Liberationism: The Counterfeit Gnostic Pagan Gospel of the Critical Social Justice Religion
Liberationism, n: A gnostic pagan Millenarian religion centred on the worship of the self, and its place in a hypothetical transhuman utopia achieved through collective abandonment of social conventions.
The 60s and 80s were an orgy of self-congratulatory "liberation" back to primitive existence in the pursuit of escapist mysticism. Humans are religious creatures by default, so what happens when the syncretism of radical politics and mystical fascination re-emerges is a regression to tribal primitivism - which its fans label "progress". It has a name, and is humanity's ancestral religion: paganism.
What do all gnostic religions have in common? The idea you can achieve salvation through knowledge. There few other sentences which describe the social sciences' religious sentiments more accurately.
You can tell someone in a cult almost anything; it's how they got there in the first place. But there is one thing they will never believe: that they're part of a cult. It's hard to define what a religion is for tax purposes, harder still when it doesn't look like a typical religion.
Ask any of them, and they will tell you they are definitely NOT religious. That's embarrassingly backward and unfashionable.
What is a Religion?
As strange as it sounds, few agreed definitions of religion exist, and much case law has been required to establish a legal way to determine taxt-exempt status of organisations. In the UK census, "Jedi" was infamously entered on the census after a popular campaign.
But how do you define it? It's much harder than you expect. In the US, the First Amendment has caught the government up many times, and no more than in the IRS' battle with Scientology.
"The Supreme Court has interpreted religion to mean a sincere and meaningful belief that occupies in the life of its possessor a place parallel to the place held by God in the lives of other persons. The religion or religious concept need not include belief in the existence of God or a supreme being to be within the scope of the First Amendment."
At LearnReligions.com, this amended list of traits is suggested:
- Belief in something sacred (for example, gods or other supernatural beings).
- A distinction between sacred and profane spaces and/or objects.
- Ritual acts focused on sacred spaces and/or objects.
- A moral code believed to have a sacred or supernatural basis.
- Characteristically religious feelings (awe, sense of mystery, sense of guilt, adoration), which tend to be aroused in the presence of sacred spaces and/or objects and during the practice of ritual which is focused on sacred spaces, objects, or beings.
- Prayer and other forms of communication with the supernatural.
- A worldview, ideology, or a general picture of the world as a whole and the place of individuals therein which contains a description of an overall purpose or point of the world and how individuals fit into it.
- A more or less complete organization of one's life based on this worldview.
- A social group bound together by and around the above.
https://www.learnreligions.com/what-is-religion-250672
A religion prescribes a worldview and generally has to answer the same framework of questions in a coherent and consistent way:
- What is real? (Reality)
- Where do we come from? (Origin)
- What is life's meaning? (Meaning)
- What is right and wrong? (Morality)
- What happens when we die? (Destiny)
The study of things divine is theology. Within that subject, we look at classifications (ontology), design (teleology), and more.
What we know is religious attendance and identification has been continually declining since World War II.
What happens when people desert religious belief, yet remain religious creatures. Well, the father of all totalitarianism - Karl Popper describes him as the "missing link" with Plato - gave us a hint:
"The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth … We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth … The State is the march of God through the world … The State must be comprehended as an organism … To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. The State knows what it wills … The State … exists for its own sake … The State is the actually existing, realized moral life." (Hegel)
Popper is infamous for his criticism of Freud, Marx et al, for their unscientific and unfalsifiable theories which mimick religion:
"It was rather that I felt that these other three theories, though posing as sciences, had in fact more in common with primitive myths than with science; that they resembled astrology rather than astronomy.
I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment."
https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/PopperArticle.html
What Do We Mean By Pagan?
Paganism is a large umbrella term which tends to describe non-Abrahamic religions which held as their core belief that divinity could be found in the natural world, rather than "outside" or transcendent to it.
When we think of pagan beliefs (from paganus, or countryside/rural), it usually refers to polytheistic or ethnic spiritualism in the rural parts of the Roman Empire after it was Christianised. It was a term used by Christians of the time, and not a formal name for any specific religion. The same people were known as heathen in Northern Europe.
Typically, paganism referred to:
- Greco-Roman polytheistic gods;
- Obscure cults;
- Witchcraft, magic, and veneration of nature;
- Primitive animism / ancestor worship;
- Ritualistic hedonism;
- Unbelieving or atheistic individuals;
- Pantheism / panentheism;
Paganism enjoyed a renaissance at the turn of the 19th century during the Enlightenment, coming to be known as neo-paganism and focusing around mystical phenomena:
- Spiritualism / necromancy;
- Mesmerism / mental science;
- Crowley et al - e.g. Thelema;
This turn became more pronounced during the counter-culture of the 60s as Asian beliefs and practices merged with draft-dodging anti-Vietnam protestors who were growing out their hair, eventually becoming the "human potential" and "New Age" movements:
- More Crowley (through music);
- Wicca / witchcraft;
- Neodruidism;
- Environmentalism;
- Hedonistic "liberation";
Neo or "reconstructivist" paganism is tricky to define, but it can broadly be characterised thus:
- Veneration of nature and its intrinsic divinity;
- Celebration of hedonistic practice;
- Feminine leadership;
What Do We Mean By Millenarian?
Millenarianism (from millenarius, or containing a thousand) is a belief derived from apocalyptic Christian literature that history is marching towards a massive, world-changing event; that that the end of this world is at hand and that in its wake will appear a New World, "inexhaustibly fertile, harmonious, sanctified, and just". A complete transformation of society is inevitable and drawing near.
In a word, eschatology.
We see this in two major political movements today:
- Marx's theory of communism and the "stages" of history inevitably leading to overthrowing of capitalism by the workers (based on Hegel's idea of the Absolute), and,
- Extreme environmentalist groups (e.g. "Extinction Rebellion") who claim industrialisation and other noxious human activity has already initiated the collapse of the planet.
Also common are cults who espouse this belief, such as Jonestown and the QAnon nuts.
What Do We Mean By Critical Social Justice?
The term "critical social justice" was described by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose in their excellent book "Cynical Theories" from different quotes made by "scholars" of the humanities. We know it colloquially as being "woke".
"A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural), and actively seeks to change this."
In a word, sociology. That nonsense subject previously confined to the fringes of the worst universities which anyone can get a diploma in.
This is explicitly stated the literature of the humanities neo-subjects in the most extraordinarily absurd terms. The Institute of Social Research's "Critical Theory" - which aimed to marry the theories of Marx and Freud as "meta" commentary - overlaid onto every subject, anywhere.
Seeing the world this way (being "woke") was termed by Critical Pedagogy's Paul Friere as possessing a "critical consciousness" which he claimed in 2005 to be "the ability to intervene in reality in order to change it". Presumably after he destroyed the Brazilian education system. One should note the obvious crossover with spiritualism and mental science, as well as mental illness.
In essence, having this enlightened "critical consciousness" is a pretentious way to say you've been indocrinated and radicalised into seeing anything and everything as a Marxist by your university professors and celebrities.
Force 50% of the school population through university, where they pick useless neo-sociology degrees requiring no real work, and this is what you get.
Pulpit & Pen gives a stunningly brilliant insight into all of this:
"While these faith systems might technically be classified as religions, their formation and growth is observable and quantifiable science. In short, all new religions develop in the same sociological pattern and have predictable and similar characteristics. While the new American religion may not have an official name, it might be called the Religion of Wokeness, Social Religion, or Social Justice."
The Fashionable Cult Religion Which Refuses To Be Named
Lenin infamously sought to destroy the religious traditions of Russia by labelling them as "backward". Gramsci demanded socialism had to become the religion which usurped Christianity. Mao set his Red Guards to destroy the "Four Olds" of China's classical culture. To do that, both had to resort to mass murder and the absolute enforcement of atheism, ensuring individual allegiance was to the State rather than anything higher.
The goal of this religion is an "academic" movement to "liberate" humanity into to a malleable blank slate, devoid of any defining characteristics imposed by the "oppression" of institutions:
- No organised religious beliefs;
- No social "structures" or memberships;
- No prescriptions of morality;
- No linguistic categorisations;
To do this, the Olds must which hold us together be dismantled: race, capitalism, education, religion, family, marriage, sexuality, gender. Anyone who gets in the way of this juggernaut's mission of "progress" is to be destroyed.
The weapons are fashionable "rights" campaigns which divide us and subvert, perversion of the language which "constructs" our perceptions, appeals to selfish moral relativism, forceful bullying, and stigmatisation.
The result of the "struggle" will be a magical utopia where "equity" is finally achieved.
We've seen this before. It killed 170 million people in the 20th Century. And it depended on "unmet religious needs".
God: The Self
Self-esteem. Self-worth. Self-image. Self-help. Self-discovery. Self-care. Your truth. Your lived experience. You do you. Whatever works for you. Good vibes only.
State of Nature: Blank
Humans are only the way they are because of society and the names we give to things. Nurture is the explanation for everything evil. It's irrelevant if this is contrary to your immutable fallen nature of racism.
Total Depravity: White Supremacy
All people are completely enslaved to internalised psychological perception of whites as dominant. There is not one who is righteous; not one. We are powerless to change it.
Original Sin: White Privilege
Your ancestors are guilty of a crime, and as a result, all members of your species are tainted from it, whether or not they are personally guilty of it.
Origin Story (Teleology): Colonialism
The world was a happy pagan matriarchy with all faiths and ideas celebrated in primitive communism. Then white Christians from Europe enslaved everyone.
Kingdom of Heaven: The Equity Utopia
The realisation of the New World after the revolution. A magical place in history where humanity is liberated from all its constraints, classifications, and perceptions as a blank slate where our true good nature can be unveiled. A place where complete equality means there is no exploitation or discrimination, love is love, and everyone has the same share: more than enough.
Angels: Children
The purest blank slate form of human, which we all return to when Equity is achieved on Earth by eliminating all oppression. They know no prejudice or skin colour, but have labels cruelly assigned to them at birth, preventing them from ascending to their true form. Many of our members (e.g. Foucault) are so entranced with them, they like to teach them about their innate sexuality via classroom costume time, and sexually commune with them to experience their innocent holiness.
The Devil: Hate
A multi-headed, ever-present creature personifying the evil spirits of intolerance; racism; disgust; homophobia; transphobia; misogyny; Nazis. Zionists. Billionaire capitalists. Borders. Far-right extremist nationalists who blame immigrants for everything. Jordan Peterson.
Demon: Racist
A wretched, half-human white-skinned creature who exists only to cause suffering to others and enslave them. Females are known as "Karens".
Holy Spirit: Critical Consciousness
A magical perception and companion only the enlightened Elect are blessed with, to see the world as it truly is: a Marxist hell of oppression, everywhere, that must be changed through activism and usurpation.
Life Meaning: Activism
True meaning in life can only be found in one's lifelong commitment to contributing to social change, and signalling it to others.
Eschatology: Climate Change
Capitalism is destroying the planet, and will lead to the extinction of all species in 10 years - unless we Build Back Better and eat insects with synthetic meat.
Temples: Free Healthcare & Schooling
Socialist institutions built and maintained by true believers for the benefit of all, which have withstood the test of time: the UK National Health Service, Universal Basic Income, university campuses. But not North Korea, or Chinese death camps, obviously.
Prophets: Sociology Academics
Interpreters of holy scripture for Marxist justice in the social struggle: Prophet Karl Marx (may peace be upon him), Prophet Sigmund Freud, Prophet Trotsky, Prophet Herbert Marcuse, Prophet Saul Alinsky, Prophet Derrida, Prophet Michel Foucault, Prophet Simone de Beauvoir etc.
Priests & Preachers: Celebrity Activists
Academic authors venerated as revolutionary magical truthtellers: High Priestesses Kimberly Crenshaw and Judith Butler; Messiah Barack Obama, Priestess Beyonce, Priest AOC, Bishop Ibram Kendi, etc.
Pharisees/Enforcers: Silicon Valley
Our holy protectors and overseers: stakeholder capitalist organisations who built and operate our temples, and are always on guard to protect our saints from persecution. We pay them monthly subscription taxes.
Doctrine: Repressive Tolerance
The history of the world is one of all evil emerging from right-wing fascism. Therefore, to achieve the utopia, we must be intolerant of intolerance and suppress anything not of communist origin, which is the true origin of authentic tolerance. Only through suppression can we achieve expression free of hate.
The Elect: Woke
Ordinary middle-class champagne socialists, white women, and Netflix executives who have realised their responsibility for "doing the work" and have made a commitment to fighting oppression by becoming less white.
Saints: Victim Groups & LGBTQABC123+
Victims of the Great Oppression who have born the pain of true discipleship in the face of Christian capitalist subjugation. But not TERFS or women who don't like men in their changing room, or gays who vote Trump.
Martyrs: Dead Black People
Symbols of the revolution. Martin Luther King. George Floyd. Victims of police violence and enforcers of capitalist rule.
Seminary: Diversity Departments
In order to truly study and trust scripture, it is crucial workplaces employ qualified teachers of the faith who maintain orthodoxy.
Elders: 60s Radicals
Crusading heroes and anti-war veterans of our great struggle who have proved their worth and led the way: Angela Davis, Bill Ayers, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Stonewall. But not Thomas Sowell.
Scripture, Gnosis, & Epistemology: Social Science Journals
Because what is in a scientific journal is truth. Even if it's not scientific, it cannot be questioned because it is written, and has been cited in other articles.
Pulpit: Social Media Account
Every text entry box is an opportunity to preach to the unconverted, and advertise the current state of your salvation. Use your platform. Politicise your position.
Bowing: Taking The Knee
A public acknowledgement of your submission and subjugation to the tenets of the faith. and should be spared from damnation.
Canon/Dogma: Critical Theory
Our scripture is based on the holy writings of Freud, Gramsci, postmodern French philosophers, Kimberle Crenshaw, Paul Freire, and Judith Butler. Everything, everywhere, all culture, can be seen as Karl Marx saw history: a small Bourgeoisie hoarding everything to themselves, at the expense of everyone else. All we need to do is usurp this cruel oppression to realise the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, because humans are good.
Existential Struggle: Whiteness
The world is leading towards a great transformation. Our goal as educators and activists is to fight oppression in all of its forms to bring about the end of the current systems and structures, even if it is internalized inside us.
Cleansing: Implicit Bias Training
One's invisible soul must be first visualised and sanctified by "re-training" it to see its own sin.
Atonement & Expiation: Struggle Sessions
Publicly acknowledging the shame of your white capitalist comfort through repeating mantras in a crowd, and renouncing your former unwillingness to be allegiant to the faith.
Soteriology/Salvation: Democratic Socialism
Only through subjugating all personal agency to the godhead of the State as our Collective Will can we truly build the Equity Utopia where all are free and receive according to their emotional needs. DemSoc is our Bridge To Complete Freedom, where the end is the paradise of true communism, or pure equity.
Conversion: Coming Out
Publicly announcing your failure as a human being to date: altering your appearance as to not indicate any gender; photographing medical treatments given to all humanity; publicly attacking dissenters.
Evangelism: Critical Pedagogy
The process by which a blank slate human child can be taught the faith from birth through the public school system, and protected from evil influence. Alternatively, an intervention at university level though immersion in resentment-generating radical books and fire-breathing lesbian professors.
Enlightenment: Empathy
Possessing the knowledge the world is not actually as you have been told, but really as sociology sees it: a cruel patriarchal hegemony of systems and structures designed to keep people from realising they are, in fact, god. Like Hegel said: the State is God's Will. Empathy is the answer to all evil.
Baptism: Vaccination
A public commitment to your belief in our collective future as a species where we pursue the Equity Utopia out of the Collective Will.
Sin: Oppression
It permeates everything we do. An evil spirit which is in everything and every moment in time, and accounts for all the evil in the world and man's broken nature. The question is not whether it is present, but how it is present in the situation.
The Soul: Unconscious Mind
It cannot be seen but it is real. A magical mechanism not demonstrable in any laboratory which guides all we do.
Sacred Spaces: Safe Spaces
Magic prayer circles where new believers can be protected from the trauma of the world's oppression by our Elders, to reconnect with the empowerment of nature's divine healing. The only way to overcome trauma is to avoid it forever.
Spells: Creating/Speaking Your Own Reality
Think yourself rich. The Secret. The Law of Attraction. Speaking your truth. Speaking what you want out loud and letting the Universe corral the spiritual energy to bring you wealth.
Incantations: Political Slogans
Repeating three-word mantras repetitively displayed as the theme of print and TV advertising to anyone who will listen, and those who won't.
Glossalalia: Scholarly Jargon
Performativity. Heteronormative patriarchal hegemony. Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Sanctification & Purging: Cancel Culture
To be truly free of the capitalist patriarchy of intersectional oppression, you must completely remove all influences of it in the public town square and in your personal life.
Penance: Public Apology
Issuing statements to the whole world for your guilt, ignorance, or complicity after you have blasphemed or contradicted official social science doctrine.
Festivals: Pride, History Month
Mandatory, corporate-sponsored weeks and months every year of public exhibitionism to ensure the faith is foremost in everyone's minds.
Blasphemy: Offensiveness
Showing contempt for or attempting mockery of the faith, such as implying our victim saints are not as virtuous and victimised as we say they are.
Heresy: Invalidation
Minimising the infallibility of victim status or promoting wrongful versions of the absolute truths of social science, such as citing scientific evidence or undermining the sins of capitalism.
Indulgences/Tithes: Corporate Donations
Making political contributions to fashionable non-profits to make sure your company is protected from PR disasters on social media.
Sacred Rites: Surgical Procedures
The right to medical processes which overcome your natural biological form and limitations, such as feticide and gender reassignment.
Trials & Hellfire: Conversion Therapy
Attempting to reverse a person's true form and nature revealed through their conversion and allegiance to the faith.
Final Battle: Revolutionary "Justice"
Revenge and retribution will come as hellfire to those who perpetrated the oppression enslaving the world, a bit like rioting against Nike and other expensive stores. The revolution will finally defeat the forces of evil and forgive them once they confess their complicity.
Witch-Hunting: Doxxing
Obtaining the names of a detractor's employer and ensuring they lose their family's livelihood, reputation, and confidence to dissent again by harassing the company until they are fired - i.e. "accountability"
Zealotry: Highly Online
It's not enough to be for the faith or against those who don't believe. You must be anti-not the faith. Whiteness is everywhere. Your entire life should be a story of how you spent it fighting the oppression of others.
Shunning: Boycotts
Removing problematic unbelievers - white capitalist European men and their supporters - from your life, disowning family members or suppliers with the wrong opinions, and refusing to speak to people at dinner.
Hell: Non-Existence
Being disappeared. Not appearing anywhere online. Never being "seen" as a transhuman ever again. People claiming you don't exist.
Humanity's Relentless, Continuous Train of Stupidity
It doesn't take a genius to see politics replaces religion in a lot of people's lives, and how close creativity and imagination are to magical thinking, as well as mental illness.
The New Religion is a hot, turgid mess of insanity. It's incoherent, and utterly devoid of any moral substance. Not only that, but it's cruel, tyrannical, and unforgiving. What distinguishes it as pagan isn't its non-Christian classification, but it's syncretism: it's a dozen things merging together.
The first thing to note is all of sociology and its Marxist-Freudian roots can trace themselves back to an old pagan idea: gnosticism. The idea of salvation by knowledge. The Marxists and their friends were simply 19th century gnostics who wrote about politics.
The American Conservative points to the Catholic definition:
"It is markedly peculiar to Gnosticism that it places the salvation of the soul merely in the possession of a quasi-intuitive knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and of magic formulae indicative of that knowledge. Gnostics were “people who knew”, and their knowledge at once constituted them a superior class of beings, whose present and future status was essentially different from that of those who, for whatever reason, did not know."
An immediate historical precedent is the religion of Babylon in the story of Daniel, as noted - in albeit slightly nutty ways - by evangelicals:
"This system reached its ultimate height in ancient city of Babylon—where every conceivable false god was worshipped through idols (K. Tallqvist, in his Akkadische Götterepitheta counted around two thousand four hundred of them that we now know about), ritualistic child sacrifice, and the occult. It was a totalitarian system, where all forms of worship were acceptable… as long as the supremacy of Marduk/Bel was upheld, and the “equality” and “inclusivity” of the system was respected and appropriately maintained."
But perhaps a more intuitive comparison might be an old favourite in the US: Calvinism. In a dark corner of that cesspool, Reddit, lies this:
"Wokeness can be defined as a philosophy with the central belief that advocacy for those innately less endowed than oneself is righteous; and from my perspective, it’s a direct philosophical descendant of Calvinism.
It can be observed that everywhere Wokeness is culturally prevalent, there’s also a historical Calvinist cultural influence; and the correlation is quantitatively proportional. In other words, the more that a culture has been influenced by Calvinism in the past, the more woke it’s likely to be today. Case in point, Wokeness is by far the most prevalent in the US, it’s point of origin, which happens to be the country historically most associated with Puritanism, a particularly extreme form of Calvinism. Furthermore, Wokeness has only seemed to spread as a philosophy where there’s a Calvinist cultural undercurrent; in other words, you’re more likely to find people who are receptive to woke philosophy in places like New Zealand and South Korea than you are in Japan or Russia.
It’s worth noting that Wokeness is an entirely secular philosophy, it’s neither a religion nor a political ideology. What’s interesting about these types of philosophies is the fact that they can serve an interchangeable role with religion from a psychological point of view. In other words, Wokeness can be contrasted with philosophies such as Individualism, Absurdism, and Epicureanism, not ideologies such as Socialism, Fascism, and Liberalism. In a nutshell, it’s possible to live your personal life in accordance with a philosophy or religion, but not a mere ideology. We can also say that all religions are philosophies, but not all philosophies are religions; by comparison, ideologies are not standalone philosophies.
Calvinism and Wokeness both operate on guilt based morality (Nietzschean resentment), rather than that of honour (Nietzchean sentiment). The two philosophies also imply that all individuals are born sinful (though wokeness professes that sinfulness is proportional to endowment, which must be compensated for with advocacy for those innately less endowed). Furthermore, both philosophies are puritanical and totalistic in nature; no amount of heresy or blasphemy is tolerated, and one must judge everything, however minor, through the lens of the philosophy wherever it’s possible to do so.
Wokeness is ultimately a philosophical reaction to Secular Humanism, which is a reaction to Evangelicalism, which ultimately stems from Calvinism. The culture behind these philosophies has remained largely unchanged since Oliver Cromwell was the dictator of England.
So does the average woke zealot have more in common culturally with Cromwell or Lenin? Of course, Cromwell."
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/lxw141/wokeness_is_ultimately_derived_from_calvinism_not/
The comparison has been made multiple times.
Eventually, you have to ask a question: why exactly is it so few people can understand the phenomena in their own society? The answer, presumably, is ignorance; ignorance of history and ourselves.
Why we are so easily cowed and refuse to stand up to it is simpler: cowardice.
For some, it is explained by a conspiracy. They deliberately made it this way because that's the way they wanted it: it was communist infiltration into the institutions and a planned attack over decades.
Perhaps it's a little more painful than that: laziness and stupidity. Our own moral depravity and desires to indulge our own selfish desires. It's more fun to do what thou wilt instead of resist the small evils. Refusing to read history. Refusal to stand up. A complete unwillingness to receive moral education or transmit lessons through culture.
Easy sales. Easy gratification. Zero consequences today. Someone else doing it. Attention distracted elsewhere.
If this religion becomes dominant, it will not stop, because it always needs to be fed. If that becomes real in the coming years, it will be, an utterly miserable world, and as the infamous quote goes, the longest suicide note in history.