[Short Post]: Gnosticism Of Centre Right
Note: This is supposed to be a short post intended to be answer to question I posed on twitter
Also, my previous posts on "centre right" [1] [2]
Related [1]
I think it can be said incontrovertibly that last decade has witnessed an explosive growth in, for lack of better words, centre-right movement, both in terms of online supporters as well as emerging ideational-discursive ecosystem (something I predicted in passing in one of my earlier posts )
Now it shouldn't surprise anyone that I am not exactly enamoured with this "libertarian-lite" movement. There are multiple reasons for that (which also explain its popularity), however the fundamental error, from which all others emanate, is that of gnosticism.
Gnosticism is a collection of somewhat related religious doctrines, developed alongside Christianity, whose distinctive feature was extreme rejection of material, sensual world which was considered evil and false, having created by demiurge, and a single minded embracement of spiritual world considered pure and true.
It is my contention that Centre-right movement also suffers from gnostic vision, except instead of spirituality, its proponents consider abstract thought and sterile rationality, uncontaminated by all the incertitudes and irrationality and passion of human condition, to be pure and true, and hence end goal of their intellectual interrogation. Seduced by siren songs of intellectual certitudes, they lose sight of their end-goal, essentially reversing it, which is proving intellectual scaffolding for eudaimonia with its crooked timber and all.
In that they come dangerously close to how Nietzsche described Christianity
To be charitable to centre-right movement, this gnostic vision may not be peculiar to it but to any intellectual endeavor. The only difference between a drunkard and intellectual is that while drunkard looks for the keys lost in dark under the lamppost, the intellectual insists that the keys should have been lost under the lamppost.
Also, my previous posts on "centre right" [1] [2]
Related [1]
I think it can be said incontrovertibly that last decade has witnessed an explosive growth in, for lack of better words, centre-right movement, both in terms of online supporters as well as emerging ideational-discursive ecosystem (something I predicted in passing in one of my earlier posts )
Now it shouldn't surprise anyone that I am not exactly enamoured with this "libertarian-lite" movement. There are multiple reasons for that (which also explain its popularity), however the fundamental error, from which all others emanate, is that of gnosticism.
Gnosticism is a collection of somewhat related religious doctrines, developed alongside Christianity, whose distinctive feature was extreme rejection of material, sensual world which was considered evil and false, having created by demiurge, and a single minded embracement of spiritual world considered pure and true.
It is my contention that Centre-right movement also suffers from gnostic vision, except instead of spirituality, its proponents consider abstract thought and sterile rationality, uncontaminated by all the incertitudes and irrationality and passion of human condition, to be pure and true, and hence end goal of their intellectual interrogation. Seduced by siren songs of intellectual certitudes, they lose sight of their end-goal, essentially reversing it, which is proving intellectual scaffolding for eudaimonia with its crooked timber and all.
In that they come dangerously close to how Nietzsche described Christianity
To be charitable to centre-right movement, this gnostic vision may not be peculiar to it but to any intellectual endeavor. The only difference between a drunkard and intellectual is that while drunkard looks for the keys lost in dark under the lamppost, the intellectual insists that the keys should have been lost under the lamppost.
