Philosophy Leftism, Gnosticism, and Transhumanism
- Thread starter TheRejectionist
- Start date
DarthOne
☦️
Considering the fact that the American government never wanted Tucker to talk to him, I wouldn't be surprised if it was us.
Considering that it was in Russia, Russian state is claiming that, and Russia is doing PR ops with him, i would not be surprised if Kremlin just made it all up, and it's a sign of laziness they didn't put up a show with gunfire, explosions, and FSB Spetsnaz heroically saving him.
DarthOne
☦️
That is also a possibility to be sure.
TheRejectionist
TheRejectionist
The thing that makes it more probable is that he is on a wanted list from Ukraine so there is a realm of possibility. They put other Americans on that list as well as other people from other nationalities. You just have to be "publicly known" enough and disagree with them explicitly to end up there.
No, not a wanted list from Ukraine, but a list of shitheads from a Ukrainian NGO. Get your facts straight. You can also set up an NGO and publish a list of people who you think are shitheads who hate your country.
Let's be honest, out of all people they would want to spend rare intel resources and take such high risks to try assassinate in Moscow, i'm absolutely sure there would be a whole lot of more worthy targets there.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Zelensky isn't stupid enough to take a shot at someone like Carlson, and cause himself and his country serious political problems with the US, when they could keep working their way through Russian apparatchiks and military officers instead.
King Arts
Well-known member
I mean they did want to waste money to assasinate Dugin. Sure it could be fake news but it could also be true.
Dugin is more than some journo.
Aleksandr Dugin: The sinister ideologue who's Putin's favourite philosopher
Dugin’s death cult seeks the total destruction of his opponents
Agent23
Ни шагу назад!
In the interview with Lex Friedman Tucker sounded pretty sure it was the SBU.
Dugin is basically a nobody.
Even RWA basically says he is like Nasralny, more popular in the West than in Russia, mainly because he is good at PR.
If anything, he is basically assembling some well known ideas, ranging from such diverse places like Dostoyevsky and Gumilev to Samuel P. Huntington.
TheRejectionist
TheRejectionist
Dugin is not a nobody but is has become a persona "barely" grata because he criticized Putin.
When they murdered ( a journalist nonetheless) his daughter they made him a martyr.
They were desperate for a win and they got a philospher's daughter of all people.
When they murdered ( a journalist nonetheless) his daughter they made him a martyr.
They were desperate for a win and they got a philospher's daughter of all people.
Agent23
Ни шагу назад!
Nah, that was pure terrorism.
Terrorism is supposed to make your enemy to overreact and do stupid, costly shit while you get a low cost, zero material impact victory.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
The only place where I'm seeing a Gnostic revival in the modern day is on the left, where its fundamentally deconstructionist worldview (rejecting all things of this world because this world is supposed to be a fundamentally tainted hellscape made by an imperfect false god, the Demiurge) meshes supremely well with the intersectional left's drive to deconstruct 'cisheteropatriarchal and white supremacist' civilization (ie. all of it) and reset to a blank-slate Year Zero from which to build utopia, which lines up with Gnostics' thoughts on the Biblical laws (shackles imposed upon man by the Demiurge and his archons, which is to say, basically evil angels). It's also easy to see where Gnostic ideas about the duality of man, ie. our divine spirits being imprisoned within imperfect flesh and also the shackles of society, would fit with modern leftist ideas of gender and even race (hence all those white liberals wanting desperately to claim that they're black, Native American/First Nations, etc. because those are 'purer' and more benevolent racial identities than 'white' on the progressive stack). In many ways critical/queer theory can be described as basically an especially degenerate and secularized Gnostic belief system, modern-day Carpocratians on fent if you will.
If you have several hours to kill, I would recommend looking into James Lindsay's videos on Gnosticism and its ties to modern leftist thinking (critical/queer theory), like this one. I don't agree with him on much but I do think his thoughts on the matter are worth consideration, as he does have evidence to back it up (even if he can take too long to get to his point at times).
All in all, I would not merely classify Gnosticism as a Christian heresy. It's pretty much its own religion about human self-deification, though certainly it was influenced by Christianity to some extent and took on Christian trappings in Christian areas - Mandaeism and Manichaeism are good examples of non-Christian Gnosticism focused on areas east of where Christianity grew strong, for example. Hermeticism is a related but less pessimistic school (basically, we're all divine on the inside and should work to dissolve all distinctions like male/female, mind/matter, etc. to concentrate & refine our spirits as though they are chemicals, achieve enlightenment and become like God, hence its strong association with alchemy).
A lot of the Gnostic fundamentals are, well, fundamentally opposed to Christian ones: the nature of God (Christians necessarily believe that God is both good and, well, actually God, and that Jesus is His Son and not a spinoff of the female Sophia), the world ('And God saw all the things that he had made [that is, the world], and they were very good' - Genesis 1:31) and how to interact with it (traditional Christian philosophers like Aquinas were huge on the usage of rationality, that is reason, to understand God's creation; Gnostics necessarily reject reason in favor of gnosis, that is inward-looking 'knowledge' gained not from empirical observation of God's creation but through personal enlightenment and the guidance of other Gnostic masters, because if you think the world is an imperfect trap made by a crazed demon claiming to be a god then what's the point of studying it?), etc.
Well, no man can serve two masters, especially when they're pulling in such radically opposed directions, and these contradictions more than anything I think are why the 'Christian Gnostic' sects of yore fell apart. Sooner or later, they will have to choose to be more Christian or more Gnostic, because at the core ideas of both mix together about as well as matter and antimatter. I think it's notable that most of the prominent Christian Gnostic sects, like the Marcionists you mention or the Nicolaites, died off well before the Roman Empire Christianized and thus before the Church gained the power to legally suppress them; the early Church Fathers who opposed Gnosticism had to rely entirely on their powers of reason and persuasion, not the state's muscle, to defeat them (hence why they wrote so much about the Gnostics in the first place). And that the Gnostics could be neutralized in such a manner suggests to me that their ideas really were ultimately dead ends unable to stand up to intense logical scrutiny and built on foundations of sand, well that and they lacked popular support by their own design (Gnostic sects tended to be closed-off elitist cults, not a popular religion like Christianity; in the modern day, compare that to the left's overreliance on and worship of academia, celebrity elites & the government vs. the broad base of MAGA populism and decentralist traditions in Western conservative thought).
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
I actually disagree. The modern left is a kind of anti-gnostic worldview. Gnostics are anti material, the left is intensely material, obsessed with bodies and identity. The left has some elements of gnosticism, but they are actually transhuman as opposed to gnostic, obsessed with material transcendence through science instead of spiritual transcendence through gnosis.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
That's why I said modern leftism (critical/queer theory) struck me as an especially degenerated and secularized form of Gnosticism though. It's like they tore out the interesting aspects of Gnosticism (the drive for spiritual transcendence and enlightenment) and replaced it with nihilistic hedonism, replaced all the spirituality with crass materialism that has no end outside itself. They're looking to become the perfect Gnostic transcendent being - gender-ambiguous if not sexless, unbound by age and mortality, enlightened and ruled by only themselves, indeed a god in and of themselves - but most don't even truly know why, when pressed always falling back on the thoughts programmed into them by the media & academia like it's gnosis from a master further up the chain. It sure as hell isn't to rediscover their supposed inner divinity and commune with Sophia.
And the people really pulling their strings, heh, I sure don't think those guys are particularly interested in enlightening all of humanity. Just making gods of themselves. The ill-guided and broken vessels they regard as their cannon fodder on the streets are nothing but stepping stones for their ambitions and have no high place, certainly no godhood, in the new order they envision.
When it comes to the field of gender ideology, for example, the modern left is definitely inclined towards a spiritualistic anti-materialism. You just 'feel' you are a dude or dudette on the inside, and it's your biology which has to conform to that (matter to spirit, not the other way around) - as if you have a male or female soul, intangible and immaterial but superior to the female or male body it's trapped in. The younger you start on hormones and dick/tit-chopping, when you're still at your most mentally and physically malleable, the better. Same's true of race where the 'lived experiences' and 'inherited traumas' of those higher up on the progressive stack necessarily trump material realities and all evidence to the contrary. This is not logically coherent nor is any of it empirically provable (quite the contrary) but as I have said, Gnostics have never been big on reason and logic. Back then they'd say that if such things contradict their teachings then they are the traps of the Demiurge, now they'd say they're invalid social constructs of the cisheteropatriarchal kyriarchy. And so on.
In other words Marx, Foucault, etc. have devised the perfect secular religion for 'spiteful mutants', as some on the right would call the rank-and-file footsoldiers of the modern left who have been taught to despise beauty and actual intellectualism. A fusion of Gnostic teachings with secular materialism to produce a perfect vision of Hell which they can sell as Heaven to said spiteful mutants.
ShieldWife
Marchioness
I’m inclined to say that the left are anti-humanists in a way. They deny (in essence) that there is such a thing as humanity. They believe in blank slates. They believe that men and women are the same. They think that a person can choose to be male or female.
That is why post modernism is so ugly, there is no such thing as beauty because there are no such thing as humans. No true human nature anyway. Humans, not being real, are infinitely malleable and so can be transformed into the “new socialist man.”
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
Yeah, they despise humanity. They see the limits of biology as a form of oppression. Thats why they are transhumanists.
If you hate humanity then you shouldn't be in charge of it.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
I will admit, as someone who was born wrong due to pregnancy complications (being born a crippled) SOME aspects of transhumanism is appealing. Mainly the idea of using technology to fix physical defects.
wanting to be better is ok, dispising the human form and human beings is not.