'Trans' Is A Dangerous Gnostic Philosophy
Why the Gender Jonestown is happening now, explained
Published on Tuesday, this essay was originally supposed to unlock in November. Due to Wednesday’s assassination of Charlie Kirk, we are unlocking it today, as we feel the message is more urgent than ever.
We all feel frustrated with the world. “The gnostic’s flight from a truly dreadful, confusing, and oppressive state of the world is understandable,” Eric Voegelin wrote in Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays. “But the order of the ancient world was renewed … by Christianity.” The late historian of philosophy finds the cult of Christ sublimating and transcending the cult of philosophy in the first millennium A.D., with civilization-shaping consequences. Political philosophers have been fighting back against Christianity ever since.
Writing on the origins of gnosticism in the “cosmological civilizations” and “ecumenical empires” of the late Iron Age, Voegelin points to desperate conditions. Amid state collapse in the Near East, “the loss of independence for Israel and the Hellenic and Phoenician city-states,” a series of “population shifts” as well as “deportations and enslavements, and the interpenetration of cultures,” the world was defined by dislocation and confusion. If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a city to build a Tower of Babel. Few slaves are Ben Hur. Most will volunteer to be Spartacus and burn everything if you let them.
These conditions “reduce men who exercise no control over the proceedings of history to an extreme state of forlornness in the turmoil of the world, of intellectual disorientation, of material and spiritual insecurity.” They create inequality and poverty, in other words, along with consequent demands for a better society. “The loss of meaning that results from the breakdown of institutions, civilizations, and ethnic cohesion evokes attempts to regain an understanding of the meaning of human existence in the given conditions of the world.” We are all filling the God-shaped hole left behind by the decline of meaning as we wail at the condition of the world.
Voegelin was describing the crisis of existence, the vacuum that ‘gender identity’ has filled in our time. He was not advocating for people to endure this pain, however. “No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order,” he writes. A competent therapist would say that we need an internal locus of control, so that events outside of our control do not upset us. Stoicism is a good strategy for uncertainty. We must not lose our minds because there is a war going on somewhere, or a disaster, or an ICE raid, or a misgendering.
We must remain sane even when a lunatic who cannot stop obsessing about mass murder shoots up a Christian church filled with children, for we have to accept human nature for what it is. The progressive activist on the other hand will always demand action, work to raise the consciousness of others, sound the moral alarms at maximal volume. The ardent gnostic soul wants to change the world for the better, but their changes always create blowback because they are at war against human nature.
Phrases like ‘socialist man’ betray this urge to change humanity against humanity’s will as a spiritual, rather than scientific, endeavor. The gnostic’s eternal conflict with reality keeps them in a miserable state. Sooner or later, some of them will act out their violent fantasies of creative destruction because the world keeps resisting their plans for utopia. It has always been so. For anyone who wants to watch the world burn, gnostic philosophy has its attractions, so gnostic cults are never short of volunteers. Spartacus is a dime a dozen, while Ben Hur is beyond price.
By now, you have probably heard someone, maybe Dr. James Lindsay, describe ‘gender identity’ and ‘queer theory’ as Marxism with hormones. I call it gender communism. In the schema of gender communism, we all produce ‘gender’, and everyone must be liberated to control their own means of gender-production. Karl Marx said that capitalism was preliminary to communism, and the final appeal of gender communism is the right of personal autonomy, which is defined as access to a commercialized medicalization regimen, preferably at taxpayer expense, as well as a new wardrobe, perhaps a makeover — all the things necessary to produce ‘gender’. This arrangement smashes capitalism through the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime to keep an individual dependent on a for-profit medical system.
Eric Voegelin would recognize the phenomenon, but then he also recognized Marxism as a modern gnostic religion, so he would connect all these dots for us himself, were he with us today. He would understand gender communism as yet another manifestation of what he called “activist mysticism.” When leftists use slogans like ‘right side of history’, they are performing word-magic. Their sorcery supposes that the right words will convince voters to adopt a gnostic view of the world. The progressive command to ‘educate yourself’ is both condescending and instructional, a verbal stick-and-carrot that abuses people into adopting the correct thoughts:
True knowledge exists out there, suppressed and kept secret from you. You must do the work to access that knowledge in order to be among the righteous, you sinner. You are not smart enough to get it, yet. Don’t worry, you will, because you want to be a good person. Don’t you? We will have you singing out of the hymnal in a minute.
Karl Marx took inspiration from two figures, gnostic philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his gnostic interpreter, Ludwig Feurbach. Voegelin could explain to us that Hegel’s ‘alienated spirit’ experiences the ‘flungness’ (Geworfenheit) of human existence, our sense of being cast out of paradise. This is the central element of the gnostic fable, “the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin. ‘Who has cast me into the suffering of this world?’ asks the ‘Great Life’ of the gnostic texts.”
People feeling unfit for the world are not a new phenomenon. For example, a person might lament that they were ‘born in the wrong body’, declare it an alien place into which they have strayed, and seek help in acts of self-harm against the body they reject so they can live in the paradise of ‘gender congruity’ where all their ‘embodiment goals’ are met. The expression of the discontent may be new, but the discontent is as old as humanity.
“Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos,” the body into which they were born, Voegelin would tell us. “For him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape.” Genderwoo wants to escape the sex binary or die trying: ‘death before detransition’ has become a motto of AR-15-toting transgender activists.
Today, Voegelin might read a mass shooter’s manifesto and recognize the genre. “I am already dead. A still breathing corpse,” Robin Westman writes in his third notebook. Until Westman’s social transition as a minor, his ‘deadname’ was Robert. “I wish I hadn’t been born. I am a mistake, a curse on the world. A mar on history. Shoot me dead, you motherfuckers. I want my damn AR. I live in pain, give me the kiss of death. Help!” Westman wanted to be historic in all the wrong ways, the actual wrong side of history. He wanted the historic “high score.”
Westman’s notebooks are filled with hatred for every kind of person, even haters. “I think white supremacists are idiots,” he says, admonishing them for “clinging onto your bloodland.” He admired primitive life-ways. “One of the few brown people I have respect for are Native Americans. I am impressed by them or… what they were,” because Westman hates the present-day Native Americans, too. “The prowess and skill of Native American hunters, the resourcefulness of the Aboriginals, the persistence of the Sentinelese. I like these groups in a vacuum. As soon as they integrate with the white man, problems emerge.”
As soon as humans become civilized, everything goes to hell. The modern gnostic imagines there was a paradise before the invention of indoor plumbing, a heaven to which we can all return for the mere price of human extinction. Perhaps by now the reader is thinking of climate alarmists, and Extinction Rebellion are definitely a gnostic phenomenon, whatever one thinks about the global climate.
Peter Savodnik writes at Free Press that Westman “seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism — the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed.” We see a spike in these phenomena right now, he says, because “our elites have failed. They failed with their handling of Covid. They failed over and over to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of globalization.” Our elites have not done a good job of looking after civilization.
They were too busy rearranging society to sterilize as many minor children as possible. Female sports needed male integration first. Female prisons needed male integration first. Female locker rooms and restrooms needed male integration first. First, anyone who objected to this new definition of ‘inclusion’ had to be cast as racist against transgenders, so that as many children as possible could be transformed into posthuman gender communists, ideationally committed to sex change or death, a binary outcome. “The will to power strikes against the wall of being, which has become a prison. It forces the spirit into the rhythm of deception and self-laceration,” Voegelin writes.
They had to impose this order to prevent the Gender Jonestown, they said. If they failed, then the ‘trans kids’ would all murder themselves. ‘Would you prefer a dead son or a live daughter?’ is extortion. The type of social movement that extorts the world with suicide threats is called ‘a cult’. Whether or not parents cooperate, this gnostic genderwoo cult still encourages their children to ‘go no contact’ on TikTok, regardless, so no amount of participation in the cult can protect the family relationship. The type of social movement that encourages disconnection from family, and its replacement with a ‘glitter family,’ is called ‘a cult’.
Rather than a god, in transgenderism, the gnostic impulse is directed towards the self. Voegelin recognized and warned against the gnostic impulse to seek answers in the self. “Self-salvation through knowledge has its own magic, and this magic is not harmless. The structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it.”
“Reality,” author Philip K. Dick wrote, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” The sex binary continues to exist no matter what genderwoo activists say in Scientific American.
Today, Voegelin would warn us that attempts to do the impossible are deleterious to civilization itself. “The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society.” Destruction of the body through chemistry and surgery does not actually change our material sex. There have always been some who, for one reason or another, wished they were the opposite sex, or thought they were the opposite sex. The new thing in the world are the doctors who pretend they can accomplish this impossibility. This belief is deranging and destroying civilization.
In reaction, Donald Trump and the great vibe shift are exacting a price from the elites, for “they failed, above all, to protect our institutions — standing by as our universities turned into activist farms, and then as those activists took control of our legacy-media behemoths, philanthropies, and HR departments,” Savodnik writes. “They had transformed the culture.”
But ‘the culture’ consists of people, not institutions, and the public has rejected these gnostic cultural overlords along with their entire genderwoo program.
The cult is not giving up. In the United Kingdom, a landmark supreme court decision that ‘trans women’ are in fact men has been met with stiff activist resistance. Employers, departments, and organizations have held back on making changes to policy, ostensibly because they were waiting on the European Human Rights Commission to issue new guidance. British police arrested Graham Linehan at Heathrow Airport last week on risible charges levied against him by vexatious genderwoo cultists. The more they lose, the harder they fight.
The disaster of last November is still reverberating through the Democratic Party, which is the political home of the American institutional classes. Reeling from the impact of their perceived betrayal by the voting majority, many a progressive soul has turned off MSNBC and CNN, the channels that had misinformed them. For the rest, who are the most invested in ‘resistance’, stopping Trump has become their sole agenda item, anymore. To call it ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ will hurt feelings, but it describes this phenomenon, which has only intensified this summer.
Trump’s executive orders barring transgender military service, championing women’s sports, and ending the hideous practice of pediatric sex changes are all popular measures reflecting his popular vote majority last November. The Supreme Court upheld state bans on puberty blockers and pediatric transition in Skrmetti. The Federal Trade Commission is moving to shut down gender clinics that engage in unfair or deceptive practices, such as claims that puberty blockers are reversible, or prevent suicide.
This series of setbacks is received on the political left with a predictable amount of negative feelings and defensive spin. Transgender policy issues are a top item of concern among the type of Americans who attended “No Kings” rallies, as evidenced by the many ‘Protect Trans Kids’ shirts on display.
What explains this adoration of the ‘trans child’? To be sure, many of these people have children or grandchildren undergoing transition, so they have ‘sunk costs’, or ‘investments’, in the cult of genderwoo. According to the theory of religious economy, the more liberal the requirements of the church are, the looser its hold on the believers will be. The more that you sacrifice for a belief, the more strongly you will hold on to that belief, even if it kills you. Or others.
By contrast, these same would-be saviors of the ‘trans kids’ usually exhibit a very liberal Christianity, or else outright hostility to the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Historically, the murder of God is not followed by superman, but by the murder of man,” Voegelin writes, for “the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners.” The adoration of the ‘trans child’ is part and parcel of their death cult.
To prove this, one need only mention to any defender of pediatric sex lobotomies that sterility is guaranteed. Ask: why was Jazz Jennings chemically castrated at 11 and surgically sterilized at 17? And the answer will always be a triumphant inquisition: why do you care so much about the sex organs of a child? Are you some sort of pervert obsessed with the genitals of children?
This reverse-uno argument neatly sidesteps the question, of course. In any other context, the progressive soul would instantly object to sterilization. If we offered to sterilize immigrant children, for example, or minority children, or the children of the poor, that same person would exhibit the exact opposite knee-jerk reaction. The unspoken assumption, which is even true, is that ‘trans kids’ will mostly be white, middle class children with good health insurance. Progressive orthodoxy holds that too many such people exist already, so their numbers should be culled, anyway.
And they are getting their way. Falling birthrates in the West, including the United States, are in fact a big progressive argument for more immigration. Set aside the matter of population replacement and long-term global planning at the United Nations, as well as J.D. Vance wanting Americans to have more babies. Politics are downstream of culture.
Let us note that: (1) according to surveys, family is consistently the greatest source of meaning in life, while (2) parenthood increases well-being in all adults, but especially in men. Men swung the election to Trump last November. Men are far less likely than women to endorse any part of genderwoo. Which brings us to more charts that matter.
Look at the differential in birth rates between left and right sides of the political spectrum across the First World. Liberalism is characterized by falling birthrates that endanger the future of liberal societies. Progressive policy excuses for this situation, such as poverty and inequality holding women back from having larger families, lack good evidence. Policy experiments that encourage women to have more children through financial incentives seem to show little effect.
The one thing proven to raise fertility is modeling behavior. “Between 2003 and 2006, 57 schools were enrolled into an infant simulator intervention designed to reduce teen pregnancy rates,” writes the pseudonymous ‘Crémieux Recueil’, a statistics whiz. “The program backfired and the girls exposed to fake infants were more likely to get pregnant in the five years after the intervention.” Published in 2016, the results showed that 17 percent of girls enrolled in the program experienced an early pregnancy as opposed to 11 percent before.
Also from the Financial Times, here is a chart showing the partisan divergence of male and female youth across western society. This is having severe effects on family formation and fertility. More incels, more transcels, more single women, fewer children: this is the bleak demographic future desired by the gnostic enemy of the world-as-it-is. Marx wrote that the family unit was the backbone of capitalism. It is in fact the backbone of society, and the center of resistance to overbearing authority, such as a tyrannical state, or the genderwoo cult.
Social sciences are soft, but this data offers a stark contrast. Young men who voted for Donald Trump simply value fatherhood much more than young women who voted for Kamala Harris value motherhood. After all, these women have been led to believe that their lives will be over if they have a baby too early, that life will be too hard if they have too many babies, that babies are an option which holds less happiness in life than a college degree and a career, that the planet needs fewer people — ideas which are objectively false, but have a strong appeal to the gnostic spirit that wants to unmake the world-as-it-is.
Fertility has been made into the enemy, and concern for fertility into the essence of fascism. Writing of political science, Voegelin describes “a phenomenon unknown to antiquity that permeates our modern societies so completely that its ubiquity scarcely leaves us any room to see it at all: the prohibition of questioning.” The surest sign that genderwoo is a gnostic cult is the prohibition of questions: we are not allowed to question the self-declared ‘gender identity’ of any person, to question their narrative of transition, or question their demands for medicalization. We are never supposed to interrogate their demands.
“This is not a matter of resistance to analysis — that existed in antiquity as well,” Voegelin writes. Rather, “the new phenomenon” is “a conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly elaborated obstruction” of critical thought. Because “their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis”, modern gnostics “make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma.” It is deeply harmful, “for it has attained great social effectiveness among men who forbid themselves to ask questions in critical situations.”
We are not allowed to ask whether it is a good idea to inculcate childlessness in children, or promote sterilizing medical regimens to minors. We are prohibited from asking whether there is any relationship between the hormone-fueled transgender ideation of a young person and the mass shooting they commit. We are not supposed to notice that the people yelling about ‘trans genocide’ also seem obsessed with guns and murder. We are forbidden to question why a man is in the women’s locker room or restroom. We cannot be allowed to wonder at the potential link between an ideology that indoctrinates young people into believing they will die unless they chase the impossible dream of sex change, and violence against others. We can never ask whether that rude awakening is more dangerous than leaving the child’s mind and body alone.
These new taboos and social stigmas have set the Robert Westmans of the world up for failure and disappointment. Inevitably, some of them will act out, no matter who the president is. We are simply living in the moment when the pigeons come home to roost.
All Aboard The Transgender Death Cult Tugboat, Destination Unknown
Jack Amadeus ‘Ziz’ LaSota wanted to save the world, and he also hated paying rent, so he hatched a perfect plan. In 2017, he convinced some friends to help him buy the Caleb, a 94-foot tugboat, and sail her to the San Francisco Bay area. His plan was to live ‘anchor-out,’ away from shore, rent-free, “escaping the burdens of society” while they
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