Perhaps the best analyst of the cult of Maoism, from which Woke derives (including Woke Right, as we’ll see), was Robert Jay Lifton, who was in Hong Kong in the early 1950s interviewing and documenting refugees and exiles from the newly formed People's Republic of China

Lifton wrote books about this including the thorough case-study driven Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (1961). In this book, inter alia, Lifton gives a few vivid descriptions of the cult phenomenon of the “thought reform” environment in China (also translated: “ideological remolding”) that characterizes two aspects of it as what he calls a “cult of confession” and a “cult of enthusiasm

These two cult orientations may be comprehensive of the Maoist Communist milieu, but to them I would add a third, a “cult of transgression,” for modern Woke cult environments and behavior, only there in nascent form in Mao’s People's Republic, at least before the Cultural Revolution. In fact, the “cult of transgression” model is what might distinguish the Cultural Revolution environment (1966–1976) from the rest of Mao’s time in power (from 1949 forward).

The Cult of Confession Dynamic

The “cult of confession,” as Lifton has it, is a key feature of the totalizing cult because creates incredible vulnerability in each individual. The way it works is by getting people to confess to their own wrongdoing, increasingly as defined against the ideological expectations of the cult. The idea is that people would confess to their sins against the cult doctrine and each other in order to bond, avoid punishment, signal adherence and understanding of the doctrine, etc. Lifton describes the phenomenon this way

Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. (p. 425)

Every confession has a number of psychosocial effects. First, it induces massive vulnerability in the confessor. The whole group is hearing things the confessor will be judged for, perhaps harshly. Second, it therefore opens a gate to a carrot-or-stick reaction of punishment or leniency that enables trauma bonding of the confessor to the group and its leadership cadres. Third, it provides catharsis for the confessor and even some of the people witnessing that confession, allowing them to vent the pressures of cult belonging into deeper cult commitment. Fourth, it inspires more people to confess for themselves and, in fact, competitive confession where people try to give bigger and bigger confessions as it goes from one person to the next, amplifying the all the other psychosocial effects

You can easily imagine the last of those characteristics if you’ve ever sat in a class where everyone is supposed to give some kind of introduction of themselves with an update on their emotional growth (yoga classes often do this, for example). The first few people say a little, and by the end it’s a sob-fest with long, detailed stories of high emotional content and valence and tons of flowing empathy. As Lifton explains, this is a semi-performative act of self-initiation into a totalizing cult environment,

But as totalist pressures turn confession into recurrent command performances, the element of histrionic public display takes precedence over genuine inner experience. Each man becomes concerned with the effectiveness of his personal performance, and this performance sometimes comes to serve the function of evading the very emotions and ideas about which one feels most guilty. (p. 426)

Lifton adds the following color to the situation,

The totalist confession takes on a number of special meanings. It is first a vehicle for the kind of personal purification which we have just discussed, a means of maintaining a perpetual inner emptying or psychological purge of impurity; this purging milieu enhances the totalists’ hold upon existential guilt. Second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender, the expression of the merging of individual and environment. Third, it is a means of maintaining an ethos of total exposure—a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory. (pp. 425–426)

Now imagine that but confessing evils you have committed, including against imaginary crimes. The Woke Left made strong use of this “cult of confession” dynamic. DEI meetings were, in essence, exactly this program rammed into a professional workplace setting. Accusations of mysterious “structural” racism or transphobia or whatever were leveled, and everyone has to look for ways they’ve contributed or been complicit and confess it all in front of the group (Lifton: “confess[ing] to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed

There is also much confessing of “I used to be like this but then I learned how much harm it causes to people of color for white people to go hiking” or some such claim of self-improvement—or, “ideological remolding,” or, thought reform. Cult-like mantras follow: “Hiking-while-white encodes whiteness into the recreation, hiking culture, and the outdoors, which is exclusionary.” You get the idea. Lifton explains

The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaningful psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, especially insofar as these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an orgiastic sense of “oneness,” of the most intense intimacy with fellow confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement. And there is also, at least initially, the possibility of genuine self-revelation and of self-betterment through the recognition that “the thing that has been exposed is what I am.” (p. 426)

The purpose of this ritual, Lifton tells us, is ultimately horrifying and fundamental to its nature as a totalitarian practice:

The assumption underlying total exposure (besides those which relate to the demand for purity) is the environment’s claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products—of imagination or of memory—becomes highly immoral. (p. 426)

Thus we come to understand the dynamic of a cult of confession as central to that of a totalizing cult, thus the totalitarian environment.

The Cult of Enthusiasm Dynamic

Alongside the “cult of confession” dynamic in totalitarian environments, Lifton characterizes the “cult of enthusiasm” as partially derivative to the cult of confession and partly free-standing. In short, the cult of enthusiasm refers to a strong current of enthusiasm for supporting the cult program, beliefs, and its leadership. It’s also usually highly emotional in nature and meant not to create and manipulate guilt and shame so much as to whip up frenzy, mania, and enthusiasm in the participants. As Lifton explains,

Thought reform has the opposite ethos [to traditional Chinese culture of self-restraint], a cult of enthusiasm (enthusiasm in the religious meaning of rapturous and excessive emotional experience), with a demand for total self-surrender. It is true that thought reform implies a promise of a return to restraint, and of an attainment of relaxed perfection some time in the mystical Communist future, just as Confucius claimed that these ideals had existed during an equally mystical past or “golden age”— but enthusiasm and restraint, once established, are not always so easily controlled. (p. 397)

Notice that Lifton characterizes this activity as driven by a “demand for total self-surrender.” Surrender—or submission—is a key component of the totalizing (or authoritarian) cult environment, as submission to the ideology and its perceived authorities is a key aspect of cult (and authoritarian) psychology and sociology. Lifton here, though, describes a kind of ideological innervation through this surrender of self to the cult and its ambitions.

Now, part of the ideological innervation Lifton describes here can be done directly, particularly in the People’s Republic of China context in terms of enthusiasm for the party and party leadership (esp. Mao) worship or various icons that were held up as ideal comrades. Communist doctrine tends to be held maniacally, as Lifton relates through one of his interview subjects, a Catholic priest who had been wrongly imprisoned by Mao’s thugs, exhibiting characteristic symptoms of a mind that had been broken to the point of admiring its tormenters:

The Communists have tremendous enthusiasm in their outright devotion to their doctrine. … What they believe, they do. … We are divided between doctrine and practice. … There is a discrepancy between religious life and doctrine. Therefore we are weak. … They are superior to us in carrying out their actions. … They have dialectic and a strange use of their proofs. … They have a keen instinct for finding out what each man may be doing against his own creed and his work. … I don't know where human beings can find such proofs. (p. 140)

Some of the mania of the “cult of enthusiasm” in the totalizing environment is derivative to the cult of confession, however. After confessing, there often follows an enthusiasm to “do better,” with people frantically and manically participating in the cult’s behaviors and rituals, including denunciations of class enemies or those who haven’t confessed sufficiently or at all. That is, victims become perpetrators through this transformation from one cult dynamic to another.

Psychologically, the cult of enthusiasm dynamic energizes members of the cult, helps them bond in a shared sense of activity and worldview, reinforces the cult’s beliefs, inspires loyalty and commitment, and reinforces the sense of the high social cost of dissent while also discouraging it through general social pressure and enthusiasm for the common cult direction. The highly emotionally charged atmosphere of this cult dynamic is instrumental to binding and orienting people with the cult’s doctrines

The Woke Left does this as well, as indicated by my deliberate wry usage of the phrase “do better” just above. These denunciation rituals—which relate to what Maoists called “speaking bitterness”—are obvious and, in fact, more or less characterize Woke Left behavior in most people’s minds. They also present a general enthusiasm for “liberation” and a “socially just world,” as we hear in ridiculous terms like “trans joy.” Every Pride parade was an increasingly libidinous “cult of enthusiasm” exercise, as were many of their other rallies, protests, demonstrations, and so on. (This has led me in the past to say that protest is Woke church.) They were something more too, though: deliberately transgressive, which is indicative of a Cultural Revolution program where “change agents” destroy the norms of the past for a brighter future.

The Cult of Transgression Dynamic

Lifton, writing well before the Cultural Revolution, does not focus in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism upon any such “cult of transgression” dynamic, but the seeds of this particularly pernicious form of personal and societal destruction are clearly present. Of course, they must be, because they represent the same Jacobin spirit from the French Revolution that runs through all of Communism. Lifton, describing the situation of one of the captives in Mao’s People’s Republic makes this apparent:

He also developed the concept that it was necessary to degrade oneself “to convince the Communists that you are with them—and not in grace in the bourgeois world—so that the Communists would feel that you were so degraded in the bourgeois world that you could not go back.” (p. 166)

It’s difficult to read those words and not recognize the self-humiliation rituals of Woke Leftism today, especially as we might see them in Queer Activists or around “Pride” displays. The words “so degraded in the bourgeois world that you could not go back” haunt the participants in those displays perfectly. This self-degradation as a means of distinguishing oneself from the “bourgeois” (or normal, or fallen, or mundane) world is also the basis for a cult dynamic in Wokeness, though: a cult of transgression.

The purpose of Woke theory is often to transgress norms and boundaries, especially in Queer Theory, which is explicitly formulated to do this and only this. bell hooks (name intentionally not capitalized) even published a famous book called Teaching to Transgress (based on Paulo Freire’s “Marxification” of education model, as I called it, itself based on Mao’s thought-reform methods) that highlights the centrality of this behavior in a semi-formal academic way, even though, again, every Pride demonstration made it obviously clear in a more tangible and blatant way. hooks makes clear that there’s a connection between enthusiasm and transgression, as does every monstrosity performed in the name of “Pride”:

I longed passionately to teach differently from the way I had been taught since high school. The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. And if boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere. Neither Freire’s work nor feminist pedagogy examined the notion of pleasure in the classroom. … Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. (p. 7)

The idea of the cult of transgression is essentially the idea of teenage rebellion but turned deeply pathological. Teenagers naturally rebel against their environments, parents, norms, etc., just as a way of testing out boundaries in the effort to stake out an independent adult identity for themselves. They often do this in tightly knit social groups that develop their own slang language, set of in-group jokes, and sets of transgressions that prove their defiance, and they often play off one another to increase the transgressive capacity of their bubble until it strikes various boundaries from which it is supposed to learn important lessons about public versus private behavior, social norms and limitations, etc. That’s normal, but it can also be the basis for a cult of transgression defined by people pushing the boundaries of prevailing norms through cult doctrine and eventually socially and psychologically isolating themselves from those outside the cult

In organic situations like with teenagers, this transgressive behavior is likely mostly harmless and even in some ways edifying, but when there is a directed cult ideology in play, it can be a potent cult recruitment and commitment tool that takes the form of what we might call the “ritual of transgression

The Ritual of Transgression

The ritual of transgression is best described by saying that everyone in a group within the cult, or the cult itself, competes to transgress the expected norms of behavior and thought a little more but always in a particular direction in line with cult doctrine. You can imagine a group of young Critical Race Theorists sitting around starting with a transgressive statement like “the police are racist” (not worthy of respect) and going down a deep rabbit hole of wanting to defund police, abolish police, abolish prisons, imprison police, kill police, etc. You can also easily imagine another rabbit trail in which “police are racist” turns into discussions of why everything else is racist too, even hiking and probably the mountains people want to hike on

Radical feminist behavior over the last fifty years (thus Woke activism in many ways) can almost be defined by participation in a combination of these three cults with the tip of the spear being the cult of transgression; hence bell hooks’s book title. They did this in both theory (blaming men, patriarchy, misogyny, “rape culture,” etc., for more and more ridiculous things) and in practice (say, making themselves deliberately hateful and ugly to “reject gender norms” and “being nice” and blaming men for thinking they're ugly and hateful). They were, and are, as Lifton has it, making themselves “so degraded in the bourgeois world” that they cannot “go back.”

The Maoist cult did this too, particularly in the Cultural Revolution under the doctrine of “Smash the Four Olds,” which admittedly came long after Lifton’s research (mid-1950s) and publication of Thought Reform (1961). Young people rejected their elders (became transgressive) and went on to “smash” anything reminiscent of “old” society (today: “Boomer mentality

These actions were blatant transgressions against the existing society, by the way. Streets were renamed, temples desecrated, relics looted, smashed, and burned, and even people were killed or struggled into suicide over their adherence to “old ways of thinking” or “old habits” (today, again: “Boomer mentality

In the cult of transgression, the ritual is to transgress to the limits of tolerability with no backtracking and to do so in a social environment where everyone is going a little deeper into the ideology and doctrine of the cult. In the process, through the transgressions themselves and the cultish identification with them to which they become increasingly socially bound, the cult isolation and commitment deepens. The dynamic is partly by these transgressions becoming the bases for “in-jokes” they can’t share elsewhere because they’re too transgressive, which is also socially isolating, and partly through a shared sense of rule-breaking. The transgressors are now in it together and defined by opposing the world. As you might imagine, this slope is extremely slippery, and past a certain point, there’s almost no way back, psychologically or socially.

Ultimately, this creates massive social co-dependence on other members of the cult and a self-isolation from outsiders (who will eventually have to be driven away) who might act as moderating forces. The transgressors cannot relate well to normal society any longer while maintaining a sense of degenerate superiority over it, literally in the mold of “Left-hand” or “black” magic. They’re bound together as self-satisfied outsiders who believe they’ve transcended a false moral universe through their acts of transgression

Of course, this perverse antinomian behavior sets up exactly the kinds of guilt and shame mechanisms that drive the cult of confession dynamic forward. The false light of enthusiasm fills in the growing darkness as a psychological and social cover, and the false enlightenment of shedding morality through transgression rationalizes the participants’ fall. Coming to believe morality to be false and imposed, thus in need of transgressing in the first place is what it means to become “Woke.” The participants’ “wake up,” from their own perspectives, to a higher morality that transcends and disparages the real thing.

Woke Cult of Transgression

A peculiar feature of the cult of transgression is that it’s like a system of social valves that increasingly lock a participant into the cult ideology and its most radical views. It even defines the vanguard of the Woke cult’s detachment from reality. That is, participants cannot easily go backwards without a total break from the cult and its totalizing environment

Once a person transgresses morality and society to a certain degree and the cult accepts that level of transgression or extremism, to back off or to moderate at all is actually to violate the terms of the cult of transgression itself. At that point, the cult will turn on the participant for denying the ritual

All participants in a cult will eventually participate in the punishment of hypothetical or real moderates or eventually “traitors,” so they will each know that more than social rejection awaits them if they deviate or show any sobriety against the cult environment. Put differently, the cult of transgression dynamic is a radicalization vehicle with no safe escape hatch and that becomes harder to escape the longer one participates in it and the deeper one gets

Take, for example, a cult of transgression dynamic that calls everything racist from a Critical Race Theory perspective. Suppose someone says something isn’t racist after someone else in the cult transgresses the boundary of saying that it is. According to the rules of the cult, that poor reasonable person is now maintaining racism, so they’re a racist—so they’re a traitor; so they’re evil. Punishment will ensue

Not only can we easily imagine dozens of examples of this pattern of behavior on the Woke Left from recent memory and experience, we can also credit it with the whole of the “transgender” phenomenon. Radical feminists wanted to say “gender is a social construct,” so they had sacrificed access to a place of epistemic authority necessary to stop a movement claiming “sex is a social construct”—or any of its derivatives, like that men who claim to be women belong in women’s sports punching them in the face and breaking their skulls (which is a huge transgression, when you think of it that way). They just got called “TERFs” and expelled from the vanguard of their own movement while the transgressive cult marched on without them

The Woke Right’s Cult Dynamics

Now, of course, Woke Right circles exhibit all three of these cult dynamics too, most notably the cults of enthusiasm and transgression. In fact, those largely define “Woke Right” in a functional sense

The Woke Right is wild-eyed (enthusiastic) with the idea of “winning” instead of “always losing because of ‘muh principles.’” Principles are therefore expendable against the cult of enthusiasm dynamic of “winning,” and the values and norms upon which those principles are based will have to be transgressed as a matter of creating permission structures to pursue more unprincipled “winning.” As a result, nearly everything they do (under the misapplied brand name of being “based”) is transgressive of the norms of both Woke and through illegitimate conflation polite and normal liberal society. (Yes, this makes Woke Right a “queering” movement in many ways, just like the Woke Left

The word the Woke Right misuses internally for its cult of transgression is “based,” which has nothing to do with being based in reality or principle. For them, being “based” does not mean to be unafraid to state uncomfortable truths against social pressure while maintaining your values; it means saying edgy things you’re not supposed to say in polite society or under Woke hegemony. That is, it means being transgressive, or, in the Woke Left parlance for the exact same thing, being “queer,” but in a “trad” way. Their primary cult of confession dynamic is in confessing to having not been based enough to transgress earlier or further than they did in the past.

Woke Right social dynamics tend to involve competitively saying or expressing more “based” (that is, Woke or queer-trad) things, whether that be racist, sexist, anti-gay, Jew-hating or blaming, patriarchal, chauvinistic for their own groups, or extreme (anti-Constitutional) MAGA policy positions or reactions to politics relevant to MAGA policy goals. To go backwards against these transgressive cult-social values is to be labeled and treated as “controlled opposition,” “cucked,” “neocon,” “warmonger,” and a long litany of other names, or simply and in Red-Guard fashion “Boomer minded.” Such is verboten in the Woke Right cult

In the Woke literature, the principle of the cult of transgression is ultimately characterized most blatantly by Herbert Marcuse in “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), where he calls the principle “liberating tolerance.” He defines it thusly,

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

Another way to term liberating tolerance would be “No Enemies to the Left (NETTL).” The parallel concept in the Maoist cult would be “No Enemies of Mao Zedong Thought,” and in the Woke Right cult would be “No Enemies to the Right (NETTR),” which is explicitly and strongly argued for and held to in the Woke Right cult and its various cults of transgression and enthusiasm. These forces are all the same and serve only the function of deepening radicalization, commitment, and cult communal self-isolation

This cultish program on the Woke Right is underwritten by the logic of what is called the “friend-enemy distinction” in politics. Where Karl Marx divided the people into “oppressor and oppressed,” Mao Zedong separated the population into “the people” and “the enemies of the people,” and Herbert Marcuse broke the population into “the Left” and “the Right,” the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt described politics as the dynamic between “friends” and “enemies” who are pitted in an existential battle over the direction of society. It doesn’t really matter which formulation we use, however; the effect is the same: destructive cult-like tribal politics based on mutual enmity that becomes increasingly totalitarian and self-justifying in the name of the conflict that is explained to be defining of a given sociopolitical moment.

Lifton gave us the tools to understand these dynamics, however, as they are the dynamics of totalism—a cult environment. The cult dynamics of confession, enthusiasm, and transgression are defining of a psychological and social environment. They are also indicative of being “Woke” in the sense of having “woke up” to a pervasive “false morality” in society that must be transcended with themselves as the intrepid vanguard movement away from the old (repressive) and into the new (liberated).

None of these “Woke” cult dynamics is healthy for their participants or for the society plagued by them. All should be understood for what they are: dark, destructive cult dynamics indicative of the totalitarian condition, thus the enemies of peace, freedom, and civilization. Thus we can understand Woke across its many manifestations through history and today—and reject it for the sickness that it is.

I've been trying to share a particular message for a couple of years now, and I can never quite find the words. I doubt I will tonight, but I have to try again because I watched my great friend get murdered over it today.

We have a choice: catharsis or civilization.

There's no other choice for us. We can have a civilization, where people are civilized enough to live, work, and trade with one another in a productive way, a safe way, a trustworthy enough way, or we can abandon it for the pursuit of letting the negative emotions of the past years, decade, or decades consume us.

There's no other choice.

If we choose catharsis, we let our emotions, our Pathos, get the better of us. We turn to our anger and look to give it more justifications. We turn to our frustration and seek an orgiastic release through whatever deeds vents it. We turn to our oppression, our rage, our despair, our fear, and we let it flow through us until the Pathos pours out and covers the land in what will eventually be fire and blood.

Catharsis is tempting, and stepping into it will be libidinous, orgiastic, elevating, and divine, until we realize that it's the feast of demons upon everything we could have built and everything we could have passed on to our children and our posterity.

Civilization is harder. It's bitter, in fact, in comparison to catharsis. It means swallowing hard and taking all those negative emotions and sublimating them into something productive, something that builds rather than makes us feel better. Civilization feels like injustice, in fact, even though it is the only basis for justice outside of Heaven and Hell, if they exist.

If we choose civilization, we're allowed to be mad, but we must temper our anger into right action that builds something to leave a better world, which will dissolve it, of course. We're also allowed to be frustrated, but we must sublimate our frustration into the dedicated search for real and lasting solutions to our problems in a civilization worth living in and passing to our children. We are not allowed to despair, though, and we cannot persist in fear. We must have faith that swallowing and metabolizing all of our negativity to turn it into a flourishing society is possible and worth it, and faith will drive out fear and is the mortal enemy of despair.

Civilization is not available on the wide path. It is the narrow path, at least so far as worldly life goes. Veer too far to one side or the other, or even for too long a moment forget your purpose or principles, and you lose the path, lose civilization, and lose everything worth having.

Without civilization, though, we will find ourselves in a terror beyond our comprehension. Maybe it will be like the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it in the wake of the terrible English Civil War, when civilization was nearly thrown aside. Violent, solitary or tribal, nasty, brutish, short, a wicked and selfish war of all against all. It looks like the favelas of Brazil.

Maybe we'll end up conquered, fighting among ourselves while our enemies feast on our folly. Maybe we'll end up holding it together, for a little while anyway, under a tyrant who can, for a time, make it all stop and demand order. Maybe we all just end up learning Mandarin and get along mastering the ins and outs of social credit existence.

Civilization is worth fighting for, and catharsis is the kind of momentary pleasure followed by pain that every virtue stands in opposition to. In a civilization we, and each of our children after us, can live as individuals, free to pursue our dreams in sufficient safety and opportunity to generate abundance. Catharsis will be a groupish disaster with all the allure and hangover of a drunken mosh pit.

Again, I'm not expressing myself the way I see this issue in my mind. It's such an important message that I just can't get right, no matter how I try.

What I will say is that, for any differences in the particulars my great friend Charlie Kirk and I have had, Charlie Kirk stood for, lived for, and acted to his dying breath for civilization. He was far too temperate and wise, even at 31, for catharsis.

How can I be sure?

Under strange circumstances once, I found myself out on a skiing boat on a lake with Charlie Kirk. Music was playing, we were having a good time enjoying the morning. Charlie, with his standard grin, bare chest in the sun, laughed a little and explained himself, "I had fun once, guys, and I hated it."

Then he made our host change the music from something fun and hip to... classical. And we ran up and down the lake alongside all the other party boats listening to Bach, Vivaldi, and Stravinsky, not having fun even once and loving it. Charlie Kirk lived for civilization, and nothing remotely like catharsis would have been near his mind, heart, or soul, even in its darkest, most frustrated moments.

Charlie wanted to win, but he wanted to win so that we can move away from evil and move away from cathartic, orgiastic destruction and toward civilizational order, where his family and children could grow up as strong, proud Americans.

More than that, Charlie lived for Jesus, the Logos, as He is named in John 1. He knew the difference between the Logos and the Pathos, human though he was. He understood civilization is built on the rock of Logos, and that it can never be built on the churning sands of Pathos.

That's how I know that Charlie understood the choice I still cannot articulate. We have two options, and only two. They are catharsis and civilization. Charlie Kirk lived that we would have civilization.

May Charlie Kirk not have died such that we spiral into catharsis and evil.

At the core of both Fascism and Communism as radical ideologies is a sense of alienation. In fact, it’s alienation with the injustice of the alienation turned up to eleven. This alienation breeds resentment, envy, hatred, self-pity, and radical politics itself. It is also, in these evil systems, deliberately manufactured specifically for this purpose.

About Radicalism

First, a word about radicalism. What does “radical” mean? It means “at the roots,” or more accurately, tearing out the roots of the existing system to replace them with a new system with totally different roots. Radicalism means wishing to dismantle the existing system and replace it with something the radicals prefer. It almost never works.

Resentment, envy, self-pity, and a certain kind of hatred—not to mention psychopathology—is therefore often at the roots of radical politics. Certainly it is possible that a political system is actually oppressive and needs a radical solution, but it is also very common that the radicals are in a perfectly functional system but don’t feel like they fit within it. When that feeling turns sour, we get radical politics of the sort under examination here.

About Resentment, Envy, Etc., and Their Agitation

Second, a word about the politics of envy and resentment. At the heart of radicalism is a suite of negative emotions that stem from a sense of alienation. These primarily include envy (of those who are not or do not feel alienated), resentment (of the same), hatred (of the same), and self-pity, which is the most destructive of all human emotions. These often tend to sour under the feeling of alienation into something nasty Nietzsche called ressentiment, using the French word to distinguish it from mere resentment. Ressentiment is like envy that has curdled; it’s resentment that has turned putrid and has been directed outward. It’s the feeling the prisoner has for the freeman when he hates him merely for his being free.

Radicalism is often the politics of resentment through alienation, and Woke is no exception. While it’s frequently the case that the person who feels alienated will go on to develop these other emotions at the roots of his radicalism, and thus become a radical himself, it is much more often the case that the sense of alienation is inculcated by others who are already afflicted and that these negative emotions are encouraged to develop to a far larger degree than they might have under organic individual circumstances. That is, I suppose, Woke is a mind virus, and its receptor sites are almost all located in the emotions attached to feelings around fairness and belonging.

Radicals spend much of their time agitating others to join them in their misery, a process they call “consciousness raising.” They are actively teaching people to see themselves as alienated and to feel resentful about it. This is one way Wokeness spreads.

About Alienation and the Alien

Third, a few words about alienation—and therefore also about the “Alien force” that alienates. Alienation here ultimately refers to the idea of being made an alien in or to your own circumstance. In the circumstance of radical politics, what this implies is feeling like there’s a circumstance that fits you, and you belong in that circumstance by some right, and you are or feel removed or estranged from it, likely unjustly.

The sense of political alienation is usually believed to be the result of having been (actively) alienated from your rightful inheritance or sense of belonging in society by some hostile force—the Alien who alienates. It is, of course, generally assumed people would not intentionally remove themselves from their own rightful context. Alienation in radical politics is something that has been wrongly done to you by some force outside of you that you cannot control.

The outside, interloping force that removes the alienated subject from his rightful context and circumstance is, from the perspective of the radical, an Alien power. It doesn’t recognize the legitimate circumstance of society or people’s rightful claim to it and its inheritance. Instead, it comes from outside and imposes itself into and over that circumstance to usurp it for itself. While there's a lot of depth that could be added to this (notably talking about Gnosticism in various stripes), now is not the time for that

Understanding this mechanism and belief structure, which is fundamentally dualistic (split), is absolutely necessary to understanding the underlying mythologies and ideologies of both Fascism and Marxism. Both depend upon it fundamentally and intimately

A Clarifying Example

A sadly familiar example will help us understand. The way the Woke Left sees race and racism is that we should have a fully egalitarian and thus “antiracist” society, but that’s simply not possible. Our “state of nature,” in their eyes, has no racism and no room for racism. So, where did it come from? The short answer is “white people,” but it requires understanding more deeply than just that.

The Woke Left racial mythology (and it is a mythology) is that white people at some point in the past decided upon their own racial superiority and imposed racial categories onto all people specifically to name, maintain, and enforce their own “white supremacy.” White supremacy is an ideology meant to convince all people in society that this outside, artificial imposition both of racial categories and of racialist superiority and inferiority is “real,” “natural,” “just,” or what have you. White supremacy therefore alienates people of color from their full participation in a society that is supposed to be intrinsically “antiracist.” White people, as an interloping Alien force, impose this racial framework and racism to their own benefit and thus alienate themselves from their full humanity, which is supposed to be “antiracist.” In so doing, they become the Alien who alienates by race.

As a brief aside, the Iron Law of Woke Projection is located here. The pathological modes of Fascism and Communism (Woke) do not actually represent true humanity, as they claim, but are themselves an interloping Alien power that alienates people from their societal inheritance in other forms of societal organization. This, though, is what they accuse the mainstream society outside of their cults of doing. The Iron Law of Woke Projection is an iron law, therefore, because the entire psychosocial apparatus of Woke political worldviews is Alien-projection. It couldn’t be otherwise.

Alienation and Fascism

Since I usually start with Marxism and lose people, I’ll start with Fascism, which is actually easier to understand. Fascists fundamentally believe that there’s a past state of their own society that was roughly a golden era that is now corrupted. It fell through the corruptions of some alien powers being allowed sway—that is, through tolerance

More specifically, they have a romantic fantasy about their past as a people and the society and fruits they should have inherited from it, but they are alienated from that society and its inheritance by the inclusion of an interloping power. That power is the Alien that has corrupted the system for its own gain and to their loss

So Fascists look back to some mythological, romantic point they come to believe is their past and feel aggrieved as a people (collective) from having inherited the fruits of that past. Notice that they are likely to write historicist accounts of their past to reinforce this belief and to spread it. They go on to blame outsiders (political, cultural, or ethnic) for having displaced them from a glorious life they’ve lost due to illegitimate impositions of the Alien politics, culture, or ethnicity

In response, they seek to band together (fasces, from which Fascism gets its name, refers to a tight bundle of thin faggots) to reclaim their lost inheritance through brutal political power and the imposition of the romanticized past state as it was, they believe, meant to progress to the glorious future they’ve failed to inherit. (Talk about an entitlement complex….) So the Fascist, ultimately, feels alienated from a glorious society (that never really existed) and the firstfruits of that glorious society. Alienation is at the core of his disposition

Fascists, then, see themselves as alienated or dispossessed political, cultural, or racial elites who have lost the opportunity for an idealized Received Society, which the Alien has prevented them from receiving. The Alien is his enemy, and he must destroy his enemy and reclaim his lost society. Identifying and destroying the Alien who has alienated him—along with its societal enablers—becomes his chief political project. All who do not join him are believed to be sympathizing with and part of the alienating force and are therefore as much Enemy as is the Alien

The Fascist Project of Counter-Alienation

The Fascist project is therefore to awaken people to a consciousness of their alienation—which most will not have detected—and its alleged causes to get them to band together in the effort to reclaim their “future past.” Notice here, then, that it isn’t just a sense of alienation but a manufactured sense of alienation, deliberately spread to others, that drives the process of “awakening” (Woke). Of course, the most awakened Fascists will have to lead the program, not mere recruits, and they will restore the conditions for the common good and a future Golden Era in exchange for everyone’s liberty

Obviously, the “renewal” process begins (and proceeds) through punishing the Alien and its representatives and sympathizers, resulting in tyranny and mass murder. That is, the project is actually one of counter-alienation. Seemingly ironically, in the name of deposing the Alien who alienates them, the Fascists themselves become the imposing Alien force who alienates. This is a crucial point to understand. Rather than seeking to end alienation, they seek to counter alienation with their own more powerful and compelling alienating force. In staring into the abyss, they become the enemy they wish to destroy. Given the suite of negative emotions driving Fascist radicalism, it couldn’t be otherwise.

Who Were the Fascists?

Obviously, since there are different ways Fascists can feel alienated from their idealized Received Society, it can manifest in different ways. Three historical examples make the case

In Italy, the Italian Fascists arose around the idea of displaced Italian Nationalist identity, which was partly based on rejecting the internationalist agitations of Communism. In Spain, the Francoists arose around the idea of a displaced Spanish National cultural identity rooted particularly in Catholicism—so long as it obeyed Franco. It too claimed the internationalist and cultural (especially anti-religious) agitations of Communism as part of the Alien problem, but it hardly limited itself to purging Commies. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazis proposed a hybrid alienation scheme of German Nationalist identity and a German racial identity (based in part in eugenics and in part in the occult ravings of the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, who, in alignment with pre-existing currents of German antisemitism believed that Jews represented the lowest (spiritual) racial form

Thus, to simplify, the Italian Fascists under Mussolini believed they were alienated from being fully Italian and sought to restore Italian Nationalist identity and usher in progress under its banner. The Spanish Fascists under Franco felt alienated from being fully Spanish and sought to restore Spanish Nationalist and Cultural identity through a kind of Nationalist-Catholic reunification program and usher in progress under its banner. The German Fascists (National Socialists) under Hitler felt alienated from being fully German in both practical and a profound occultist racial senses and sought to restore German Nationalist and mystical-racial identity, from which Hitler believed “high culture” sprung, in order to literally complete history (that is, to usher in progress under its banner). All three were unmitigated catastrophes

A similar utterly failed experiment was conducted in various ways throughout South America under the banner of (Catholic) Integralismo in Brazil, or Brazilian Integralism (reintegration of Catholic Church, state, and economy). Its program was different because the Alien was ironically framed primarily as colonialist in nature (that Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses), particularly blaming Western liberalism and Communism as alienating both indigenous populations and the working classes. South America is mostly Communist today as a result, not least because Integralismo gave way to Marxist Liberation Theology in so many cases (e.g., Dom Helder Camara, the “Red Bishop” of Recife). [No, Pinochet wasn't an Integralist, to be clear, but another sort of Fascist

So, as indicated, we understand Fascism as an ideology of (Gnostic) alienation and resentment where there is some idealized group that is a contingency of history itself who has been displaced from its rightful inheritance by an Alien power that must be destroyed

Alienation in Marxism

I’ll be briefer with Marxism, but it is ultimately the same, differently (same energy, opposite direction).  First, note that if you don’t realize that alienation, “the Alien,” and estrangement are very explicitly at the very center of everything Marxism thinks and talks about, you don’t know anything about Marxism. Marx talked about these concerns all the time and characterized his entire philosophy around them.

Marxists believe that all of humanity is the alienated group, and the bourgeois class is the Alien. That is, certain human beings are alienating all human beings from their rightful inheritance and proper circumstance unjustly for their own benefit

Marxists do not look back to a past romanticized golden era for their inspiration, as Marx told us in 1852, as do the Fascists. They look, he claims, “to the future,” but this isn't quite right and requires understanding Marxism properly to comprehend

Marxists all believe they are alienated from an idealized future that recovers the idealized past. They believe they are oppressed through the Alien who is located in the “dominant” or “oppressing” classes in each society throughout history. Private property becomes the alienating force that estranges man from himself and prevents his realization of the idealized future that recovers the idealized (communal, “social”) past. Marx stated frequently that realizing this idealized future is therefore humanizing, which is a “complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.”

This belief sounds confusing and crazy, so we should unpack it a little. Marxism actually adopts the dialectical nonsense of the wildly degenerate Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau to outline its (Gnostic) theory of man, history, and thus the future from which we allegedly alienate ourselves. Rousseau believed man is imprisoned by the strictures of civilization and is only truly free in his proverbial State of Nature (“man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”). Rousseau also liked civilization and all its perks, so he dreamed of completing man by finding a way to live in our State of Nature (free and noble “savages”) while retaining all the fruits of society (“savages made to live in cities

Marx echoed this sentiment clearly in his definition of true Communism: “Communism [is] the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore [is] the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development

Marxists believe that all human beings as one giant group alienate themselves from their true inheritance (Communism: a stateless, classless society of plenty for all) by alienating ourselves from who we really are (Communists). We allegedly do so through the acquisition of private property (fundamental right to exclude others from your property), which inherently defines each person as an individual who can hold and withhold property from others (which is the basis for all wealth

People who support the concept of private property are therefore the Alien who alienates all of man from his inheritance, which is his State of Nature while “embracing the entire wealth of previous development.” It is from this preposterous fantasy future Marx believes Communists take their inspiration instead of some stupid, romanticized past era partway along the track. Marxists still romanticize the State of Nature (origin point, Alpha Man) but want him completed (Omega Man) at the same time.

Marxism’s Remedy to Alienation: Sublation

Marx rejects the mere rejection of private property “as human self-estrangement,” though. That, he argues, defines a low, ugly, brutish, dirty “crude Communism” that doesn’t have any higher culture or “wealth of previous development” to grift off of. While Fascism seeks to throw off the alienating force in a kind of counter-alienation, Marxism seeks to transcend the alienation entirely.

The problem is how it’s supposed to get there. Marx’s solution to this problem was through two means: violent revolution followed by “inversion of praxis” by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” First, there would be revolution, in which the masses would rise up under the direction of the Communists and “expropriate the expropriators.” Then, the Communists would establish a dictatorship in the name of the workers called the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would effectively re-educate, re-train, and brainwash everyone through forced re-socialization (“inversion of praxis”) to become progressively more socialist. The Communists saw this as a kind of remembering of who people really are (socialists), but it’s quite obvious that it’s just another counter-alienation move.

Curiously, Marx saw this process beginning with class consciousness, which he explained begins through “supersession” of the self. How did he say you supersede yourself and come to a class identity? “Supersession as the retraction of alienation into the self,” he explained. That is, you radicalize yourself by coming to see yourself through the lens of your own alienation, which will then awaken that suite of negative emotions that leads to the revolutionary radicalism that drives his project.

Marx’s project, like that of the Fascists in another fashion, is ultimately transformative, though: man must transcend private property, not merely reject it. Only in that way can he retain “the entire wealth of previous development” and high culture while creating a stateless, classless society in which man is as free as he (always) was in his State of Nature, from which he is alienated

Marxist Agitation into Counter-Alienation

Marxism therefore mobilizes class conflict by trying to awaken the exploited classes to their alienation and also some of the exploiting classes to their participation in the total alienation of society (think: “feminism is good for men too”). That solidifies it as yet another destructive counter-alienation project in which a sense of alienation is encouraged and then exploited to their political ends

Those who cannot be awakened into militancy or allyship, the Marxists always believe, have effectively sided with the Alien and must be destroyed. Maybe two hundred million corpses testify to how destructive and impossible this program is in practice. The result we can see: resentful people who conclude their lack of success in life is due to alienation by the Alien power adopt a radical politics intentionally destructive to the existing order

Their objective is to claim as much of the infrastructure of that order as they can (“seize the means of production”) but also to destroy not only everything they cannot but the entire order upon which it is based so they can replace it with their own (which always conveniently place themselves in abusive power they use to alienate people from their own societies as an interloping Alien). It must be this way because the roots of the existing society are ultimately either the Alien itself or that which allows and enables the Alien to alienate

The politics will always be radical. The power claimed will always be abused. Destruction and mass death will always result

These Are the Politics of Resentment

The reason for these Marxist and Fascist catastrophes isn’t superficial. It’s as fundamental as a foundation can be. Their entire world-concept is based on a theory of illegitimate alienation, resentment, pride, entitlement, covetous desire, self-pity, and rank incompetence at anything except manipulation and usurpation

The (Gnostic) metaphysics of the Alien is the taproot of these programs, whatever their forms, scapegoats, and excuses. Since they cannot see beyond these metaphysics, their project is not one of eliminating alienation (or oppression, or injustice) but of counter-alienation. They are always becoming the monster they believe controls the world.

How Are Marxism and Fascism Different?

Marxism and Fascism manifest differently (same energy, opposite direction) because they locate the pre-alienated state in different places and thus bear a different vision for the completed utopian future, but they’re ultimately variations on the same theme. 

Marxists have a better but more fanciful sales pitch: a world of total freedom and no oppression or injustice based on our State of Nature while retaining the plenty we achieved through our Fall from that noble original state. The Fascists boast a more realistic and brutal one: a complete return to a fictionalized Golden Era and the glorious future it promises for our people by kicking out and destroying the interlopers who stole it from us. Marxists, in fancier words, reject historical contingency while Fascists embrace it and place it in different “received” features like politics, culture, or race. 

Why Is This Woke?

What being “Woke” means, ultimately, is having “woke up” to at least one of these dark fairytales of alienation and having committed yourself to “doing something about it.” 

Woke is a distorted consciousness born out of a sense of alienation and is therefore a way of seeing the world and acting in it. 

The Woke consciousness, necessarily, is critical too, in the sense of Critical Theory. That’s why you could say that being Woke means using Critical Theory. Why? Because as dispossessed outsiders, the alienated people aren’t in a position to challenge (or even fully imagine or articulate) the circumstance that should have been absent the Alien power. They’ve lost or lack the means. What they can do, however, is criticize the Alien power for not being the glorious vision in their dark fairytales, allowing them to pull at the loose threads of existing society and radicalize the people who can be led into feeling dispossessed and resentful of it. 

Woke is therefore a parasitic, toxic mentality that attacks the society it is attached to because it feels wrongly alienated from it. Alienation is at its core, and that alienation is often not so much real as it is profoundly manufactured for the political ambitions of tyrants, some of whom share in the resentment.