Yeah, I always thought this was a pretty stupid way to go about messaging. Especially someone as smart as Feser should not be engaging in this, even if he does point to some superficial similarities. The thing is a) even with some (fewer than there are differences) similarities in how they view human nature, only James Lindsay is annoying enough to try and actually say they're one in the same and are genealogically related so why bother pointing it out and b) it being "gnostic" in some ways doesn't make it false, nor do most people even care if it's gnostic. Attack it's veracity, not it's imagined shared characteristics with ancient religions. Good article.
go f yourselves, pigskin idiotic sht, you develeoped nothing but cuckery to jewish mythology, worshipping jews one way or another, stupid inferior sht, just you are sht, ceptu u pigskin, do, be, think, can do, be, think etc any nmw and any s pefrect
you all believed the book for the stupid shit flat earth, 6000 yo earth, skydome leaking water crap. and can't even discuess holo hoax figures without being shut, 'wE HaD tHe OnlY gOOd hIstory'. pigskin are so stupid
"In fact, if the apostles of woke have a metaphysical disposition at all, it’s much more optimistic than Feser et. al portray. Far from rejecting the material world, the woke think we can create a worldly paradise if only we can extirpate inequality and discrimination."
This is the crucial difference between leftism and gnosticism. Leftists are materialists and optimists through and through. They are levelers who want to flatten the cosmos down into raw sensuality and material factors, eliminating the spiritual and hierarchical dimension altogether. The leftist parody of theosis is to tear down the "idols" of any kind of higher authority intermediate between God and man so that everyone can become relatively divine by having nothing above them. It is more of a heresy deriving from the protestant impulse than anything to do with Gnosticism. It's actually the opposite of what the gnostics were trying to do, which was to accomplish a segregation of the material from the spiritual, strengthening the hierarchy.
It's true however that Gnosticism has a satanic, antinomian undercurrent to it. There's a kind of horseshoe effect where if you see the spiritual as reducible to the material you disenchant the world, but if you see the spiritual as too divorced from the material then you end up back at just disenchanting reality again because the spiritual is inaccessible. Because they see this world as the creation of the Demiurge, and not the ultimate God, Gnostics tend towards extreme pessimism and life-denial. If this world is entirely severed from God then it is of no consequence to the moral life whatsoever, and like leftists Gnostics come to see all existing power-structures as manifestations of darkness. Recently, the leftists have even come to support the power-structure through a strange inversion, whereas Gnostics, even more than anarchists or libertarians, have a consistent suspicion towards all forms of power. You can see this for example with David Ike, to my knowledge the most influential modern gnostic.
Truly orthodox Christianity also seeks to transcend the material world, not because matter is inherently evil, but because it becomes evil when it is the highest aim of man. Seeing the life of this world as a form of initiation into eternal mysteries instituted by God, orthodox Christianity avoids the pessimism of the Gnostics, the materialism of the leftists, and the antinomianism of both.
I think it is not wrong to see politics as a manifestation of corrupt theology, but you're correct that conservatives usually misunderstand the spiritual significance of the ideologies they oppose, usually because their own spiritual framework is disoriented.
Great article! i know how annoying it is when the average midwit conservative blames the problems of the world on the typical antagonists of their never-given- second-thought-in-their-lives worldview, but I'd like to give some nuances to this topic as the spiritual and the metaphysical are big topics and we have only a small picture of them. First I'd like to recognize that conservatives had a good intuition in seeing a gnostic tendency to transgress limits or boundaries, this is what the occultist Rudolf Steiner recognized as the luciferic impulse, this tendency towards egocentrism, individualism, revolution against the authorities and everything that tries to get rid of what chains one into rules is one which we can find in many traditions, although not so radical in all cases. Both gnosticism and leftism (in every period since it's existence) tend to a transgression of boundaries. In gnosticism we find an impulse to repudiate the material for its limitations on the spirit and the left in general has a disdain for authoritarianism and the state. Wokism has a disdain for essentialism or any categorization that places people into boxes such as gender, race, nationality, etc., they consider all of this as fascistic and an attempt against their individual (egoic/narcissist) desires. Definitions are boundaries. That's why they have adopted this social constructivist in opposition to realism/essentialism, in the end is just the good ol' nominalism from the middle ages. But there's also a second spiritual force which Steiner considered as an ahrimanic force, which is diametrically opposite to the luciferic impulse, it tends towards materialism, imposing boundaries, negation of the spiritual, and more things. The contemporary times would be more ahrimanic, as they tend towards a more physicalist, scientistic worldview and for that reason has transhumanism as it's modern religion. In fact, its an inversion of gnosticism, because instead of looking for salvation in the inmaterial it looks for it now by trapping us in more matter, ironically. There is this psychic pattern flowing through our unconscious that wants to be free of all the restrictions we have as embodied beings, but because we don't believe in the spiritual anymore we will create it. So in part i agree with you that modern wokism does not base it's ideology on gnosticism, that would be ridiculous and historically inaccurate, but the psychic patterns seem the same. In conclusion, i think conservatives have confounded the form with the content (gnosticism instead of the luciferic impulse) and in your case you mistook the content with the form (gnosticism as centered in the spiritual instead of the patterns that equates them in their goals). Nonetheless, i find your clarification quite prudent so that people know how to distinguish between things and learn how to see the little details that make topics like this not so simple. 👍
I agree with the general sentiment that this was a good essay. But I'll play devil's advocate for a moment: conservatives are misidentifying a real philosophical attitude which is the common cause of all the things they call "Gnostic". There is a human tendency to pursue idealism at the expense of realism, and some people are more prone to this than others. Many white antiracists fall into this camp, hence the conservative identification of this unbounded idealism with "woke". You're correct to point out that the more important cause of woke is simple who-whom tribalism, which is what motivates most non-white wokesters, and this is fundamentally non-ideological.
Oh, I forgot to finish my point. The conservative instinct is somewhat correct, as you'd expect: to be a sincere woke white person, you'd have to be delusionally idealistic. But their intellects aren't sharp enough to assign causality properly, or use the right words, and they fundamentally refuse to understand how black people think differently from them. Plus, piety signaling is how you climb the status ladder in the Christian tribe.
Good article. I think what people are seeing as gnosticism is actually the way in which the enlightenment used the garden myth. The negative enlightenment, a la hobbles, took the garden as "the state of nature", and says that human nature originated as fallen, and only civilisation can save it. The positive enlightenment, a la Rosseou, says that the original humanity is edenic, and it becomes corrupted from social structures fron which we need liberation. In either case, the fall and restoration narrative is brought into the material realm, and dealt with societally. This is a much more genralisable application of heresiology to politics.
I thought this was terrific. The more political commentary - or any commentary - wanders off into abstract speculation the more I find myself muttering, 'Yeah, maybe. Or maybe this is another Just So story'. I much prefer this grounded, arguably prosaic approach to one that is deep and meaningless.
(1) Hardly anyone claims that wokesism is self-consciously gnostic. The claim is more so that these gnostic beliefs persist through the ages by refusing to admit they are a belief system. By pretending to be intuitive, idiosyncratic, personal or 'just my thing'. That's the case with most gnostics. They don't know they are. They can't put a name to their belief system(s) and methods. Yet somehow, here they are: all believing the same wacky ideas and unable to say why! They are banned from asking themselves why they believe such wackiness - when it clearly does not work. Banned by thought cops in academia, media and the blogsphere, and political groups - who insist that everyone must be for 'freedom' (unless they're 'fascist'), and freedom is never about controlling our ideas to let the best ideas flourish. No the wokeratti say: 'freedom' is about having more wacky ideas; the more multiculturalism - the better. Why?, I ask: How are these ideas good, beneficial, nourishing, constructive"? They are clearly disintegrative and destructive.
(2) "Is wokeism merely a response to modern issues like racial justice and trans rights?"
<- Crazy questions to even ask. To assume that modern race identity is 'racial justice'. To assume that there are special people, who have a gendered homunculus inside them which 'knows' their 'real sex' is opposite to their actual sex, and compels them the trans their identity and body, to fit their gnostic 'anti-ideal?' of anti-heteronormativity, which is the new anti-Fascism.
How can, a relatively sane person, such as I, debate with leftist insanities such as this? When language, ethics, and norms are turned inside-out, into their opposites. When this pseudo-religion of anti-Westernism refuses to state its name, origin, validity, or even its true beleifs? It festers in the flotsom and jetsom of that which it declares evil and 'fascist', using ideas such as 'liberty', 'freedom', and 'equality' whilst renouncing the very civilization(s) - the West - where those ideals gained political legitimacy.
(3) BTW: Gnosis is a feminine Greek noun which means "knowledge" or "awareness". "Awareness" is precisely what the woke claim they have; but I lack. Left-wing thought cops tell me: "nothing to see here folks; iIt's those right-wing Fascists ranting, preventing your 'freedom' from fulfilling itself.
Good article. Others have mentioned the absurdities involved so I won’t repeat what others have already said. There’s a comment mentioning leftists being materialists so again I won’t repeat myself there other than to say that leftists being materialists and nihilists is a much better explanation for their behaviour. There’s nothing more to strive for than the material world if materialism is true, after all.
With this, I wonder if you’d agree with Fr. Seraphim Rose’s critique that wokeism is very much like the chiliast heresy. I’m not sure if he says its a revival of that heresy, although he does say that conceptually, something like wokeism resembles that in that it tries to “immanentize the eschaton”.
I think what's also rooted in gnostic tendency of our corrupt souls is denial of hierarchy, authority, strict rulers. See the movie Wish or alike. Also, all those "atheists" like CosmicSkeptic who say things such as "God can't be real because of so much evil in this world, if He exists, He is so cruel I deny Him". It's a heresy that seems to be a reaction to evil in this world. Another reason is drift towards pelagianism.
You go on and on and on with your fancy jargon. Woke is simply old, squalid socialism. Break people into groups oppressed/ oppressor, encourage finger pointing, encourage a victim mentality, get rid of merrit, reduce individual responsibility, talk about 'equity' of outcomes. There's nothing fancy about any of this. It's the same old socialist sickness that fails over and over and destroys country after country.
go f yourselves, pigskin idiotic sht, you develeoped nothing but cuckery to jewish mythology, worshipping jews one way or another, stupid inferior sht, just you are sht, ceptu u pigskin, do, be, think, can do, be, think etc any nmw and any s pefrect
you all believed the book for the stupid shit flat earth, 6000 yo earth, skydome leaking water crap. and can't even discuess holo hoax figures without being shut, 'wE HaD tHe OnlY gOOd hIstory'. pigskin are so stupid
you fantacising so much about 'other civiliazation' are just how pigskin inferior sht you are
This is an important piece! It is not helpful in general to search for supposed roots of ideologies and use those 'results' to form ones arguments if the other side simply has no clue and does not care about them, nor does it mean that any ideas have to be bad just because one has a problem with its precursors. Wokeism - and its followers actively tell us this anyways - is a modern form of socialism. Its core believe still is class struggle however: Wokeism focusses on making the allegedly suppressed groups (classes/mileus) more "equal" to what it sees as the highest class via political activism, the media, by disowning, redistribution, and by law - a clear sign of it materialism too. Just as national socialism saw race and class as one category so does wokeism. Here everything evil is from or at least connected to the "white man", not just a stand in for its alleged political antithesis "western capitalism", but its core. Thus everything it sees as direct outgrowths of it is "white" and has to be destructed or outright destroyed: imperialism, fascism, misogyny, racism, white supremacy, colonialism, chauvinism, christianity and so on - everything they see as part of "white identity", the anti-culture. It views every issue through the lense of oppressed and oppressor. The solution, just like every other form of socialism, it sees in the deconstruction of the old and construction of the new man who builds utopia - socialist totalitarism, just as it is the case in marxism, stalinism, maoism or national socialism for example. Now the new man has to be the antithesis to what it deems the "white man" to be: old, religious, family oriented, race oriented, traditional, nationalistic, hard working, male and so on. Wokeism is thus at its core atheist but it allowes everything spiritual that is seen as non-traditional or revolutionary (again a bit like the nazis). Wokeism, again like other socialist forms, focusses on the progession toward the future of the idea. Whenever there is a new thought hoisted into doctrine it is untouchable and sacred. To not agree with it makes one into a traiter of the cause. This is also the reason it can only be anti-free speech, anti-free market and in general anti-normal.
I will think about this further and might write an essay on it.
As a political philosopher and thinker, Voegelin was primarily concerned with first and last things, ontology and teleology. He divided his critique of Gnosticism into transcendent and immanent forms and identifying immanent forms of "political religions" was a major part of his mission. While I think it is fair to say that he applied a broad brush when identifying ideological and intellectual forms as "Gnostic" and didn't tend toward a focus on the details and nuance, this is largely by choice. For Voegelin, who was a Christian mystic, a denial or alteration of the Platonic-Aristotelian, and later Christian, world-transcendent order of being, was broadly considered by him to be Gnostic in nature, and was ultimately a political position, as he considers all political philosophy to be grounded in whatever we claim to be the truth of existence. (We see this borne out throughout history where the priestly class is above -or at least in-tandem- with the political class, the political downstream from the priestly) In the case of Marxism and Nazism, among others, Voegelin analyzed their end goals and asserted that both ideologies have clear similarities with Utopianism. However problematic his use of the term "Gnosticism" may be, I believe he was correct in his final assessments of the major ideological movements of the 19th-20th century. Voegelin can be thought of as a neo-heresiologist. A small aside on wokeism - As we drift further and further away from meaning, objectively, and as a social organizing principle, the "Gnosticism" label does become less useful, as you make a solid case for here. Nihilism, and by extension, Atheism, appears to be the defining characteristic of the woke. Finally, I'd add that "real and profound biological differences between groups" can exist simultaneously with a metaphysical dimensionality to political discourse.
Yeah, I always thought this was a pretty stupid way to go about messaging. Especially someone as smart as Feser should not be engaging in this, even if he does point to some superficial similarities. The thing is a) even with some (fewer than there are differences) similarities in how they view human nature, only James Lindsay is annoying enough to try and actually say they're one in the same and are genealogically related so why bother pointing it out and b) it being "gnostic" in some ways doesn't make it false, nor do most people even care if it's gnostic. Attack it's veracity, not it's imagined shared characteristics with ancient religions. Good article.
go f yourselves, pigskin idiotic sht, you develeoped nothing but cuckery to jewish mythology, worshipping jews one way or another, stupid inferior sht, just you are sht, ceptu u pigskin, do, be, think, can do, be, think etc any nmw and any s pefrect
you all believed the book for the stupid shit flat earth, 6000 yo earth, skydome leaking water crap. and can't even discuess holo hoax figures without being shut, 'wE HaD tHe OnlY gOOd hIstory'. pigskin are so stupid
"In fact, if the apostles of woke have a metaphysical disposition at all, it’s much more optimistic than Feser et. al portray. Far from rejecting the material world, the woke think we can create a worldly paradise if only we can extirpate inequality and discrimination."
This is the crucial difference between leftism and gnosticism. Leftists are materialists and optimists through and through. They are levelers who want to flatten the cosmos down into raw sensuality and material factors, eliminating the spiritual and hierarchical dimension altogether. The leftist parody of theosis is to tear down the "idols" of any kind of higher authority intermediate between God and man so that everyone can become relatively divine by having nothing above them. It is more of a heresy deriving from the protestant impulse than anything to do with Gnosticism. It's actually the opposite of what the gnostics were trying to do, which was to accomplish a segregation of the material from the spiritual, strengthening the hierarchy.
It's true however that Gnosticism has a satanic, antinomian undercurrent to it. There's a kind of horseshoe effect where if you see the spiritual as reducible to the material you disenchant the world, but if you see the spiritual as too divorced from the material then you end up back at just disenchanting reality again because the spiritual is inaccessible. Because they see this world as the creation of the Demiurge, and not the ultimate God, Gnostics tend towards extreme pessimism and life-denial. If this world is entirely severed from God then it is of no consequence to the moral life whatsoever, and like leftists Gnostics come to see all existing power-structures as manifestations of darkness. Recently, the leftists have even come to support the power-structure through a strange inversion, whereas Gnostics, even more than anarchists or libertarians, have a consistent suspicion towards all forms of power. You can see this for example with David Ike, to my knowledge the most influential modern gnostic.
Truly orthodox Christianity also seeks to transcend the material world, not because matter is inherently evil, but because it becomes evil when it is the highest aim of man. Seeing the life of this world as a form of initiation into eternal mysteries instituted by God, orthodox Christianity avoids the pessimism of the Gnostics, the materialism of the leftists, and the antinomianism of both.
I think it is not wrong to see politics as a manifestation of corrupt theology, but you're correct that conservatives usually misunderstand the spiritual significance of the ideologies they oppose, usually because their own spiritual framework is disoriented.
Thanks so much for writing this. It was sorely needed!
Great article! i know how annoying it is when the average midwit conservative blames the problems of the world on the typical antagonists of their never-given- second-thought-in-their-lives worldview, but I'd like to give some nuances to this topic as the spiritual and the metaphysical are big topics and we have only a small picture of them. First I'd like to recognize that conservatives had a good intuition in seeing a gnostic tendency to transgress limits or boundaries, this is what the occultist Rudolf Steiner recognized as the luciferic impulse, this tendency towards egocentrism, individualism, revolution against the authorities and everything that tries to get rid of what chains one into rules is one which we can find in many traditions, although not so radical in all cases. Both gnosticism and leftism (in every period since it's existence) tend to a transgression of boundaries. In gnosticism we find an impulse to repudiate the material for its limitations on the spirit and the left in general has a disdain for authoritarianism and the state. Wokism has a disdain for essentialism or any categorization that places people into boxes such as gender, race, nationality, etc., they consider all of this as fascistic and an attempt against their individual (egoic/narcissist) desires. Definitions are boundaries. That's why they have adopted this social constructivist in opposition to realism/essentialism, in the end is just the good ol' nominalism from the middle ages. But there's also a second spiritual force which Steiner considered as an ahrimanic force, which is diametrically opposite to the luciferic impulse, it tends towards materialism, imposing boundaries, negation of the spiritual, and more things. The contemporary times would be more ahrimanic, as they tend towards a more physicalist, scientistic worldview and for that reason has transhumanism as it's modern religion. In fact, its an inversion of gnosticism, because instead of looking for salvation in the inmaterial it looks for it now by trapping us in more matter, ironically. There is this psychic pattern flowing through our unconscious that wants to be free of all the restrictions we have as embodied beings, but because we don't believe in the spiritual anymore we will create it. So in part i agree with you that modern wokism does not base it's ideology on gnosticism, that would be ridiculous and historically inaccurate, but the psychic patterns seem the same. In conclusion, i think conservatives have confounded the form with the content (gnosticism instead of the luciferic impulse) and in your case you mistook the content with the form (gnosticism as centered in the spiritual instead of the patterns that equates them in their goals). Nonetheless, i find your clarification quite prudent so that people know how to distinguish between things and learn how to see the little details that make topics like this not so simple. 👍
I agree with the general sentiment that this was a good essay. But I'll play devil's advocate for a moment: conservatives are misidentifying a real philosophical attitude which is the common cause of all the things they call "Gnostic". There is a human tendency to pursue idealism at the expense of realism, and some people are more prone to this than others. Many white antiracists fall into this camp, hence the conservative identification of this unbounded idealism with "woke". You're correct to point out that the more important cause of woke is simple who-whom tribalism, which is what motivates most non-white wokesters, and this is fundamentally non-ideological.
Oh, I forgot to finish my point. The conservative instinct is somewhat correct, as you'd expect: to be a sincere woke white person, you'd have to be delusionally idealistic. But their intellects aren't sharp enough to assign causality properly, or use the right words, and they fundamentally refuse to understand how black people think differently from them. Plus, piety signaling is how you climb the status ladder in the Christian tribe.
It would be hypocritical of me to denounce idealism itself as bad, but taking it too seriously is bad.
Good article. I think what people are seeing as gnosticism is actually the way in which the enlightenment used the garden myth. The negative enlightenment, a la hobbles, took the garden as "the state of nature", and says that human nature originated as fallen, and only civilisation can save it. The positive enlightenment, a la Rosseou, says that the original humanity is edenic, and it becomes corrupted from social structures fron which we need liberation. In either case, the fall and restoration narrative is brought into the material realm, and dealt with societally. This is a much more genralisable application of heresiology to politics.
I thought this was terrific. The more political commentary - or any commentary - wanders off into abstract speculation the more I find myself muttering, 'Yeah, maybe. Or maybe this is another Just So story'. I much prefer this grounded, arguably prosaic approach to one that is deep and meaningless.
More recently, I’ve seen accusations of Gnosticism limited more specifically to transgenderism rather than social justice in general.
Wow, excellent article.
Thank you!
Contrary points
(1) Hardly anyone claims that wokesism is self-consciously gnostic. The claim is more so that these gnostic beliefs persist through the ages by refusing to admit they are a belief system. By pretending to be intuitive, idiosyncratic, personal or 'just my thing'. That's the case with most gnostics. They don't know they are. They can't put a name to their belief system(s) and methods. Yet somehow, here they are: all believing the same wacky ideas and unable to say why! They are banned from asking themselves why they believe such wackiness - when it clearly does not work. Banned by thought cops in academia, media and the blogsphere, and political groups - who insist that everyone must be for 'freedom' (unless they're 'fascist'), and freedom is never about controlling our ideas to let the best ideas flourish. No the wokeratti say: 'freedom' is about having more wacky ideas; the more multiculturalism - the better. Why?, I ask: How are these ideas good, beneficial, nourishing, constructive"? They are clearly disintegrative and destructive.
(2) "Is wokeism merely a response to modern issues like racial justice and trans rights?"
<- Crazy questions to even ask. To assume that modern race identity is 'racial justice'. To assume that there are special people, who have a gendered homunculus inside them which 'knows' their 'real sex' is opposite to their actual sex, and compels them the trans their identity and body, to fit their gnostic 'anti-ideal?' of anti-heteronormativity, which is the new anti-Fascism.
How can, a relatively sane person, such as I, debate with leftist insanities such as this? When language, ethics, and norms are turned inside-out, into their opposites. When this pseudo-religion of anti-Westernism refuses to state its name, origin, validity, or even its true beleifs? It festers in the flotsom and jetsom of that which it declares evil and 'fascist', using ideas such as 'liberty', 'freedom', and 'equality' whilst renouncing the very civilization(s) - the West - where those ideals gained political legitimacy.
(3) BTW: Gnosis is a feminine Greek noun which means "knowledge" or "awareness". "Awareness" is precisely what the woke claim they have; but I lack. Left-wing thought cops tell me: "nothing to see here folks; iIt's those right-wing Fascists ranting, preventing your 'freedom' from fulfilling itself.
Good article. Others have mentioned the absurdities involved so I won’t repeat what others have already said. There’s a comment mentioning leftists being materialists so again I won’t repeat myself there other than to say that leftists being materialists and nihilists is a much better explanation for their behaviour. There’s nothing more to strive for than the material world if materialism is true, after all.
With this, I wonder if you’d agree with Fr. Seraphim Rose’s critique that wokeism is very much like the chiliast heresy. I’m not sure if he says its a revival of that heresy, although he does say that conceptually, something like wokeism resembles that in that it tries to “immanentize the eschaton”.
I think what's also rooted in gnostic tendency of our corrupt souls is denial of hierarchy, authority, strict rulers. See the movie Wish or alike. Also, all those "atheists" like CosmicSkeptic who say things such as "God can't be real because of so much evil in this world, if He exists, He is so cruel I deny Him". It's a heresy that seems to be a reaction to evil in this world. Another reason is drift towards pelagianism.
You go on and on and on with your fancy jargon. Woke is simply old, squalid socialism. Break people into groups oppressed/ oppressor, encourage finger pointing, encourage a victim mentality, get rid of merrit, reduce individual responsibility, talk about 'equity' of outcomes. There's nothing fancy about any of this. It's the same old socialist sickness that fails over and over and destroys country after country.
go f yourselves, pigskin idiotic sht, you develeoped nothing but cuckery to jewish mythology, worshipping jews one way or another, stupid inferior sht, just you are sht, ceptu u pigskin, do, be, think, can do, be, think etc any nmw and any s pefrect
you all believed the book for the stupid shit flat earth, 6000 yo earth, skydome leaking water crap. and can't even discuess holo hoax figures without being shut, 'wE HaD tHe OnlY gOOd hIstory'. pigskin are so stupid
you fantacising so much about 'other civiliazation' are just how pigskin inferior sht you are
This is an important piece! It is not helpful in general to search for supposed roots of ideologies and use those 'results' to form ones arguments if the other side simply has no clue and does not care about them, nor does it mean that any ideas have to be bad just because one has a problem with its precursors. Wokeism - and its followers actively tell us this anyways - is a modern form of socialism. Its core believe still is class struggle however: Wokeism focusses on making the allegedly suppressed groups (classes/mileus) more "equal" to what it sees as the highest class via political activism, the media, by disowning, redistribution, and by law - a clear sign of it materialism too. Just as national socialism saw race and class as one category so does wokeism. Here everything evil is from or at least connected to the "white man", not just a stand in for its alleged political antithesis "western capitalism", but its core. Thus everything it sees as direct outgrowths of it is "white" and has to be destructed or outright destroyed: imperialism, fascism, misogyny, racism, white supremacy, colonialism, chauvinism, christianity and so on - everything they see as part of "white identity", the anti-culture. It views every issue through the lense of oppressed and oppressor. The solution, just like every other form of socialism, it sees in the deconstruction of the old and construction of the new man who builds utopia - socialist totalitarism, just as it is the case in marxism, stalinism, maoism or national socialism for example. Now the new man has to be the antithesis to what it deems the "white man" to be: old, religious, family oriented, race oriented, traditional, nationalistic, hard working, male and so on. Wokeism is thus at its core atheist but it allowes everything spiritual that is seen as non-traditional or revolutionary (again a bit like the nazis). Wokeism, again like other socialist forms, focusses on the progession toward the future of the idea. Whenever there is a new thought hoisted into doctrine it is untouchable and sacred. To not agree with it makes one into a traiter of the cause. This is also the reason it can only be anti-free speech, anti-free market and in general anti-normal.
I will think about this further and might write an essay on it.
As a political philosopher and thinker, Voegelin was primarily concerned with first and last things, ontology and teleology. He divided his critique of Gnosticism into transcendent and immanent forms and identifying immanent forms of "political religions" was a major part of his mission. While I think it is fair to say that he applied a broad brush when identifying ideological and intellectual forms as "Gnostic" and didn't tend toward a focus on the details and nuance, this is largely by choice. For Voegelin, who was a Christian mystic, a denial or alteration of the Platonic-Aristotelian, and later Christian, world-transcendent order of being, was broadly considered by him to be Gnostic in nature, and was ultimately a political position, as he considers all political philosophy to be grounded in whatever we claim to be the truth of existence. (We see this borne out throughout history where the priestly class is above -or at least in-tandem- with the political class, the political downstream from the priestly) In the case of Marxism and Nazism, among others, Voegelin analyzed their end goals and asserted that both ideologies have clear similarities with Utopianism. However problematic his use of the term "Gnosticism" may be, I believe he was correct in his final assessments of the major ideological movements of the 19th-20th century. Voegelin can be thought of as a neo-heresiologist. A small aside on wokeism - As we drift further and further away from meaning, objectively, and as a social organizing principle, the "Gnosticism" label does become less useful, as you make a solid case for here. Nihilism, and by extension, Atheism, appears to be the defining characteristic of the woke. Finally, I'd add that "real and profound biological differences between groups" can exist simultaneously with a metaphysical dimensionality to political discourse.