Peter M. Burfeind writes:
According to the various social theories—all claiming to be scientific—it is an ironclad law that to be human is to have all your thought and thinking inescapably determined by whatever structures you’re born in. A Cretan can’t stop being a Cretan any more than an apple can stop being pulled to the earth by gravity. At least that’s the pretense of the sociologist (who fantasizes he’s doing science, but that’s another story.) The only escape exists in something transcending the physical nature of the subject, something outside its earthy, physical nature. Thus, if you wished to escape your human-ness, you’d have to be supra- or trans-human.
This was the exact position of the Gnostics. A Gnostic believes our flesh imprisons us in various fleshly designations—our place in space and time; our sex; our family and culture; our race and country, the language we grow up with. An elite few, however, are able to escape the tyranny of flesh and its various institutions and systems. They are able to see things purely, free of the various constructs established by life in a physical world.This sets up, in effect, a radically binary world. Where the non-Gnostic (traditionalist) understanding of human thought invites a host of thinkers to discuss and strive for objective truth—yielding a form of federalism that when working best begets humility, tolerance, and curiosity as each deals with other seekers of the truth (i.e., what a university education used to be)—the Gnostic says all these posers are blinded by social forces they don’t perceive or understand. They’re all just on power quests, one blind thinker imprisoned by social forces leading another, all living the delusion they are pursuing the truth.
But he, the Gnostic, is not blind. Coupled with evolutionary thinking, the Gnostic is one who has “progressed” to the next age, who is on the right side of History, who is on the verge of trans-humanism, and who is charged with shepherding us benighted folk into the bright future. The program can’t be federal—a bunch of blind idiots leading other blind idiots in random circles. It must be universal, the enlightened leading the benighted out of systemic darkness into systemic light.
This is, needless to say, terrifying, because it dabbles in the idea that those not properly advanced in their thinking are of a lesser species, stifling the progress of the earth. And we’ve seen where that idea has led before. Sieg Heil!