The Gnostic State of Exception

In this third decade of the twenty-first century, liberal democracies across the West are in the throes of an upheaval surpassing that of the 1960s. The rejection of the common good and the loss of faith in civil society is now far more pervasive and toxic than it was with the mid-century counter-culture. Rather than liberal promises of social harmony, political stability, and widespread economic prosperity, we see a tragedy of the commons as arenas both physical and virtual are balkanized—that is, splintered into fiercely contested ideological enclaves.

Balkanization & Liberal Intolerance

Balkanization is a concept that emerged in the early 1900s about the Balkan Peninsula—then called Europe’s “powder keg” situated in the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, known at the time as the “Sick Man of Europe.” The region is infamous for centuries-long ethnic rivalries that spawned an insidious corollary to balkanization: ethnic cleansing—a perverse euphemism for forced population transfer characterized by extreme privation and often mass death.

Today, liberal democracies are undergoing their own form of hostile balkanization. For years now, ostensibly open-minded progressives, who previously preached tolerance for a plurality of views, have hypocritically—often aggressively—demanded that their political and cultural adversaries be “cleansed away” from public spaces, workplaces, film, television, social media, government, academia, and schools—everywhere really; perhaps not murdered en masse and consigned to earthen graves, but certainly cancelled, deplatformed, silenced, and disappeared. Now, however, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the situation is even more troubling, with some on the left, oblivious to the irony, openly justifying political violence against anyone they deem “hateful” or “fascist.”

The current climate of hostility and violence brings to mind a vexing binary advanced in the 1920s by German legal theorist Carl Schmitt—the friend/enemy distinction. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced,” he wrote, “is that between friend and enemy.” As Schmitt saw it, the very essence of all politics is friend versus enemy.

This distinction now saturates our lives, because practically everything has been politicized. The blindfold is off and justice is political. Entertainment is political. Forms of energy are political. The climate is political. Math is political. Biology is political. Pronouns are political. Even viruses are political. In these fractious times, there’s no escaping the clutches of the political. To wit: You may not be drawn to the friend/enemy distinction, but the friend/enemy distinction is drawing you in.

Media Disruptions

Recognizing, as Aristotle does, that human beings are innately political, what accounts for the cyclical nature of violent politicization? What lay behind the periods of relative calm punctuated by periods of extremism, like the climate of today, or the unrest that provoked the German Peasant Wars and the Protestant Revolution, or the antipathy leading to the two world wars, perhaps best characterized by Charles de Gaulle in 1946 as the Second Thirty Years’ War?

One probable explanation, based on the work of Walter J. Ong, is the restructuring of civilization and consciousness induced by historic transitions in how we use words to communicate and acquire knowledge. Ong’s pioneering work examines the shift in Western civilization from orality to literacy, from speaking to writing, a transition that defines classical Athens and Jerusalem. Athens represents the transition from the oral Socrates to the literate Plato, Jerusalem the transition from priestly orality and Temple ritual to rabbinic literacy and textual exegesis. As the fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, Christianity’s transitional figures are Paul and the authors of the Four Gospels, who set down in writing what Jesus conveyed only through the spoken word.

Writing is a technology, one that: shifts knowledge and communication from the aural to the visual; enables the creation of scriptural and philosophical texts separated from their authors and infinitely interpreted; enables translation, historiography, and the discovery of logic and moral reasoning (building on the if-then sequence of divination); provokes the separation of logic and truth from rhetoric; and facilitates recognition and refinement of mental interiority. It is no coincidence that the Ecumenic Age and the associated emergence of prominent religions corresponds to the widespread transition from orality to literacy.

Printing is the next technology of the word that reshaped knowledge, communication, and social order. Behind the early modern peasant revolutions, religious wars, and rise of Protestantism is the moveable-type printing press invented in the mid-1400s. Printing initiated the spread of literacy and with it the proliferation of novel ideas in politics, science, and religion, ideas that challenged traditional hierarchies and attitudes toward religious transcendence. Printing also further refined the interiority of consciousness—the popularity of reading silently to oneself arose from the printed page.

Continuing along the timeline, some 500 years after the printing press came the introduction of electronic media, which intensified the changes wrought by the book and deeply impacted the political and social structures of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s came the emerging prominence of film, radio, and amplified public address, and in the 1940s and 1950s television. Amplified speech was crucial to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, just as radio was instrumental to the popularity of Franklin Roosevelt and Father Coughlin, and television was central to galvanizing public opinion against Richard Nixon and support for journalists who, we were told, would save us from authoritarianism. Worth noting, too, is that like the term disseminate, the word broadcast came from agriculture, meaning to spread seeds—an ironic metaphor for the spread of propaganda, ideologies, and agitation as the West fitfully transitioned from agrarian to industrial.

In the final quarter of the twentieth century came the personal computer, which in the twenty-first century spawned the smartphone and the proliferation of social media, new media that provide forums of free speech but also dark recesses of ruinous ideology, where the wisdom of crowds can turn on a dime to the madness of crowds.

All this is neither to say printing, radio, television, personal computers, smart-phones, and social media are inherently bad, nor to contend that media disruptions account for every historical cycle of political violence, only to recognize that when introduced new technologies of the word increasingly democratize social communication and knowledge-sharing and consequently provoke significant levels of populism, mass movement, and mob activism. Such provocations invariably upend established orders and conjure up the political friend/enemy distinction.

Unmooring from Transcendence

Long before electronic media, however, when books still dominated, religious transcendence came under sustained philosophical attack. In the standard reading of Western philosophy, this attack was initiated in the 1600s by René Descartes with his method of skepticism—doubt everything then reason one’s way back to reality to establish Truth. Leo Strauss argued it was Niccolò Machiavelli who fired the first volley in the 1500s. Whoever or whatever the spark, it certainly reached a climax when Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “God is dead” in 1882. By this he meant that the centrality of God as the moral foundation of European civilization had dissipated and a grave crisis loomed over the horizon.

Like his father, Nietzsche was bound for the life of a Lutheran pastor when his religious faith was evidently destroyed by three books: David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1836); Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841); and Wilhelm de Wette’s A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament (1843). He wasn’t exactly elated by this newfound perspective, despite what so many misguided readers of his work believe. In fact, he was rather devastated. Thenceforth, his life became a tortured journey to articulate a reconfiguration of human nature without God, a philosophic struggle made worse by his nomadic lifestyle, frequent migraines, chronic insomnia, near blindness, and a brain disease (likely CADASIL) that ultimately reduced him to a catatonic invalid.

Aside from physical infirmities, what tormented Nietzsche was the future of humanity when the death of God drifted like mustard gas from the ivory tower down to the masses. Written in 1888, his famous passage from Ecce Homo has come to be considered prophetic: “we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with a war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have exploded—all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth before.”

A mere twenty-six years later, in 1914, World War I erupted, marking the first industrialized global war and with it levels of carnage that indeed the like of which had never been seen on earth before. With antenna for sensing the moral consequences of severing humankind from God, Nietzsche seems to have foreseen the horrors of the world wars and the Holocaust. His philosophical solution was to conceive of a new type of human being, the overman (Übermensch), an apolitical figure committed to nature who could be joyful and creative without God—an ambitious project to be sure.

Voegelin & Modern Gnosticism

Grasping the essence of Nietzsche’s philosophical project, Eric Voegelin identifies the wandering neuropath as a prophet of modern gnosticism. This orientation is materialist and fiercely committed to utopian designs for a total remapping of the self and the world, what Voegelin characterizes as to “immanentize the eschaton.” Voegelin derives this novel phrase from Christian theology, wherein the eschaton is the end-time or immediate aftermath, and thus the consummation of history, when God renders the last judgement on all persons; it also signals the defeat of all evil and the eternal blessing of the righteous. To immanentize the eschaton means to transmute divine otherworldly transcendence into profane immanence, to turn from a transcendent God to an interior gnosis, a hidden internal knowledge that will irrevocably change the self and the world.

Seeking to build heaven on earth, modern gnostics are necessarily opposed to the religious transcendence of Western monotheism. And like Nietzsche’s endeavor to conceive of a new kind of human being, gnostics seek to radically alter or recreate human nature. Among the examples of gnosticism Voegelin cites are “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism,” all of which are materialist and advance novel understandings of human nature. To this list we might add critical race theory, gender theory, and the eschatology of certain climate scientists.

Gnostics see themselves as alien to the world and any traditional order, and this alienation demands a total reordering, a totalitarian enterprise. Indeed, Voegelin argues that totalitarianism is fundamentally gnostic. As such, a totalitarian regime sets out to obliterate the old order (or its remnants after a period of decline) and construct a new one. Significant in this regard is that the European totalitarian regimes of Bolshevism, Nazism, and Stalinism are often characterized as religio-political and effectively displaced the old-order institutions of monotheism.

Cynicism & the State of Exception

Carl Schmitt is also known for another concept: political theology. His book of that title begins with the laconic statement, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Holding that Western political concepts are secular abstractions from monotheistic theology—hence the descriptor political theology—Schmitt sees the sovereign as a secular man-god with ultimate authority over the state and its population.

The exception, what we typically call a state of emergency, is any severe economic, political, or existential crisis befalling the state that demands extraordinary measures. Examples include the 1933 Reichstag fire that destroyed Germany’s parliament building, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which enabled governments around the world to quash civil liberties and implement draconian measures to severely restrict the movement and free association of populations. Indeed, government responses to terrorism and the pandemic signaled an alarming intensification of government intrusion in people’s lives at the expense of the civil liberties once considered central to liberalism.

The context of Schmitt’s concept of political theology and his associated critique of liberalism is, however, Germany during that fitful period from 1918 to 1933, years marked by the ineffectual reign of the Weimar Republic. The regime was Germany’s first attempt at liberal democracy, and with it came hyperinflation, lewd cabarets, violent street clashes, dystopian art, and more than 250 instances of proclaiming a state of exception—all of which paved the way to the rise of national socialism. Weimar was, in a phrase, a bioweapons lab of anti-culture and political instability, where, as Peter Sloterdijk noted, “we can best study how the modernization of society has to be paid for.”

Sloterdijk writes that Weimar hosted a culture of pervasive cynicism, which he defines as enlightened false consciousness, a sardonic variation on one of Marx’s concepts. Traced back to the kynical (dog-like) Diogenes of classical Greece, cynicism forever courses beneath the surface of Western culture. It bubbles up and crystallizes in the 1920s as a haunting dissolute false consciousness in Germany and Austria. “Because nothing is ‘sacred’ to this consciousness anymore,” he writes, “it becomes greedy. A world of instruments lies at the feet of this amorphous and imprecise greed, but it finds no real enjoyment in them.”

After World War II, the interregnum cynicism that morphed into Nazi nihilism and spawned the death camp was temporarily suppressed, but it makes a steady return to popular consciousness across the West, enabled no doubt by the absurdities of the Cold War and the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. By the early 1980s, as Sloterdijk observed, “the specific forms of consciousness of Weimar culture are beginning to become visible for us again through the prism of the cynicism of our time, which is now coming into its own.”

Max Beckmann’s “Family Picture” (Frankfurt 1920) perfectly captures the cynical, haunting, dissolute false consciousness of the Weimar era.

Today, the similarities between Weimar and the contemporary West are striking and appear to multiply by the day—the loss of civility, the perversion of virtue, the strident militancy, the brazen will to power, the worship of the body, the incongruous alliance between the mob and political elites, the justifications for violence, and the open and accepted antisemitism. Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt now resonate in uncanny ways because they experienced the upheavals of the 1930s firsthand and understood how easily a liberal democracy, when confronted with crises, can become hateful, tyrannical, and violent.

Authoritarian vs. Totalitarian

Among many who claim to be politically astute, the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian is conflated, ignored, or rejected; it is, however, a crucial one. Hannah Arendt understood this, writing in “What Is Authority?”: “Behind the liberal identification of totalitarianism with authoritarianism, and the concomitant inclination to see ‘totalitarian’ trends in every authoritarian limitation on freedom, lies an older confusion of authority with tyranny, and of legitimate power with violence.” She was referring to the broad liberal tradition, but that confusion is most concentrated among today’s leftists and left-liberals, evident in their constant use of the term “fascist” for anyone and everything even faintly conservative or traditional.

The difference between authoritarian and totalitarian was concisely summarized by Andrew Michta in The Wall Street Journal in July 2020, when rioters were burning down city blocks across the United States with glaring impunity—scenes that were eerily similar to the street violence of Weimar Germany. Michta wrote that authoritarians “seek to proscribe certain forms of political speech and social activity,” usually that agitating for the overthrow of the regime, whereas totalitarian regimes “prescribe an interpretation of the world and dictate the language with which citizens are permitted to express that interpretation,” claiming “unconditional authority to reach deep into each person’s conscience.” While authoritarians may restrict public expression, they tend to “leave largely untouched the private civic sphere of human activity,” while totalitarians aim to control not just outward expression and activity but also inner thought and belief regardless of the social domain, from the workplace and classroom to the home and the family; “totalitarians destroy traditional value systems and reorder the culture.”

Micha’s account of totalitarianism aligns with Voegelin’s characterization of modern gnosticism. Looking at history through the lens of their work, we can readily see that every totalitarian regime—be it the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge, or whomever—prioritizes the gnostic creed over the sanctity of human life; each seeks to reshape not just the outward behavior of the person but also interior thought and belief, to annihilate individual conscience, recreate human nature, and enforce rigid social collectivism. Any dissent from the ideology, even if harbored silently in thought, cannot be tolerated because it undermines the absolute totality of the gnosis. For totalitarians there is no freedom of conscience, only total conformity inside and out.

An Age of Rising Totalitarianism

Soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a belief emerged in the West that liberalism had vanquished the ideological totalitarians, a view notably articulated by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992). His Hegelian argument was that with the unraveling of the Eastern Bloc, the dialectical forces that drive history forward had ground to a halt and liberalism at long last triumphed. Clearly, like the exaggerated reports of religion’s demise in the 1960s, the last rites over history and totalitarianism proved to be premature autopsies.

Contra Fukuyama and fellow travelers, the more forthright historical assessment is that the West has been living in an age of incremental totalitarianism since the mid-twentieth century. It is a timeframe that accords with the institutional unmooring of Western culture from religious transcendence as well as the erosion of reason in political and social discourse. About that latter point, Augusto Del Noce wrote in The Crisis of Modernity: “The widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism or Stalinism is completely mistaken. In fact, totalitarianisms are founded on the negation of the universality of reason, so that any form of opposition to established power (in the broadest sense), be it cultural or political, supposedly does not express rational concerns but conceals interests of class (according to Communists) or race (according to Nazism), regardless of the awareness of those who criticize.”

Giorgio Agamben writes in State of Exception that “modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” Since the rise of the Nazi State in the 1930s, “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of exception (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.” In other words, since World War II, putative liberal democracies across the West have engineered or exploited one crisis after another to establish permanent states of exception—the aim of which is to steadily gain total control over the population and target those who refuse to conform to the terms and constraints of state tyranny.

The foremost crisis was, of course, the Cold War and associated beliefs that justified state surveillance and terror of citizens (like Project SHAMROCK and McCarthyism). Additional crises came in the 1960s and 70s with the counter-culture, the energy crisis, and what the Trilateral Commission called “an excess of democracy.” The Commission’s 1975 report, The Crisis of Democracy, was nothing less than a blueprint for neoliberalism and a permanent state of exception.

In the 1980s we had the baseless satanic panic, and after the Cold War ended in the 1990s, the crises enabling government overreach were domestic anti-government types and the climate. Then came 9/11—a crisis that spawned the ill-defined War on Terror and massive domestic surveillance. The next great exception was the unexpected populism that triggered Brexit and spirited a political outsider to the US presidency—a crisis countered with a host of invented moral panics about Russia, Ukraine, misinformation, fascism, systemic racism, and insurrection.

But the crowning crisis, surpassing terrorism and populism in its capacity to declare a worldwide state of exception, was the COVID-19 pandemic. Other than remote uncontacted tribes, practically every individual on Earth was touched by the hysteria. What’s telling about the government responses to the pandemic was the unequivocal degree of totalitarianism: widespread de facto house arrest, forced vaccination, mandatory facial masks, and coercive social distancing—all of questionable efficacy. Worse still, we were cut off from the elderly who died in isolation and encouraged to report family and friends who defied the totalitarian rules. The scale of censorship rivaled that of North Korea, while paragons of polite society earnestly said rule-breakers deserved to die.

Woke Gnosticism & Permanent Revolution

The pandemic has passed but the totalitarian machinations grind onward. Totalitarian power has an insidious inertia driven by institutional forces regardless of momentary electoral wins or popular discontent. This is evident in the long years of the Soviet system and the enduring tyranny in China and North Korea, just as it’s so with Western liberal democracies that have shamelessly restricted free speech and persecuted dissent from the gnostic tyranny, like the thousands across Europe and the United Kingdom arrested for social media posts deemed “offensive.” One has to wonder if George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four has been repurposed from novel to instructional guidebook.

Although the excessive censorship fraudulently justified by the pandemic has since been restrained in the United States, it would be a mistake to assume current political fortunes signal the end of woke gnosticism and its totalitarian aims in the political realm. While many recoil from the term “Deep State,” the persistent administrative state is real, and it’s staffed by legions of unelected—often unaccountable—bureaucrats, agents, and judges committed to woke gnosticism. Repulsed by populism, these Brahmins of the state within a state perceive their work as “saving democracy”—a truly Orwellian euphemism for despotic ambitions fueled by the preservation of power.

Not being a monolithic belief system, woke gnosticism is difficult to define, but to hazard a rough summation: it is a shape-shifting ideology informed by scientism, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, gender theory, historical negationism, moral presentism, climate eschatology, and much else born out of alienation and the negation of reason. It is realized through mass migration, biomedical control, judicial activism, lawfare, not jailing violent criminals, relentless propaganda, destructive protests, eco-terrorism, assault, and even assassination. Additionally, it includes an aversion to open debate, hierarchy, the nuclear family, public safety, law enforcement, fossil fuels, farming, capitalism, conservatism, European heritage, Jews, Christians, Western nation-states, and arguably even civilization itself.

The point of this litany of beliefs, actions, and animosities is to convey the myriad complexity of woke gnosticism—it’s more of a congeries riddled with contradiction than a coherent political ideology. When historical figures are condemned and erased for not being woke, when scores of physicians reject fundamental biology, when supposed anti-fascists use thuggery to intimidate citizens, when Pride activists wave Hamas flags, when environmentalists set fire to businesses, when anti-oil protestors deface linseed-oil artworks or block traffic, causing more emissions from idling vehicles, we know we’re dealing with the negation of reason.

If we view the current political rancor and social turmoil through the lens of the exception, as a function of the need for a constant series of crises, we instantly understand the political intent of woke gnosticism: to assert total control over populations by inducing fear and anxiety. Totalitarians thrive on permanent revolution and sowing confusion about identity.

The True Origin of Totalitarianism

In her landmark 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote: “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.” Voegelin agreed in his 1953 review of the book, writing: “This is, indeed, the essence of totalitarianism as an immanentist creed movement”—that is, a gnosticism. “Totalitarian movements do not intend to remedy social evils by industrial change,” he wrote, “but want to create a millennium in the eschatological sense through transformation of human nature.”

Voegelin’s main criticism of the book was that Arendt herself seemed open to human nature being altered and “adopts the immanentist ideology,” a stance reflecting “a typically liberal, progressive, pragmatist attitude” that abandons transcendence. “The true dividing line in the contemporary crisis does not run between liberals and totalitarians,” Voegelin wrote, “but between the religious and philosophical transcendentalists on the one side and the liberal and totalitarian immanentist sectarians on the other side.”

In other words, whereas imperialism, racism, and dismantling the nation-state may be instrumental to its rise, as Arendt contends, the ultimate origin of totalitarianism is mass alienation from the divine ground of existence—alienation exploited by political figures and ideological pundits, some cynical profiteers, some true believers.

To be fair, Arendt was in fact consistently disdainful of liberalism, writing to Waldmar Gurian in 1942, “Nazism is the spawn of that hell known as liberalism.” But she was also receptive to Voegelin’s critique, particularly regarding the centrality of alienation. One could even argue that her 1958 magnum opus, The Human Condition, is a brilliant rejoinder to address the topics of alienation and human nature. However, she remained reluctant to embrace Voegelin’s sense of (vertical) transcendence and instead maintained a commitment to Heidegger’s understanding of (horizontal) transcendence, which is that Dasein itself is transcendent in its being-in-the-world alongside the things that are ready-to-hand.

Voegelin’s critique notwithstanding, Arendt’s points about imperialism, racism, and undermining the nation-state remain instructive. Today, many political figures across the West are overtly hostile to national sovereignty and accept the racism directed at Jews and people of European heritage. And despite their obsession with decolonizing, the actions of the European Union along with the fiery demand to “globalize the intifada” and compel conformity to the new gnosticism all bear the stamp of imperial projects.

The burning question is: how in the world do we overcome the mass alienation at the root of the new gnosticism? Political power, audience engagement, and money are potent opiates for those who exploit alienation, especially in the realm of new media. There are thousands of opportunists eager to take the bet and enter a Faustian bargain at the expense of civilization. To point out to them that this or that idea “doesn’t work” is hopelessly ineffective because they seek not to build, only to destroy—and profit.

With deference to both Arendt and Voegelin, those of us dedicated to conserving civilization can at the very least: denounce all manifestations of racism; call out compelled conformity to gnostic beliefs as imperious and totalitarian; and, crucially, work to preserve the integrity and sovereignty of the nation-state as the locus of periagoge, as it is the institution and arena best suited to spark a return to the divine ground and the reconnection with transcendence. Nothing less will save civilization.

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