Postmodernism and Wokeness are Rebellions Against the Demiurge and Its Power Structure

Victory of ignorance over knowledge was represented in Gnostic allegory as the victory of the Ignorant Demiurge over the Knowledgeable Pleroma.

Antony Kagirison

Human history is a history of the victory of the less intelligent leader (who had more willpower) over his/her intelligent rival with less willpower. The less intelligent Josef Stalin won over the intelligent Leon Trotsky. This also applies to people. The Turkish invaders overran the Byzantine Empire and the savage Mongolian barbarians destroyed the Kievan Rus, the Han Civilization of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the Abbasid Caliphate. The same can also be said about ideas. Semitic Monotheism won over the intelligent Neo-Hellenistic Monotheism, and Islam won over Zoroastrianism in Persia (and irreversibly dimmed the Persian mind). This victory of ignorance over knowledge was represented in allegory as the victory of the Ignorant Demiurge over the Knowledgeable Pleroma in gnostic cosmology.

The popular fiction writer, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, explores this theme of the ignorant conquering the intelligent in her fictional works on utopias that become dystopias. As a fiction writer, Le Guin has the comfort of creating and destroying her fictional worlds. Fiction allows her to exercise her power of creation just like God in the Talmud who created and destroyed worlds until the present world was created and found to be perfect (or the best of all possible worlds as the German Philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz would later put it when explaining Theodicy).

Salvation through Knowledge

The less intelligent Victor abhors (and even despises knowledge) and creates despotism built on a power structure whose three key pillars are misery, ignorance, and prejudices. For this despotic tyrant, knowledge endangers this power structure and can destroy it, along with the tyranny it supports.

Gary North, the author of the voluminous, An Economic Commentary on the Bible, introduced the phrase: fat book theory of social transformation. North argues that fat books (which are a representation of expansive knowledge) have been central to political and social revolutions in Occidental History. He gives the example of the Bible that ended Roman Paganism and replaced it with the Christian Era. He also mentions other fat books that were central to political and social transformation. Some of the books he mentions are the City of God by Saint Augustine of Hippo, Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas, Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuael Kant, Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone, Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, and Das Kapital and Theories of Surplus Value by Karl Marx. He also acknowledges that some short works have had a monumental impact on human history, and some of the books he mentions are The Prince and Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli, Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Second Treatise of Government by John Locke, Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, and the legendary Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

These books contained knowledge that when put into practice ended up destroying or reforming existing socio-political power structures. This shows the power of knowledge to transform the society. Also, knowledge can have a salvific value as noted in the Book of Genesis.

“In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, records Genesis 2:9b. One of the principal reasons why the man was created is mentioned in Genesis 2:15, “The LORD God took the man (Adam ha-Rishon) and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it”. So, the man was created to be a worker who abhors unnecessary knowledge as the Hebrew God commanded in Genesis 2:17 “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die”. Early Christians interpreted this verse as proof that the God of the Hebrew Bible is the demiurge who does not want human beings to acquire knowledge that will liberate them from being slaves of fate and nature.

In the present day, only postmodernism and wokeness have rebelled against the demiurge and are trying to dissolve its power structure and liberate humanity from the cycle of despotism-freedom-despotism that has been established as the demiurgic order of cyclic history.

Postmodernism and Wokeness

Philosophical Postmodernism was borne in elite French universities and Wokeness as an ideology was developed in elite American universities, especially the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). They analyze and study knowledge and its supporting power structures.

Wokeness is a liberation ideology that has liberated the oppressed from demiurgic power structures. Newton’s third law of motion states that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction of the same magnitude, and wokeness has generated fierce opposition (sometimes of unequal magnitude) from members and supporters of the demiurgic power structure that demeaned other races, degraded women, devalued the poor, denied existence of non-binary genders, and discredited non-heterosexual intercourse as madness that needs to be managed in psychiatric asylums. This demiurgic power structure has supported not only the snobbish wealthy elite in America, but empowered the non-progressive elites in Gulf Arab nations (where they have created tyrannical monarchies) and Latin America (where they have used political violence and massacres to disempower indigenous tribes, progressive politicians, and the peasantry). In India, the demiurgic power structure manifests as the caste system and social norms that normalize unequal treatment based on caste, race, ethnicity, religion, and social status.

The greatness of America and the magnificence of Europe is rooted in their humanism. Humanism is not the norm outside the Occident. In fact, outside the Occident, superstition and irrationality are the norm. The great mission of the Occident now is to export postmodernism and wokeness across the entire globe, and in the process, raise the global consciousness towards humanism. As expected, this will be resisted by governments that are custodians of backwardness, despotism, and prejudices. Their anti-progressive governments have used their two most potent powers – the power of ignorance and the power of misery – to reduce their populace to squalor, destitution, vices, degradation, crime, and wretchedness. It is why they are opposed to liberating ideas like wokeness.

In my opinion, the only demerit that wokeness has is its unhealthy fixation with race politics, which reduces identity politics into a competition between races. The idea that salvation comes through skin color should be condemned and excoriated in public. In fact, it is white abolitionists who ended slavery in Africa and Arabia where Arabs, Berbers, and Black Africans kept slaves and considered slavery as normal. Freretown in Mombasa was established by Sir Bartle Frere as the home for free slaves. There is a reason why wokeness and postmodernism developed only in the Occident and not in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. Non-whites are not really saints as the ideology of Third Worldism as born at the Bandung Conference of 1955 tried to present them.

To deny the role played by Europeans (including Russians) and Americans to free humanity from the bondage of superstitions, despotism, and institutional prejudices is to abuse history. It is only the people in the Occident who have confronted systemic inequality. Outside the Occident, systemic inequality has been accepted as the norm, and grand narratives have developed to vindicate this normality.

In wokeness and postmodernism, I find the influence of Freemasonic ideals of liberty, fraternity, and pursuit of happiness in a liberal society. How is this so if Postmodernism is against hierarchies and the system of initiation in Freemasonry creates hierarchies?

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