Inverted Gnosis, by The Perpetual Self Optimizer

PSO on Gender and Theology in the Progressive Mind

A Brief Overview of the Progressive Mind’s Machinations

The progressive mind is a perverted one; its existence, putrid and doughy, arises from the bubbling pan of secular liberalism and ferments into the desire to attain freedom from every collective association. This “freedom” is a fundamentally fragile one: a pure, unterrified individualism constituting what Christopher Lasch described as “the seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familial, or religious obligations… [sanctioning] a revolt against convention, against bourgeois solemnity, against [perceived] stupidity.” The progressive mind is a fluid one, while simultaneously being unimaginably rigid – it morphs readily into new categories, eschewing traditional, time-honored ones for the momentary ecstasy of novelty, oftentimes abandoning and rebuking yesterday’s new categories on a moment’s notice. But at the same time, it proclaims whatever ephemeral position it occupies on its infernal, churning path as being the only permanent one: ”it’s always been this way.” It rejects historicity altogether, and in its narrow scope sees the present as an eternal state, a continuous line upwards, ascending forever.

The progressive mind distrusts the masses, which it sees as provincial, conservative, and bogged down in archaic collectives. Fulfilling Walter Lippmann’s desire for an enlightened, tolerant “bureau of experts,” the progressive mind desires freedom from all things that might hinder its perceived potential for infinite growth, and it desires to act on behalf of the masses, who it sees as remaining ignorant in their (artificial) plight against nature. This freedom, however, comes at the expense of the freedom of all others. C.S. Lewis described the progressive minds of his time as not being men in the old sense at all. “They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of defining what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.” The progressive mind remains preoccupied with a neurotic project to categorize and optimize every facet of life, and arbitrarily reshuffle all that already exists. Its ability to alter the conventions of common speech at will is indicative of this symbolic power. 

In our time, language is bent and shifted through artificial, top-down interference, under the auspices of inclusivity and sensitivity – the brilliantly shiny, opaque mask fastened over an ironclad, totalitarian interior. Thus, the seemingly benign cultural interventions proceed. Pronouns and simple descriptors are the first to change. Celebrities begin PR campaigns to make the world aware of their shiny new names, academics alter the names of cultural groups, infographics and viral clips are disseminated widely. Propaganda narratives are birthed and inculcated.

A Polemical Critique of Corporeal Idealism

The progressive mind seeks a post-human epoch, desiring, as Aleksandr Dugin writes, “to produce creatures that will lack an existential dimension with zero subjectivity… [These creatures see] reality itself as having already become a prison – a concentration camp, an agony, a torture.” Beyond the newly-minted tripartite formulation: ‘He/Him,’ ‘She/Her,’ ‘They/Them,’ comes a miasma of alien names--’Xe/Xem,’ ‘Ze/Zir,’ ‘Fae/Faer’--”neopronouns” for self-christened “neo-humans.” 

The progressive mind’s vision of an ideal society is a monocultural, singular heaven on earth, where every corporeal affliction is cured and the frictions of old — pesky tensions between civilizations, the constraints of the family, and the rigid binary of sex — are sublimated and resolved by anarchic logic. Sex is the most concrete barrier to the manifestation of its program, as the progressive mind is forced to deny the natural reality of sexual difference – a difference that functions to ensure the survival of the species through a divine process of generative creation and engenders an ineffable dynamic of allure and mystique between femininity and masculinity. The progressive mind rejects the natural reality of love, which is an eternally miraculous, intelligible force that morphs uncreated Form into created being. (No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” - 1 John 4:12) The misanthropic view of the progressive mind can only declare this natural difference as an inhibition on freedom, and it prefers a “normalization” of gender fluidity, surrogacy, and on-demand abortive intervention (described by some as a form of “necessary violence”). This vision is the ultimate annihilation of difference itself, and births the progressive mind’s “corporeal idealism,” a rejection of faith in love and life itself. (“Surely, as a faithless wife leaves her husband, so have you been faithless to me, O house of Israel, says the Lord” - Jeremiah 3:20)

The fundamental problem with the intellectual underpinnings of “corporeal idealism” is a theological one. It believes that salvation is possible in this finite existence. It believes in a false eternity, that the flesh is all there is all that there can be, and that the job of the flesh is to maximize pleasure to the point of perpetual ecstasy and minimize discomfort to the point of its complete abolition. In reality, attempts at achieving this herculean feat always result in a dull, muted, throbbing condition and the reduction of the necessity of extremity into a fragile and synthetic stasis. As Byung-Chul Han aptly describes, “Thresholds and transitions are zones of mystery and riddle – here, the atopic Other begins. When borders and thresholds vanish, fantasies of the Other disappear too. Without the negativity of thresholds or threshold-experiences, fantasy withers.” In effect, the progressive mind doesn’t believe in anything larger than itself, and wants not only to abolish God, but to become Him by destroying the thresholds inherent to corporeality’s ordained state of being. 

The progressive mind preaches an inverted Gnosticism; instead of the movement up from tainted, fallen flesh to divine, intelligible reality through contemplation, the movement it teaches is salvation through corporeal optimization. For the progressive mind, the flesh is the only vehicle for (and final frontier of) deification; it teaches that the flesh must be altered to properly fit what it considers true Form. This is evidenced by its obsession with gender fluidity, and its commitment to imposing a state of absolute flux on all that eats and breathes. It views as a delightful necessity the ceaseless fractalization of identity and the assertion of a learned, ‘dysphoric’ interiority upon concrete, exterior ‘presentation,’ since it seeks fleshly resplendence through hormonal and surgical intervention (LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!). A physical process of optimization that culminates in what is often described as a state of “gender euphoria”’: the fleshly alignment of perceived Form with sensible reality. The literal (penile) inversion of gnostic contemplation into corporeal, pharmaceutical optimization, accompanied by a dash of autogynephilic ecstasy.

The issue, both with pure gnosis and the progressive mind’s perverted reimagining of it, is that it views the flesh and consciousness (nous) as being distinct and irreconcilable, when the truth is that they are intertwined. Created matter is not innately evil, but neither is it the sole means by which one attains salvation. Created matter is evidence of God’s entry into the world, and the presence of God’s Logos in all beings confers a sign of divine adoption and cosmic potentiality that someday we might acquire the grace of the Holy Spirit through the liberation of the passions. The progressive mind, instead of seeking liberation from the passions, seeks absolute deference to the passions’ sinful desires. (For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in members of our body to bear the fruit for death. – Romans 7:5) It lives in the same way that Rousseau lived: meek and shameful, one day exposing his ass to women in a dark alleyway, and another desiring “to lie at the feet of an imperious mistress, to obey her commands… this was for me sweet enjoyment.” The suppressed autogynephilia of the progressive mind boasts a similarly degenerative state: perverse and hilarious, bold and exhibitionistic, yet docile and self-loathing.

The true promise of union boasts a condition of Oneness that eclipses and peacefully consumes the discordant pangs of what is described as contemporary ‘dysphoria.’ Saint Gregory Palamas describes man’s potential for the resplendent condition of salvation as man having been “brought into being in the beginning because of Him, being formed according to God’s image so that one day he might contain his archetype.” The discord felt so potently today (and ever since The Fall) is between man’s fallen nature and God’s divine nature. The degree to which discord between man’s body and man’s mind exists is a microcosmic reflection of the unfathomable anguish of that event, and man’s job is to draw himself closer to God, open himself to the love of God, not shy away from Him and participate in the progressive mind’s fantastical delusions.

If the gnostic heresy was that the nous commandeers the body, rather than inhabiting it and living alongside of it holistically (two-as-one), the heresy of the progressive mind’s “corporeal idealism” today is that the body possesses the authority to delude and force the mind’s compliance in altering it to suit its every primitive, externally imposed whim. As the Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky (echoing the Patristic successors of Origen and other early neoplatonist Christians) described, “salvation… does not tear us out of this world but is rather opened for this created world, in the Word become flesh. Gnosis, intellectual or super-intellectual contemplation will be seen… as but one of the necessary moments of the communion of created beings with God, without being the way of deifying union par excellence.” The boundaries of the progressive mind’s reality are no larger than the narrow scope of extant scientific knowledge and the domain of technological optimization – to it, anything beyond this horizon is a dangerous fantasy. This is the paradoxical essence of its “corporeal idealism;” an idealism that sees infallibility and eternality in that which is fallible and temporal, a materialism which refuses to acknowledge the bounds of human nature beyond bare corporeality.

The Perpetual Self-Optimizer is a co-host and the producer of System of Systems podcast

SOURCES:

 1. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, 1994, 233
2.  C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943, 76
3.  Aleksandr Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, 2009, 167-68
4.  Byung Chul-Han, The Agony of Eros, 2017, 41
5.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1904, p. 14
6.  Gregory Palamas, On Epiphany II, from The Saving Work of Christ - Sermons, 38
7.  Vladimir Lossky, The Vision of God, 1964, 58

ILLUSTRATIONS:

1. Pierre Molinier “L'étoile de six”
2. Jacques-Andre Boiffard “Plate 56”