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.

One of the best ways to think of “Woke Right” without getting into the philosophical and technical weeds is “same energy, opposite direction.” That is, the Woke Right has the same motivating worldview and activity as Woke Left but pointing approximately in the opposite direction, very crudely.

Ultimately, Woke Right is a reaction to Woke Left in very similar fashion to how Fascism was a reaction to Communism in Europe in the early 20th century. The Woke Right sees the Woke Left succeeding at taking power and destroying society, and it also agrees that the Woke Left is as successful as it is in these two endeavors because it must have some things right. The Woke Right therefore adopts much of the foundational worldview, most of the tactics, behaviors, and strategies, and the same disposition toward the centrality of power in the world as does the Woke Left but seeks to drive its own conclusions. As commentator Carl Benjamin put it, the Woke Right realizes that “the problem with the Woke Left wasn’t the Woke part; it is the Left part.”

Since the Woke Right sees the destruction the Woke Left is causing, it naively assumes that doing roughly the opposite must be the right thing to do. When the Woke Right perceives the Woke Left promotes “anti-white racism” as part of its Race Marxism agenda and praxis, for example, it replies with a pro-white racialism. Since the Woke Left is concerned about radical egalitarianism for all of humanity through its twisted doctrines, the Woke Right replies with a radical intolerance that sometimes combines with cultural chauvinism or even racialism that takes the form of ultranationalism.

In this way, Woke Right has the same energy as the Woke Left; it just points that energy in an opposing direction. That opposite direction is called reaction, and the Woke Right players are reactionaries.

The Simple Example of Racialism

Understanding this issue properly is probably easiest through race, but it manifests in every dimension. With race, it’s pretty obvious.

Woke Left says “don’t be racist” but enables “reverse racism,” so to speak. That is, Woke Left does two things (doublespeak) with regard to racism: decries racism (in general but in practice only from dominant groups) while encouraging and enabling racism (against majority or dominant racial groups). Put even more simply, Woke Left basically says “all racism is bad except our racism.

Woke Right takes this energy and points it the other way. In some sense, it does reverse-reverse racism as a reaction to the bogus Woke Left “anti-racialism” program. In the simplest expression, the Woke Right replies to the Woke Left’s “all racism is bad except our racism” with “actually, racism is actually good (or normal), especially our racism.” That is, Woke Right racialism embraces racism as normal, universal, beneficial, or at least strategically necessary (“if everyone can do group identity politics and racism except whites, we’ll lose” is the logic) and encourages (rewards, incentivizes) and enables racism against minority or marginalized racial groups as a reaction to the obvious, and obviously bogus, double standard from the Woke Left.

The consequence is that reaction gives us obviously similar energy in the opposite direction, but the fact is that the energy isn’t just similar. It’s the same. It’s Woke in both cases.

To get under the hood, we have to ask why each side does this.

What’s Under the Hood?

Woke Left insists that its racial program (“antiracism”) is built off the idea of dismantling systemic racism with is unjustly imposed upon “minoritized racial groups,” alienating them from themselves and society. They don't believe in racism, they claim, and racism is not our natural state as people, but it is forced upon us all by the existing racial power structure. The “system” forces the racialist game on everyone, so that’s the game that must be played in order to “dismantle” racism. That’s the Woke Left’s “liberating tolerance” logic, just like it was Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” logic.

Of course, everything goes wrong because the Left’s conflict-theory approach to race stratification in society cannot fix race stratification in society or attitudes related to it, including racism. It can only make these issues worse. That is, they do not have “mostly right analysis, effective tactics, wrong solutions.” They have wrong analysis all the way down to the core too, and their tactics are actually evil.

In fact, their solutions are crude redistributions of opportunity that ultimately place unqualified “DEI hires” (Affirmative Action) into positions they shouldn’t occupy, so things start going wrong in consequential ways. Meanwhile, the “dominant racial group” is discriminated against and genuinely “minoritized” (made into a group with minority status in society) by the logic of “liberating tolerance.” As Herbert Marcuse said it, “liberating tolerance would me extending tolerance to movements from the left and withdrawing tolerance from movements from the right.” People notice this bias and reject it eventually.

Woke Right observes this state of affairs and decides things worked better without these Leftist manipulations, but we can’t go back. They don’t believe we can simply stop doing the Leftism and liberating tolerance because that genie is out of the bottle. There’s no going back; there’s only going through and forward. In this way, Woke Right reaction is actually a form of right-wing progressivism.

In many cases, the Woke Right decides that “repressive tolerance,” which “liberating tolerance” was meant to break, was actually a good thing. Society worked better, they observe, back when society was more racist, so racism must be good. In greater generality, the Woke Left would say that society is made of oppression and that’s why it’s terrible, so we need to overthrow oppression. The Woke Right would react and reply that society is made of oppression and that’s what made it work, but we lost that in the name of tolerance so we need to restore oppression to stabilize society.

The Woke Right response then goes on to justify a racial hierarchy with themselves on top by observing the problems equity programs cause and blaming it on the minorities rather than the programs. They further justify it by saying racism is normal and natural as the now-obvious “reverse” racism of the other groups demonstrates. Therefore, there’s not just reasons to be racist (it’s natural), but it was apparently holding society together (it’s good). Same energy, opposite direction.

Based on Woke Origin

In pursuit of establishing their fundamental worldviews, both Woke Left and Woke Right write elaborate fictional histories of their people and countries to justify their ridiculous beliefs (here: about race).

Woke Left tells a story about an idyllic State of Nature in the distant, lost past that was destroyed by the imposition of the majority race and its evil racial ideology. We were all “antiracist” by nature until the white man came along and imposed white supremacy and made us all racialists, and we can return (on a higher level) to this antiracism in the future, bringing with us the developments of the periods of segregation.

The Woke Left’s is not a story about an awful past but a past that was ideal and then forced into a Fall by an evil Alien power, which is awful after that up to the present day. It’s a rotten twist on the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. It’s a story of the alienation of man from his true ideal nature, to which he must return by going forward and through, not backwards. Oppression is the Original Sin of man, and man alone can work to overcome it.

Woke Right tells a similar story, though with important differences. It looks less far back and tells a romantic story about a previous Golden Era when the majority race was much more dominant and the social order was more stable and prosperous for the people who really matter in society (themselves, the “heritage” people). Man does not have an ideal State of Nature but a brutish one (Hobbes) we climbed out of by tooth and claw into fragile civilization, and then the Left burst onto the scene and broke the social agreements that made it all work.

Their story is therefore also one of a Fall by an evil Alien power: the inclusion of the inferior and degenerate, general weakening and corruption, and then the eventual displacement (alienation) of the superior from its heritage inheritance, which is civilization itself. Civilization was progressing (it’s progressive!) away from its brutish Hobbesian State of Nature until it became too tolerant and broke the spells that bound civilization together, and by restoring those conditions, by state force if necessary, and ending the foolish tolerance, we can get back on track toward the Golden Era we (those who count) should already be inheriting. Tolerance is the Original Sin of man, and man alone can work to overcome it. Again, this is same energy (Woke), opposite direction.

This Is an Old Story and a Woke Story

Both of these stories are fantastic distortions that serve their ambitions and ideology. They’re also both stories of Gnostic alienation in the social domain (Sociognosticism), though they choose their starting points, thus solutions, differently and according to their need.

Sociognosticism refers to the old Gnostic alienation myths playing out through sociological means rather than spiritualist means. Rather than an evil creator demon alienating us from our godlike state and from union with the true God, we have various sociological phenomena and forces alienating us from the rightful trajectory our lives should be taking and a demand to transform society into what it always should have been. In Sociognosticism, this will not be achieved through right spiritual belief but through right social and political belief and action.

Obviously, the morals of the stories are superficially opposite but profoundly the same: the Alien must be displaced to return us to our true inheritance. The energy of the Fall must be resisted and, through power, dismantled. Oppression must be defeated by the Woke Left, and tolerance must be defeated by the Woke Right. Then man can return to his true inheritance. Same energy, opposite direction.

Same Toxic Methodology

It isn’t just that the ground beliefs between Woke Left and Right are essentially two takes on the same toxic story structure. Where the “same energy, opposite direction” phenomenon of Woke Right and Left really becomes apparent is in their core methodologies, which are flattening and transgressing.

The transgression part is easy to understand: the existing boundaries enforced by the existing sociognostic powers have to be transgressed in order to open up space for the liberation of the people trapped by them.

The thing is, really understanding the transgression part requires understanding the (dialectical) flattening part. Flattening refers to flattening out the political universe from either Woke view into “our side” versus “their Woke.” It is the sociopolitical extension of the psychopathological phenomenon called “splitting.” Splitting separates the world into all good (my side) and evil (against me) with virtually no middle ground (middle ground is not fully on “my side” so it is “against me”). In early Christian Gnostic terminology, it is called Manicheanism.

From the Woke Left worldview, everything that isn’t Woke Left is somehow Woke Right, no matter how tortured the explanation has to be for how that is. Everyone who disagrees with them is “racist,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “Alt Right” (Woke Right), or whatever. Their main targets are members of the center left who can be radicalized through the menace of the expansive “Far Right.” Those who cannot be radicalized will be marginalized as “complicit” in oppression. Their worldview is flattened into a Manichean struggle of themselves versus the evil oppressive Other—liberating tolerance versus repressive tolerance. The reason for this is because it’s how the dialectical perspective (Woke conflict model) views the world.

From the Woke Right worldview in reply, everything that isn’t themselves is somehow Woke Left, no matter how tortured the explanation has to be for how that is. “Liberals” and “centrists” and “neocons” and “shitlibs,” “cuckservatives,” “Jews,” and “moderates” are all somehow crypto-Leftists. Their main targets are members of the center right who can be radicalized through the menace of the expansive “Far Left.” Those who cannot be radicalized will be marginalized as too weak (tolerant) to fight effectively. Their worldview is flattened into a Manichean struggle of themselves versus the evil tolerant Other—repressive tolerance versus liberating tolerance. The reason for this is because it’s how the dialectical perspective (Woke conflict model) views the world. Same energy, opposite direction.

Mao Zedong (Communist dictator) split the population into “the people” and “the enemies of the people” in this way. Carl Schmitt (Nazi political theorist, favorite on the Woke Right) called this the “friend/enemy distinction” and claimed it’s the “essence of the political” (that is, what makes politics political in the sense of explaining what politics really essentially is). These are two manifestations of exactly the same thing. The Woke Right adopting the friend/enemy distinction as a reaction to Woke Left Maoism is just another way of picking up Woke Maoism. From a Woke perspective, all politics is just the friend/enemy distinction, whatever they call it. The result is a complete flattening of the world into “(Not Woke!!!) us” versus “Woke them.”

This is the essence of Woke flattening, which can be seen as Sociognostic Manicheanism or as sociopolitical psychopathic splitting. It’s the same thing either way.

From Flattening to Transgression

Flattening is really crucial to properly understanding transgression. The point of Woke transgression is to transgress against the norms of prevailing mainstream society by acting as though you’re defiantly transgressing against the other side’s radical, artificial, imposed (repressive or liberating) norms.

The transgressive activity on the Woke Left is frequently just called “transgression” openly in general (e.g., bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress). It is also called “queering” in a particularly blatant specific.

Queering means deliberately violating the norms and confusing the bases for all legitimacy through transgressive activities against them. Simple enough. The Woke Leftist will transgress against an overarching societal norm like not having sexual fetish performances in the street in front of children who might even participate during a parade, and they will do so by claiming they’re transgressing a “repressive” norm like “heteronomativity” enforced by “homophobia.” Society has all these (Sociognostic) power dynamics that “straighten people out,” and it is their obligation to disrupt and dismantle those systems to liberate people from that evil alienating power.

If we keep our eyes on the ball, though, the target isn’t “repression.” It’s society. The goal is to break the norms of society to their own advantage. The excuse is breaking free of repression. Almost no one things drag queens and fetish performances in front of children have anything to do with gay civil rights, and most people (gay or otherwise) are horrified and even insulted by such an insinuation. The idea that a child who will grow up to be gay needs a drag performer as a role model rather than a doctor, pilot, lawyer, or businessman is not just absurd and misguided but generally disgusting.

From Queer to Based

The Woke Right does the same thing, misusing the word “based” instead of using the word “queer” to do so.

It’s amusing in a way. The original use of the word “based” as a kind of slang was not from “based in reality and principle and courageous enough to tell the truth against opposition” as every healthy (normal, reality-based, principled) person today understands it. It was a slang term from a rap song about freebasing cocaine and being high out of your mind. The term was adopted to fighting back against Woke Left excesses through the mid-2010s (as when Christina Hoff Sommers, a fairly mainstream anti-feminist, stood up against “third-wave radical feminism” plainly and boldly, got nicknamed “Based Mommy”). It then took on a life of its own, especially among younger right-wingers, who started using it to mean transgressing not just Woke Leftist policing of society but also many norms of polite society itself—in the name of fighting against the Woke Leftism and going further and further.

While the Left says “queering,” nobody says “basing,” but that would be closer to the meaning the Woke Right has for its trasgressive activity. It would also be a perfect parallel to queering, so I’ll use it here to make the point. “Basing,” which could actually refer to getting high out of your mind on (your own supply of) coke, would be transgressing against the norms of society in the name of standing up to the “fake and ghey” demands imposed by Woke Leftism.

We need to keep our eyes on the ball here again. The target of this behavior isn’t merely “liberating” Leftism but also the norms of society that are implicated by Woke logic in enabling the tolerance that took us into Woke Leftism in the first place. The goal isn’t to end Woke Leftism and carry on with society. It’s to transform society on the assumption that society itself is the foundation of Woke Leftism.

This manifests the same way with our earlier example: normal society rejects racism, and Woke Leftism does this awful “antiracism” scam, so being racist on purpose transgresses the norm of society in the name of defiantly rejecting the imposition of Woke Left CRT race rules. The project is being racist and getting away with it, though, transgressing the norms of a society that rejects racism. The Woke Right call doing this “being based,” by which they mean transgressive of society in the name of rejecting Woke Left. If we use the verb form, they’re “basing” like the Woke Left is “queering.” Again, the idea that it's more like freebasing ideological and social cocaine than it is like being based in reality becomes pretty obvious. It’s clearly same energy, opposite direction.

The Anti-Jewish Elephant in the Room

It isn’t hard to come up with examples of “queering” and, if we will, “basing.” We’re swimming in them. You can probably think of dozens, including the weird elephant in the room: antisemitism.

It is transgressing societal norms (queering) for the Woke Left to support terrorist organizations like Hamas and its bid to free “Palestine” of Jews. Mountains of weird arguments can be given about imperialism and Jews being white (usurpers of dominant culture) or colonizers or whatever, and have been, but the point is transgressing society’s norms (queering) against a militant outside religion that wants death to our society too and supporting terrorism. “The issue is never the issue,” David Horowitz told us, “the issue is always the revolution.” The rationalizations are all there to cover up this fact and make it appear they’re transgressing the norms of a repressive, nationalist, racist “Far Right” (that is, “resisting").

It is also transgressing societal norms (“basing”) for the Woke Right to step out of line with conservatives over the last 75 years and hate and blame Israel, Zionism, or Jews for many of society’s problems, including the problem of Woke Leftism. Mountains of poor and corrupting arguments can be given about imperialism and Jews being usurpers of dominant culture or whatever, and have been, but the point is transgressing society’s norms (“basing,” i.e., Woke Right queering) against a minority race and defending a strategic ally in a crucial part of the world. The rationalizations are all there to cover up this fact and make it appear they're transgressing the norms of a Woke or “Jewish” plot to damage “heritage” America and its people (defending and reclaiming).

Summary

Obviously, this could go on and on and on, but the point is obvious enough. From the position of a normal person who already understands Woke Left to some degree, what Woke Right means is “same energy, opposite direction” as compared to Woke Left.

Woke Right is a reaction movement against Woke Left that adopts significant portions of its worldview, tactics, and covetous relationship to power (same energy) and points them toward the project of un-alienating the rightful inheritors of society from the oppressive consequences of tolerance (opposite direction)—engaging a dialectic of tolerance, if you want.

This isn’t hard for people to understand, though. Woke Right is people who think and act like the Woke Left but for ostensibly right-wing goals. It’s as simple as that. The Woke Right is the “right hand of the Left.”