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.

In the 1950s, there was a UFO cult called the Seekers, and it was infiltrated by a psychologist named Leon Festinger who wanted to understand why they believed what they believed and how their beliefs worked. In particular, he wanted to see what happened when their very specific central prediction, around which the cult orbited, did not come true. 

The Seekers believed there was an impending catastrophe that would strike the world on December 21, 1954. On that date, there would be a gigantic global flood. As a cult they engaged in lots of rituals and “awareness raising” activities about the impending disaster. 

The Seekers also believed in aliens—it was a UFO cult. Specifically, they believed that aliens would save the faithful Seekers from the coming disaster. In particular, the aliens would rescue the faithful Seekers for trying to warn people about the coming catastrophe. They also believed the aliens had the power to intervene on Earth if necessary. As everyone might suspect, the aliens would only intervene, believed the Seekers, if there was sufficient faith in Seeker doctrine and its vision of living a moral life on Earth. 

Obviously, what the Seekers believed amounts to a 1950s UFO-based version of the biblical story of Noah recorded in Genesis 6–9. Also obviously, they were completely wrong. 

Leon Festinger understood this and wanted to understand not just the Seekers but the phenomenon of cults. To learn more, he infiltrated the cult, posing as a faithful Seeker, and observed it through the lead up to the fateful December 21, 1954. Additionally, from his position inside the cult, he was positioned to observe and interview subjects when it turned out after that date that nothing of the sort had happened.

Eventually, December 21, 1954, came and went, and… nothing happened. This failed prediction marked a crisis of faith for the Seekers.

What did the Seekers do? Did they abandon their beliefs? No! They did not abandon their beliefs, except in a few individual cases. Instead, most Seekers experienced some form of emotional crisis and emerged from it with a powerfully increased commitment to the Seekers’ cult beliefs. Festinger was intrigued.

Most of the Seekers emerged from the crisis of their failed prediction firm in a new belief. They believed that their faith and devotion had saved humanity because the aliens saw it and intervened to prevent the flood, thus saving not just the Seekers but also humanity at large. Yay, Seekers!

That’s obviously nonsense, but it served as the foundation for the psychology not just around cults but around conspiracy theories (not conspiracies, which are real, but the “theories,” which are borderline crazy crap).

What Festinger observed is that under certain conditions, people do not abandon their conspiracy theories or cult beliefs when presented with solid evidence those beliefs are wrong. Instead, they modify and repackage their beliefs in even more tenuous ways so they can keep believing them. With the Seekers, the aliens magically intervened thanks to their Seeker faith. Who could check this claim? Well, nobody, and that’s the point.

Festinger explained what happened with the Seekers by formulating what’s called the theory of cognitive dissonance, which many have heard of but may not fully understand. When our minds are occupied with two contradictory but strong beliefs (cult doctrine versus hard evidence, for example), a state of great psychological discomfort and unrest called “cognitive dissonance” arises and becomes an impulse for the subject to resolve that discomfort, which is psychological but can be profound and manifest with physical signs.

There are a few roads to resolving the state of cognitive dissonance, but two stand out. One is to double-down on the cult belief or conspiracy theory, which is called “rationalization,” and the other is to accept the hard facts of reality and repent of your error, which is also psychologically painful.

Under many conditions, the psychological pain of facing reality is far too high for most people to bear, and they will instead rationalize. Perhaps the moral implications of their beliefs and resulting behavior is too high, so they cannot face it. This is easily understood. Imagine you transitioned your child and have to cope with the fact that you've done them irreparable serious harm in the name of “inclusion” so you could feel virtuous. That’s hard to walk back from. This recommitment to the beliefs rather than facing the emotional pain of facing the consequences of your error has been called the “Backfire Effect.”

Festinger observed with the Seekers that their commitment to the cult beliefs was too deep, so they could not overcome it. Instead, they not only came up with a rationalization for what had happened that preserved their beliefs; they also specifically came up with a rationalization no one could check—an unfalsifiable rationalization. No one could know whether or not the immensely high-tech aliens and their UFO came close enough to Earth to stop the flood but without being seen. It had to be taken on the Seekers’ word.

It turns out this phenomenon is common. When a cult’s doctrine gets crushed by a collision with reality, the psychological and social importance of the cult or its beliefs can win out and cause the individuals involved to make their beliefs unfalsifiable instead of letting them go.

The question here is why that commitment is so deep. The answer, when factual embarrassment and moral culpability aren’t the only explanations, is almost always that one’s social milieux and sense of identity get wrapped up in the cult and its beliefs that it’s more important to keep seeing yourself in line with the cult than in line with reality. For many people, there’s simply no going back if being part of the cult is who you are and how you fit in.

So how does someone get so locked into a cult that they’ll deny reality, even at the point of catastrophic falsification of their beliefs?

Being socially locked into a cult is usually its primary hold over people, particularly at first. Eventually this social lock will creep into one’s sense of identity through the processes of psychosocial valuation on the self (answering: how do I fit in as a valued member of a community I esteem, thus who am I in relation to this community and in a more universal sense?). At the point when the cult defines your identity and sense of virtue and worth, you’re deep in, and there’s no easy escape.

This gets worse in ideological, political, and religious cult circumstances, especially rigid and militant ones—like Communism, Fascism, Woke Left, and Woke Right. Part of this is psychosocial, as before, though with a particularly vicious twist. You will be heavily punished both socially and psychologically for any defection both while inside the cult and while attempting to leave it—and you know it. In fact, you have probably participated in that punishment ritual against others by the point of being fully ensconced in such a cult.

In ideological cults, though, there’s an even deeper layer because there’s substantial doctrine that allows you to intellectualize your beliefs in terms that sound true and reasonable. This feature facilitates the rationalization process of deepening cult commitment against exposure or contrary evidence (the “Backfire Effect”). While rationalizing the UFOs through unfalsifiable claims seems risible (from outside the Seekers), the ideology of ideological cults is the cult’s rationalization schema turned into a totalizing worldview. There’s already no escape!

Because the conditions of an ideological, totalizing cult can be so vicious to defectors of any kind, rationalization is the easier road in the case of doubt or encountering contradictory evidence, and most (not some) take it. Millions of people died, property was destroyed, and everything fell apart in a horrible war last time we attempted a mass movement based on your “new” world-changing beliefs? That’s because the people back then did it wrong and didn’t believe it sincerely enough! Obviously. Of course, this belief cannot be falsified.

This is the essential feature Festinger noticed, too. The rationalizations of the Seekers were that the aliens came and, from a safe distance, saw the faith of the Seekers and their righteousness and so intervened to stop the flood. No one could see this happen because it was far out in space and very high tech, and the bad thing the Seekers predicted simply didn’t happen. “Nothing happened” became “evidence” that something happened.

The way it was possible is that the Seekers changed the fulfillment conditions of their beliefs without changing their beliefs. Their new belief structure reaffirmed the cult rather than evidence against the cult’s bogus doctrine.

What Festinger noticed, ultimately, is that when cult beliefs and conspiracy theories encounter hard evidence that they’re wrong, or other exposure, most of the cult’s victims will cling to the cult’s beliefs by rationalizing them in ways that render them unfalsifiable.

While the example of the Seekers is clearly instructive, take the example of the moon landing being “fake and gay,” as some people today phrase it. The equipment from that landing is still mostly on the moon, and it has been observed in multiple ways by orbiters and even from the ground (in the case of the mirror array for laser telemetry).

Confronted with this evidence, deniers will counter that the imagery is all faked, probably by NASA, which is also “fake and gay” and also Satanic, including because the acronym represents something nefarious and evil in secret Hebrew which is probably also in the Talmud but only the one Jews will never let you read without having to kill you if you do…or something. The conspiracy mindset only grows deeper, and the evidence in front of their own eyes gets denied. At every turn, new evidence is just more “evidence” of the alleged conspiracy, and the belief becomes unfalsifiable.

Not incidentally, this is in a way similar to the state called “demoralization” that Yuri Bezmenov warned about with regard to Communist subversion. The “demoralized” person, Bezmenov explains, cannot see or comprehend as real evidence that contradicts his demoralized and propagandized view of the world “until the boot comes crashing down on his balls,” at which point he might still rationalize it away.

This is the ideological equivalent of locked-in syndrome, where someone is fully locked into their minds because their bodies are in every way absolutely frozen and unusable, even though they are fully conscious. Another good way of putting it, especially when the cult belief is a political ideology, is that people in (ideological) cults are ideological prisoners of war. People still wearing their masks alone in cars are Covid ideological POWs, for example. So are most deep conspiracy theorists, though for different belief programs.

You might think this is a dumb-people problem. Not so. Notice that rationalization is an intellectualizing and abstracting process, so higher intelligence isn’t a guard against it but a liability for falling into it. Smarter people can rationalize better. If you find yourself wondering how smart people can fall for this stuff, it’s that they’re still human (thus social) and are in a literal sense too smart for their own good. They're expert rationalizers.

Festinger did not have a particularly optimistic prognosis for this circumstance, and I have to admit for myself that as the internet and social media in particular have exploded cult recruitment and expansion (including conspiracy theories), that it's hard to be optimistic about our psychosocial environment under the circumstances we've built for ourselves.

There’s genuinely only one antidote: exposure to reality until the victim of the cult begins to see it for themselves. Something has to become undeniably out of alignment with the cult’s views, and the cults failures and manipulations have to become visible. Only then can the process of escape begin.

This process can take months or years, though, and it will almost never be from a sudden change of mind. The process of leaving a cult is literally called “deprogramming” for a reason.

Not that long ago, I released a controversial podcast titled “Communism Is Not Atheist” on the New Discourses Podcast platform. Without actually hearing what I said, a lot of people got really upset about it. I’d like to make the argument briefly for you here in writing.

Before I do, let me acknowledge the rebuttals. I think there are three things worth addressing. First, obviously, the Soviet Union and other Communist states deliberately implemented what they called State Atheism and declared themselves to be Atheist as part of being Communist. Second, there is the claim that Communism, particularly Marxism, is a materialist ideology that denies the existence of God, so it is clearly Atheist. There is a tendency for atheists to trend in socialist or even Communist directions. Having acknowledged these, I will return to addressing them at the end of the article, after clarifying my actual argument, which reveals that they’re tangential concerns.

Not Merely Atheist

The argument I made, drawing directly from the writings of Karl Marx, is that Communism as Marx conceived it is not merely atheist. The specific writings are namely, the Communist Manifesto, his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and his infamous essay “On the Jewish Question.” Part of my purpose was in fact to read Marx’s explicit hostility toward the Jews and Christians in that last one.

In EPM, Marx himself said very specifically and intentionally that “atheism is at once far from Communism” and then explained that the “philanthropy” of atheism is still abstract and not real, while that of Communism is real.

Therefore, we can conclude from Karl Marx himself that Marxism is not merely atheist. It requires something more, and that something more is Communism, which is its own religious view (worldview with associated duties of conscience). In saying “Communism is not Atheist,” I specifically mean it is something more than mere atheism, and that something more is religious Communism.

Marx’s Hidden Theology

I go a little further too. While repeatedly acknowledging that the answer to the question is Communism atheist? is “yes and no,” I also indicate that Communism still has something like a deity figure at its heart. That figure is man himself. Not you man or me man or any individual man. Mankind, all man, as socialist man.

You can argue that this isn’t a god, God, or any kind of deity, but that denies specifically what Marx was doing. Marx’s program was derived from the Lutheran heretic Hegel’s program before him, and Hegel’s program was to actualize the Absolute Idea, which he saw as identical to God. Marx sought to remove all of Hegel’s theology (literally) and to materialize his philosophy, but this is merely a kind of intellectual slight of hand that Marx played on himself and his followers. He never escaped the idealism of Hegel; he just relocated it “in the material.”

Marx viewed Communism, “as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement,” as the ideal for humanity—literally the Ideal Man(kind). Hegel’s Absolute is just relocated into man who realizes himself to be his own Creator, not in the sense of physical procreation but in the process of humanizing himself through humanizing his environment. Humanizing here is meant both literally and figuratively: literally in the sense of making him human instead of a beast and figuratively in the sense of returning him to what makes him truly human, which is being a Communist. In the same sentence in EPM, Marx described this transcendent Communism as “the complete return of man to himself as a human (i.e., social[ist]) being.”

Because Marx regards man as his own Creator in the sense of putting the human (so “divine”) spark into himself, his idea of Communism is way outside of what atheism would recognize or claim for itself. Because this process returns man to his Absolute state from which he has been alienated (by the introduction of private property, thus individualism), his idea of Communism goes even further outside of what atheism would recognize or claim for itself. Because the parent belief Marx used was Hegel’s, which ultimately believes our state of alienation from which we are returning is human alienation from the Absolute (God), which we are already intrinsically a part of, there’s no good reason at all to accept Marx’s formulation of Communism as being “atheist.” It just rejects existing religions, especially Christianity and Judaism.

My Actual Argument: An Agricultural Analogy

Although what I just said above is sufficient to my point, in the podcast, I made my argument by reading Marx and providing an analogy. The analogy I give is agricultural.

If you have a field that you want to cultivate, the first thing you have to do is clear the field of the existing growth so you can prepare and till the soil and plant your crops. Religion, in Marx’s view, would be like the native growth or some previous cultivated crop that isn’t Communism. In order to “plant” Communism, the existing growth has to be cleared away.

The “atheism” in Communism, then, is like clearing the field so you can plant Communism. Atheism isn’t the point. It isn’t the point at all. According to Marx, it’s not only not the point but also wholly inadequate to how he conceived of Communism.

Atheism is not the point of Communism in exactly the same way that clearing a field isn’t the same as growing crops. This isn’t hard to understand. Marx believed existing religion had to be plowed out of the way so people would be able to become Communists.

He makes this point very clearly in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which is the famous “religion is the opium of the masses” piece. His argument is that the critique of religion—culminating in throwing it off (so, “atheism,” sort of)—is necessary to bring people back to a position where they can recognize their material suffering “without illusions.” Facing their suffering head on without religious “opium” would lead them to want to fix their material suffering. Then you can make them Communists.

Once people are ready to tackle the real conditions (“root causes”) of their suffering, Marx believed, they could be easily led to Communism as the proper solution to the causes of their suffering. That is, Marx believed that getting religion out of the way is like clearing a field so you can plant Communism in the bare soil of their material suffering, which religion had previously obscured from them.

Guess What: Marx Was Wrong

Okay, James, you might ask, if that's really the case, why didn't you titled your podcast "Communism Isn't Merely Atheist"? Hmmmmm...?! Well, if you listen to the podcast, you’ll understand why.

As Communists rapidly learned in Soviet Union and its satellites, and beyond, stamping religion out of people is effectively impossible, especially with faithful Christians and Jews. Clearing the ground, so to speak, is a lot easier written about in theoretical critiques than it is accomplished in practice with actual faithful people. If nothing else, the horrifying Pitesti Prison experiments from Soviet Romania prove this fact, though it was shown over and over again throughout the entire Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.

Communism doesn’t care about how it achieves operational success, though. It only cares about achieving operational success. So, if you can’t beat or torture the religion out of people or convince or coerce them to adopt atheism as a bare-soil starting place to become Communists, but you need them to become Communists, what can you do? The answer is simple: you co-opt their religion to Communism. Marx didn’t suggest this, but the Soviet Union figured it out.

The KGB was particularly good at this, whether in establishing the Registered Church in the Soviet Union as a replacement for the Russian Orthodox Church, helping to establish the World Council of Churches for the West, or co-opting Catholicism (especially in South America) through Liberation Theology. Protestants, through a different pathway, developed something called a “theology for the Social Gospel” that did roughly the same thing. The Christian Left, as it is called, has been marching various forms of Marxism into the West through Christian religion specifically, and quite successfully (including by being strongly positioned to discredit Bible-believing churches as houses of bigotry and extremism).

As it happens, virtually all of what we call Woke (Leftism) today came to us through the crucible of Liberation Theology instruction turned into “secular” education. The tool is called “critical pedagogy,” and it was developed from Paulo Freire’s adaptation of Liberation Theology to peasant literacy campaigns under the branding “Education for Liberation.” Henry Giroux, a disciple of Freire who frequently described his work in explicitly religious terms like “prophetic,” made critical pedagogy out of Freire’s model plus some of the “European theorists,” namely some postmodernists and Critical Theorists.

In short, the largely Judeo-Christian West was mostly impervious to Communism through the method Marx advocated, which included the idea that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion. That is, Marx believed you make the people atheists, then they’ll recognize their true suffering in a “real” way, and you can use that to make them Communist. And… it didn’t work, at least not in the Judeo-Christian West. It didn't even work in the Orthodox Christian East, to be honest, hence requiring the KGB-run Registered Church.

The ethos of Marxist Pragmatism as their general approach to their agenda (operational success justifies the means—“practice is the criterion of truth”) is not to keep doing something that doesn’t work (or to do only that), like trying to force people out of their religion. It is more practical than that. The solution was for Marxism to co-opt religion itself and turn it into a vehicle for producing Communists.

Extending the Agricultural Analogy

In the agricultural analogy, as someone offered me later, some time after the podcast was released, Communists co-opting religion would be like realizing that you can’t uproot certain stems in the religious field, so rather than trying to dig them up (impossible), you cut them strategically and graft Communism on.

Imagine an apple tree, for example, that grows healthy, good apples. Now picture Communism like really bad, awful crabapples. The method would be to make cuts in the healthy apple tree and graft on crabapple limbs, and allowing them to start growing alongside the native limbs. Bit by bit, as they establish, you cut the good apple limbs off and let people have the bad crabapple limbs in their place. Eventually, all the good apple limbs are cut off, and all the limbs are Communism that has been grafted on.

A co-opted religion in this analogy would be one that still looks and sounds like a Christian church or Jewish synagogue but that bends the teachings toward Marxism. The root stock of the religion is still the same, but what it’s actually teaching is different. Both the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology are explicit examples of this in practice in Protestantism and Catholicism—and the Registered Church in the Soviet Union is extremely obviously another.

The result is straightfoward co-optation of religion rather than its replacement. A “good tree” is slowly transformed into one that only produces bad fruit.

This offered the Communists a second method other than just atheism for overcoming religion and replacing it with the religion of Communism. First, they could clear the ground (atheism), and, second, they could co-opt the existing crops (subversion). Both methods can be used, and in the latter case, the Communism may never have to take on “atheistic” forms at all. It can go on being a simulacrum of the religion it has co-opted.

For this reason, I couldn’t meaningfully say that Communism isn’t merely atheism because it doesn’t have to take the atheist route at all. In fact, in practice throughout the West, the co-optation path has been much more successful than the criticism of religion path, though they have worked together fruitfully in recent decades. As it turns out, the atheism part is not a necessary condition to Communist radicalization and misintegration.

Judge Them By Their Fruits

Jesus said that a bad tree can only produce bad fruit, and a good tree will produce good fruit. The diabolical mind of Communists figured out a way around this, at least with the poorly discerning. They take a good tree and graft on limbs of a rotten tree and slowly, bit by bit, remove the good limbs. Now you have a tree with good root stock that only produces bad fruit. Isn’t that something?

Of course, Jesus told us what to do with this situation too: judge them by their fruits. What the Communists do is enable people to go on judging by the good root stock while the fruiting limbs themselves have been wholly replaced by bad fruiting stock. Judging them by their fruits (which is an appeal to Common Sense Realism and Empiricism, by the way) turns out to be the necessary test of discernment, not judging by the root stock or what it “should have been” absent subversion and co-optation.

Addressing Objections

I promised to address the objections people have raised, at least in brief, at the end of the essay, and here we are. These were: first, that the Soviet Union pushed State Atheism; second, Communism is materialist; and third, atheists tend toward socialism.

About State Atheism

Yes, the Soviet Union and Mao’s China were explicitly running State Atheism and officially persecuted religion. Their hard Marxist materialist worldview demanded getting belief in God out of the way. This is a historical fact. (It’s also a historical fact that, at least in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, they couldn’t keep a good thing down and had to switch to a hybrid program that included a lot of co-optation too.)

This fact doesn’t make Communism atheist, though. All it does is say that the Soviet Union, for instance, tried to use a bulldozer to clear the religious field in line with Marx’s prescriptions for his man-centered religion. The goal of the program was to produce Communists with no competing religious loyalties as the belief in Communism is that it will not work when anyone has competing loyalties, whether to self or to God. In Christianity and Judaism where loyalty to God is considered a personal relationship, there is an obvious problem Communists have to overcome.

The goal, though, is total loyalty to Communism because the only way Communism is believed to be able to work is by man, as a collective, making a complete return to Communism.

Regarding Materialism

This objection has actually already been addressed at the start of the essay. Marx’s materialism was a false materialism located within the broader German idealist tradition. Marx’s entire Communist project was to idealize the world and man in it. The word he used for this program was “humanize.” By humanizing the world—meaning remaking the world including “man as his own object” in his own image—man would complete himself and realize his true (ideal) nature: Communist.

So Communism claims not just to be a “scientific” and “materialist” ideology but also uniquely scientific and doubly materialist (only the material world exists, and material conditions are socially and political determinate), but it’s just lying to itself. Marx couldn’t escape Hegel’s heretical theology by “turning it on his head,” and once we see Marxism for what it is, it’s clear he didn’t really even try. Marxism is bad, heretical theology posing as socioeconomic analysis.

But Atheists Go Socialist

Of these objections, this one has the most purchase. While I titled a section above “But Marx Was Wrong…,” as it turns out, he wasn’t always entirely wrong about everything.

When Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that people who give up religion perceive “real” (material) causes of their problems and thus set to solving them in the real world, he wasn’t completely wrong. I don’t agree with him that religion is some “opium of the masses,” but he did manage an insight that people who accept a materialist worldview realize we have to solve our own problems without God’s help (even if that be blasphemy on their part, they will believe it).

Atheists therefore do have a tendency to try to figure out ways to incorporate human beings intentionally and deliberately to solve larger human challenges, some of which seem resistant to private-sector and individualist solutions. Often naively, they imagine the state is a good tool for incorporating the “general will” of the people and solving these problems.

Of course, this puts them in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, as we run down the course of Continental thought, both Hegel and Marx. Hegel believed the state is in fact the incorporation of the people’s general will and as such represents “the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.” Though it’s more than I’ll explain here, Marx accepted this idea negatively, believing the state to be an instrument of transforming man (who are their own end) to a Communism so perfect a state wouldn’t be necessary.

I agree that there is a temptation in atheism that will lead someone, especially someone ignorant about economics and naive about statism, to tend toward socialist views. That is, atheism can be (but isn’t necessarily) fertile soil in which the seeds of Communism can be planted, even on its own terms. In the same way that fertile soil isn’t a watermelon that grows from it, though, this possible disposition does not make Communism atheist. It just suggests that atheists are, under certain circumstances, quite predisposed toward Communism as a potential means of solving societal problems they don’t know how to solve.

On the other hand, as the Communist co-optation and subversion of religion amply proves, so is ignorant and naive religious belief. Much Communism has come our way out of a completely misappropriated line attributed to Jesus as a central Christian precept: love thy neighbor. The same ignorance of economics and naivety about statism can lead Christians of sincere belief to the same incorrect conclusion as their atheist counterparts: that righteousness can somehow be incorporated through the state.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, then, Communism isn’t atheist, even though Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and others aimed to mandate atheism, and even though Marx saw it as a necessary precondition (and, in fact, consequence) of Communism. The story is simply more textured than that.