, silence, mock, ostracize, punish, plunder, or kill anyone daring to debate, question, or doubt. This is not due to an inability to answer, as is often repeated.
That is, the Woke do not see they have no answers, therefore pretend to possess indubitable inner certainty to hide the fact. Nothing is hidden; their inability to answer is well known. Rather the Woke, because they hold their inner certainty to be indubitable, seek no answers, and do not regard it as legitimate to offer answers.
Again, silencing and punishing questioners is not a lapse of their honor code. It is their honor code. The Woke hold it to be illegitimate to dignify questions with answers, or the grant questioners are right to exist.
Even if they had answers (they do not) they would not offer them.
Their doubts were not quelled by answers, but by inner certainty and an act of the will; ergo the Woke offer no answers to quell doubts. Doubt vanishes when the sleepwalker wakes and becomes Woke. Debating a sleepwalker is in vain.
A core principle of their worldview assigns a divine status to the inner sense of certainty.
Because their certainty is divine, to question is anathema. It is a sign of woeful ignorance or willful evil. More to the point, since their certainty is based on an effort of will, for a Gnostic to entertain questions might engender doubt, and kill the certainty. Killing a divine thing is deicide, the worst of sins. Therefore to question is not merely evil, it is the only evil imaginable.
This is why failure to affirm lunatics suffering gender dysphoria is called a genocide: anyone questioned, if he encounters doubt, will lose his divine certainty, and certainly commit suicide.
3. A History of Delusion
In ancient times, Gnostics accounted for this inner certainty by declaring it to have a supernatural source: men were spirits trapped in bodies of clay by a demiurge or deceiver, who imposed arbitrary commandments by pretending to be god. Inner certainty arose from their inner godhead.
Later writers, such as Hermeticists, held the demiurge himself to be self-deceived, blind rather than malicious, and the entrapment to be an oversight or accident, but one which left a golden shard or aspect of the original undivided divinity alive in each soul. Inner certainty arose from this hidden shard of godhead.
Later still, Hegelians held this division to be uncaused, due merely to the fact that the unification promised by evolution, spiritual dialectic, had yet to culminate, and bear fruit. Inner certainty issues from the Absolute, toward which it, and all thought, inevitably tends.
Men are accustomed, says Hegel, to see only this or that and to draw sharp distinctions between the true and the false. As a matter of fact no part is complete in itself. It always implies something else. The partial is always the false just because it is partial. Only in the system of truth as a whole can we escape contradiction; only when we allow for both sides do we attain to truth.
Thus in the advance of thought every notion passes into its opposite and so there comes about an equal justification for the opposite, as well as the original notion and the truth is reached, not when we rest in any one of the sides and regard it as the whole, but when we take as complementary the two abstractions into which our thought has been sundered.
The Hegelian dialectic is based on the recognition of the union of opposites. All affirmation implies negation and all negation involves affirmation. This law of development proceeding by thesis antithesis and synthesis and thus advances from contradictions to ever fuller and more complex reconciliations.
Be not deceived. Hegel is not a philosopher. A philosopher might rightly hold that both sides of any argument must be examined in detail without bias or predisposition to discover what truth, if any, either might contain. But it is the reasoning process that hinders or halts bias and predisposition. The more rigorous the reasoning, the finer is the mesh used to sift axioms and assumptions, separating knowledge from opinion, certainty from likelihood.
But the Hegelian dialectic or union of opposites merely affirms and negates neither and both sides of any argument, and paralyzes the operations of logic. So Hegel does not use logic. He spins out complex ambiguities in vague and vaporous terms, and utters riddles as oracular as any utterance from the drug-dazed priestess of Delphi, drunk on mephitic fumes seeping from volcanic cracks.
Finally, with Marx, the intellectual dialectic was inverted to a material dialectic.
4. The Ideological Superstructure of Socialism
Marx elevates the Hegelian schtick of undermining logic and reason from the absurd to the satanic: for Marx blithely decrees all operations of logic to be subordinate to the means of production that give each stage of history its social and economic character. Hence economic theory need never be discussed, because all economists are ensnared in an ideological superstructure that supports their class interests. This applies to all theories, not just economic ones, all thought, all reasoning. All men but Marx, says Marx, are dishonest: dishonesty is defined as disagreement with Marx.
Of course, the mere opposite is the case. No figure in history ever took up his pen with an more blatant program of saying whatever nonsense he had to say, twisting logic however it could be twisted, or even uttering outright lies and gibberish, in order to reach his pre-established pet conclusions that justified his filthy lifestyle, as Marx. The whole of his corpus or written work is one freakish exercise in psychological justification and projection. There is nothing else like it in the commonwealth of letters.
But what of reason? If Marx accepts Hegelian dialectic as valid, but rejects spiritualism and intellectualism, how are the contradictions of opposite resolved?
How are contradictions resolved? By violence.
Each stage of history contains contradictions which eventually grow unsustainable, and destroy that stage, giving rise to a more advanced stage to come, which contains a reconciliation or synthesis of the prior conflicting elements, now in harmony. New conflicts, previously but seeds, now bloom as the hidden contradiction of the new stage eventuate. The process of bloody evolution advances until utopia is reached, all contradictions resolved, individual and commune are as one, theory and practice unified.
Cultural Marxists retain this vision, but ignore the surrounding dogma. For them, social division is one of social classes, or races, or sexes, or identities based on sexual perversion. The evils of division is due to the fact that the revolution to usher in utopia had been delayed by the blindness or malice of reactionary elements in society. Inner certainty is found when false class-consciousness fails, reactionary fears are boldly overcome, and the truth of scientific socialism, programmed into human meat-robots by the forces of history, is free to operate.
5. The Sleep of Reason
In Cultural Marxism as in Marxism, the demiurge re-emerges as a contrarian class, fearful of losing privilege and power, uneducated and immoral, unable or unwilling to foresee the inevitable commie paradise to come. For Marx, the demiurge is the capitalist; for feminists, the patriarchy; for race-hustlers, systemic white supremacy; for gender ideologues, binary transphobic monogamy. Each demiurge is alleged to retain an invisible conspiracy-theory power to control society, establishing economic inequalities, sexual roles, and sexual dimorphism by fiat. Everything from the laws of cause and effect (one cannot consume goods before they are produced) from laws of logic (one cannot eat one’s cake and save it for later) to laws of psychology (men are from Mars, women from Venus) to laws of biology (humans are mammals) is alleged to be manmade, a social construct, deliberately and deceptively imposed by an utterly invisible and superhuman conspirators, and meant to exploit the unwary while cementing the power and prestige of the conspirators.
The sheer absurdity of this make believe is breathtaking. This conceit holds that private property or maternity, racial characteristics, and mammalian biology were invented as a deceptive conspiracy by mortals during some golden age of the neolithic when none of these institutions existed.
One is tempted to imagine a prehistoric paradise of monochrome communist hermaphrodites when free meat-pies fell from the sky, fountains ran with wine, and we reproduced by fission, like amoebas.
Allegedly, we were not divided into tribe and nation and race, until, in some disaster akin to erecting the Tower of Babel, the White Race invented Whiteness, and all other races were immediately conquered and enslaved and rendered inferior. Why the other races cooperated with this venture, and subdivided themselves into Yellow, Black, Red, is never said, nor why they split into Slavic and Teutonic, Chinese and Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese, Tutsi and Hutu, Hatfield and McCoy, Jew and Gentile, Norman and Saxon, and so on.
In some disaster akin to the curse of God on Eve, females were convinced by conniving males to assume physical weakness compared to their mates, to stop growing whiskers, form wombs, and bear live young. The neurological and psychological differences likewise were merely assumed into being, leading to an inability to parallel park or open pickle jars, which, like menstruation, estrogen, or XX chromosomes, had not previously existed, or had no significance. Pregnant women whirling war-axes in their pale and slender hands routinely butchered whimpering knights and samurai alike, routing young men bulky as linebackers, but somehow evil conspirators erased all historical and anthropological evidence of this primordial sexual equality.
Why the conspirators allowed themselves to be ensnared in their own deception is likewise never explained. Surely inventing private property means the rich might lose money, or have goods in the public stores they can no longer obtain. Likewise the hermaphrodites vesting male roles on themselves no longer are excused from the draft, nor can have gentlemen open doors for them, nor know the joys of motherhood.
In particular, Wokeness assumes that every aspect of being feminine is an evil visited on women by men. Likewise, biological reality is transphobic. Likewise, saying twice two is four is racist. Likewise, every aspect of ethnicity, race, and history is an evil visited by whites on non-whites, except somehow the Spaniards are non-white. Because non-whites do no wrong, the Spanish Empire never conquered the Indians, nor were Turks involved in the African slave-trade, nor are there non-White Christians in the East, in Malabar, nor Ethiopia, nor Japan.
Wokeness assumes that every human relation based on mutual comfort and cooperation is malignant exploitation in disguise, and that the victimizer has infinite power over the victimized, who freely allows himself forever to be deceived. Only when the deceived victim awakens from his sleepwalking, and becomes Woke to the eternal deception ensnaring him, will world utopia erupt into being out of nowhere for no reason.
Obviously, no one at no time was convinced by a rational argument to adopt this sick and unsightly morass of self-contradictions, delusions, and distorted fever dreams as the conclusion of any sort of chain of reasoning. It is a mystic vision arising from a sense of inner certainty: the Woke, the Marxist, the Hegelian, and the Hermeticist, like the Gnostic before him, by achieving enlightenment is superhuman, and needs answer no human questions.
His sole proof of superiority is not that he raises the dead and heals the sick. No, to the contrary, hatred, division, misery and mere nonsense spring up wherever he walks, like a vampire spreading a pestilence. His sole proof of superiority is that he thinks and says the things opposite to what the hero, the genius and the saint might say. The hero sacrifices himself; the Woke demands all sacrifice to him. The genius makes riddles clear; the Woke make clear things into riddles. The saint spreads peace, joy and happiness, and embraces martyrdom if need be. The Woke sexually mutilate children, stoke riots and race-hatred, commit genocide. See the Twentieth Century for details.
The sole proof of the Woke to be the moral and mental superior of all human beings, hence above all human law, is his lack of virtue, of thought, of humanity. He is unworthy of life, and knows it; and holds this up as proof that life is unfair, and all the world must perish.
How this least to antihumanity and antichrist is yet to be seen.
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.
