The Division Between Left and Right Must be Healed

Despite all the troubles which have beset us in this foul year of our Lord 2021, there has also been an undercurrent of extremely positive vibrations. A sparkling, silvery edge to the dark storm clouds which are rapidly moving in. Despite politicians and journalists who constantly sow fear, hatred, and division between the races and along party lines, there’s a resistance growing – one which seeks to heal this polarization, and identify the ideological culprits who are behind it all. In this essay I plan to explore how the Left and Right fell apart from one another – and how we can reunite to guide our nations into a better future for all.

It was five years ago, in early 2017, when I first noticed that the inherent difference between the Left and the Right – Liberals and Conservatives – Whigs and Tories – bore a shocking resemblance to the cognitive specialization we see between the Left and Right brain (one side focussed and rule-obsessed, the other side creative and boundary-breaking). Scientific studies further reinforced the significance of this observation by demonstrating that political opinions are determined by in-built, biologically determined personality traits; specifically, two dimensions of the Big Five theory of personality. Conservatives are high in Conscientiousness, but low in Openness, while Liberals are the inverse – thus, as Prof. Peterson once said, “Liberals are the ones who start companies, but Conservatives are the ones who run them once they’re established.”

So if we imagine society as a sort of meta-mind formed out of its constituent citizens, organized into two parallel hemispheres, working in tandem but providing different functions – then this radical polarization is akin to damage to the corpus callosum. When this happens in an individual the two sides of their body will start to argue – left hand picks out the green shirt, then right hand picks out the red shirt. Even more striking is the blindness present in both sides. Right brain can’t speak, while Left brain can’t see. This is a major problem for individuals who suffer this sort of damage; is it an over-extended metaphor to suggest that radical political polarization is doing the same thing to society as a whole?

Earlier this year I saw a meta-film analysis titled “The Left Can’t See. The Right Can’t Speak.” which contrasted the movies Bird Box and A Quiet Place – two movies released around the same time, with very similar premises – monsters which force you to give up one of your senses – but the former involved Liberal characters who had to blind themselves to survive, while the latter featured Conservative characters who were prevented from speaking. Combined, the two were photo negatives, which sum up our current political milieu; the Right must be censored, the Left cannot see reality. Remembering that the brain hemispheres are wired in reverse – it is the left (Right wing) brain which speaks is not allowed to speak, and the right (Left wing) brain which interprets images that is not allowed to see.  

It’s no accident that the bicameral mind is isomorphic to bicameral politics; no more of an accident than yin and yang, or male and female. It’s a metaphysically derived inevitability which is only surprising in the manner that a fish might be surprised upon learning of the existence of water.

At this point I’d like to emphasize that this polarization should be terrifying to you. Evolution is an efficient mistress; she doesn’t give you an ‘artistic’ brain so that you can draw pretty pictures. Your right brain is an absolute survival necessity. The left brain believes it can categorize everything into systems and rules (this would be the political right) but every system of rules eventually fails when it encounters data which does not compute (see The Halting Problem or Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem). The right brain, meanwhile, is paralyzed by its endless holistic thinking; it can sense threats, but it can’t decide how to handle them. Similarly, the ‘liberal’ personality and the ‘conservative’ personality co-evolved with one another; they need each other. Society needs both progress and stability! Choosing one to the exclusion of the other is to choose civilizational collapse.

Thankfully we’re seeing a lot of people reaching across the aisles to the other side. In the past I’ve described how there are many personal bridges being built between individuals who were formally on ‘the left’ or ‘the right’ – the initial White/Black unity over the death of George Floyd, the developing alliance to resist lockdown orders – a growing number of my own audience who are temperamentally Liberal. I’m also seeing a growing intellectual movement which rejects the false either/or dynamic being propagated – Professor Jordan Peterson was the first prominent temperamental Liberal to break ranks, but in particular, I’m thinking of James Lindsay of New Discourses, who has done some fantastic work identifying the source of this political brain damage.

To put it plainly: the polarization is being driven by the Cult of Woke, and – much in the same way that Stalin took advantage of Trotsky and Lenin to install his own cruel tyranny – our current crop of technocrats is using the Cult of Woke to install a digital panopticon and a Social Credit State where “You’ll own nothing and be happy,” – or else.

We’re fighting against techno-communism, folks. And the only way for us to win is to reach across the aisle and shake hands with the people we thought were our enemies. Doing so will require some understanding of how we got to this point, however. So with that in mind, I’m going to do three things with the rest of this essay:

1. Describe the nature of the Cult of Woke,
2. Tell you how they coopted and misled the Left,
3. Explain how the Right’s backlash only sealed the divide.

The Cult of Woke is just that – a cult. It is not left wing, it is not a political stance (it has no political stances, despite appearances), it is nothing more nor less than a totalizing and destructive cult which seeks the destruction of – well, everything. It is anti-knowledge and anti-human. It is a modern iteration of the oldest heresy in the book – older than Christ, older than Babylon – Woke is just a modern form of Gnosticism.

To explain what that means, let’s first define what we mean by religion; what all peoples, everywhere have sought out when they looked for guidance in how we ought to live (to dismiss religion as nothing more than superstitious explanations for natural phenomenon is so utterly foolish that I shan’t waste any time on it). Religion is the apprehension of the axiom which makes all axioms. That there is a God – or Spirit, or Generative Principle – which exists unto itself, defined by itself, and that it created the world that is both logical and mysterious, and then populated that world with beings bearing free will, but also made in its own image, who could choose to follow its commandments, or ignore them. For present purposes, we can boil this down to two statements.

First – that the world which God created is scrutable to reason. He created a reality which is consistent and logical, and we can come to understand it – but this comes at a cost. Reality isn’t what we want it to be. You can’t have your cake and eat it too – sit on a tack, and you will bleed from the ass. This is what is meant by the saying that Fear of the Lord is the beginning – beginning – of wisdom. Second – that while we have free will, we are not sovereign in deciding what is good and what is evil. Valuation comes pre-built into reality; kindness is good, cruelty is bad, truth is good, falsehood is bad, et cetera. Certainly, life is more complex than blindly obeying black-and-white ‘rule morality’ – but nonetheless wisdom is achieved by seeking out the highest good, and charting a course intelligently through rocky waters. Somewhere between humility and boldness lies the True Tao – and of course, the Tao which can be spoken of is not the True Tao.

Now let’s consider Gnosticism. The Gnostics likewise assert that Man has a divine source, but that’s where the similarities end. Instead of God the Father who is both stern and forgiving – who lays down the rules, but wants you to succeed – they posit the Demiurge. What we call God is, according to them, an evil spirit who tricked us into slavery. The more that we obey his laws, and are rewarded for doing so (righteous living is often rewarded with material success and a joyful life) the more ensnared in his cage we become. Eden – from the Sumerian Edin – means “a walled garden”. We remember it as a paradise from which we fell, when we listened to evil and disobeyed God. The Gnostic would claim that it was the serpent which freed us; and any attempt to live according to timeless truth of Adam and Eve is an attempt to crawl back into servitude.

Ergo – to escape the tyranny of this Demiurge which calls itself our God – we must shatter every righteous rule which still remains in us fallen Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve. The True Eden is not yet achieved – it is a destiny promised us once we rebel perfectly, and transcend the metaphysical world where reality is objective and valuation is pre-determined.

Or to put it in simple teenager terms: “I reject your reality and substitute my own!”

We have the aforementioned James Lindsay to thank for exploring these connections in excruciating detail. The New Left, Neo-Marxist, Hegelian, Dark Alchemists he describes might be explicitly atheist but their mode of reasoning is entirely Gnostic. To put this in practical terms:

Frist off: the Neo-Marxists/Gnostics don’t have a plan. They have no idea how to ‘build’ the Kingdom of Heaven/Marxist Utopia – they merely assert that once we’ve done away with all of the social structures/the cage of the Demiurge’s rules, that on the other side lies bliss. So defund the police, tear apart the family, burn every single social institution to the ground – every single one of those social structures which we think is protecting us from the chaotic abyss of unrestrained Id is nothing but a trick from the Demiurge. E.g. men are ‘entrapped’ by social expectations of toxic masculinity. Okay – so as a man, instead of acting like a ‘tough guy alpha male’ to try and attract a mate, what should I do? “Who knows!” says the Gnostic, “Put on a dress and defy gender conventions!” We’re not talking about getting in touch with your artistic side, fellas – Miyamoto Musashi painted plenty of beautiful flowers after besting 100 men in the field of honour – we’re talking about destruction of all standards for the sake of destruction itself.

Second: “The greatest trick the Demiurge ever pulled was convincing his victims to enjoy their own enslavement.” Lindsay’s devoted many hours to Herbert Marcuse’s essays written during the Civil Rights era. In them he discusses how the greatest threat to the Neo-Marxist/Gnostic agenda was the potential of Blacks to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. If Civil Rights had been allowed to succeed, then American Blacks would have abandoned the Neo-Marxists just as quickly as the Labour Movements of the early 20^th Century had abandoned Leninism once a comfortable middle class lifestyle was achieved. The greatest evil of Capitalism, according to Marcuse, is that it makes people love their own enslavement; ergo, to maintain the revolutionary agenda, it was crucial for them to proliferate Black poverty.

Let me reiterate: it is explicitly stated by the “Father of New Left”, a.k.a. the Cult of Woke, that Black Americans must be kept impoverished so that they’ll be willing foot soldiers in the rebellion.

Third and final point on what this means practically: instead of having a plan or a goal, Gnostics have Praxis – a portmanteau of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ – and that Praxis is to always seek out and manufacture (Hegelian) conflict for the sake of conflict. So – let’s say that you and your friends are disobeying God’s will (hey, who isn’t these days?), but you’ve managed to find a workable solution. You’ve got a swingers club, and you’ve worked out some reasonable rules of consent, with an interview process to screen new members to make sure that they know what they’re getting into. As a whole it’s become a stable little organization you’ve all formed. Can’t have that, says the Gnostics; we need to Praxis. They’re no sexual jealousy? Then we need to manufacture sexual jealousy to eliminate sexual jealousy! And so the simple rules of consent are replaced with inscrutable legal contracts…

This is what we see in the current Woke obsession over race – the 1990s had largely become colour blind – and that’s no good, the Demiurge has trapped us again – ergo, obsessing over race became the new Praxis. A similar flip/flopping occurs over whether pornography is empowering or exploitative. When society accepts porn, they introduce conflict by claiming it’s exploitative; when society censures porn, they claim that it’s empowering. Ad nauseum. Praxis, disruption, conflict, destruction – keep burning away all the elements until we turn lead into gold.

This is the enemy we’re facing; a radical, heretical cult, as ancient as time, who seeks to subvert and undermine everything out of an insane belief that Utopia is just one more wildfire away.

I hope by this point in the essay you’re starting to see Wokism for what it is; and the tricks they used to manipulate the Left and the Right into hating one another shouldn’t be that surprising at this point. The Gnostics of a millennium ago employed religious ecstasy; they promised unity with Christ, without all of that boring Church attendance, ritual, and morality which the mainstream Church demanded. Hegel appealed to nascent Prussian nationalism, by describing it as the ‘perfected state’ (echoes when Adolf Hitler promised a 1000 Year Reich – yes, he was a Gnostic too). Marx played the economic trick on illiterate peasants. This current crop specializes in linguistic trickery.

The political Left appeals to those who are focussed on liberty, exploration, and innovation – the “Chaotic Good” personality type. The Cult of Woke has adopted that language, while flipping the meanings on their head. “Liberation” means obedience. “Diversity” means that there is a script that each race must follow, and disagreement is false consciousness. “Equity” means equality of outcome, and so forth. This, and further linguistic trickery was used to alienate the Left from the Right; just go visit my Rational Wiki page for further examples of how a Red Tory with Libertarian sympathies can be slandered as a vicious monster.

And to be fair, when the Right was electing Neocons like G.W. Bush to shred our civil rights and start illegal wars, it’s pretty easy to dismiss the Right as “Lawful Stupid”, if not outright evil; very few Republicans started to oppose the endless wars until the Tea Party era.

The Right, meanwhile, overreacted to these attacks that were initiated by the Cult of Woke, and then decided to discount the entirety of Liberalism – which is 50% of the population – as an error. Especially when they realized that they were being duped by Neocons (Trotskyists); many on the dissident Right (myself included) went off the reservation exploring alternative theories of government from eras past. Educational, perhaps, but not very practical.

While the Left has a problem with being too open minded, and allowing any damned fool to spout off his ideas, the Right has a problem with being too damned logical, which becomes apparent when you look at religious fundamentalism.

One of the smartest decisions made by Christendom was the separation of Church and State. The State – and politics – is the realm of the possible. Negotiated compromises on impossible questions, to keep everybody fed and sheltered. Nobody can know the right answers, and men who agree on principles and agree on facts can still come to different policy proposals, because we’re exploring the unknown. Furthermore, while the pursuit of goodness is crucial to any government – those that abandon God very quickly lose the Mandate of Heaven – the pursuit of holiness needs to be kept far away from the levers of power. Holiness inevitably begets tyranny – and the reason for this is rather simple.

Religion is the home of the perfect – that which we all ought to be striving for – and the perfect can very easily becomes the enemy of the good, when it is forced upon the world. When a theocracy of priests takes power, and attempts to control the world through the dictates of God – whose rules are so endless and impossible that even the saints will all tell you, “No, I am the greatest sinner!” – you wind up selecting a handful of sins (usually the more flamboyant ones) and punishing those transgressors a scape goat for all of society’s ills. Throw the homosexuals off of the roof tops – while ignoring the casual cruelty between spouses.

This is the present state of the Right wing in the West; fundamentalist, willing to lecture the Left on why they’re wrong, and were doomed to failure from the start – while simultaneously being completely intellectually bankrupt when it comes to finding a path forward for all of us. “Just go back to 1950!” is not a solution, it’s an “I told you so.” They’re like the angry father who kicked out his teen for smoking marijuana, forcing him to move in with heroin addicts.

I can’t emphasize just how important it is for the Left and the Right to start communicating again. Hegelian/Gnostic cults are what led to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot – all the horrors of the 20^th Century can be laid directly at the feet of Gnostics, and the psychopaths who rode on their backs into positions of political power. Currently they’re working tirelessly to instill mass hysteria and impoverish everybody in the West, while the technocrats are seizing up wealth, and designing new forms of tracking technology and predictive algorithms to decide who needs preventative coercion, lest they think in a manner not dictated by Diversity Thinking. Neither side, not the Left nor the Right, has the solution on these troubles all on their own; but when – if – they can come together, that’s when Golden Ages dawn.

We have the potential to turn this Earth into a Garden Planet. But only if we stand together. Otherwise – we’ll all hang separately.