Dominion Capital: II

The use of skills and connections for discourse domination

This is the forty-fifth piece in

Lorenzo Warby

’s series of essays on the strange and disorienting times in which we live.

This article can be adumbrated thusly: DEI, anti-disinformation laws, and pushes to decolonise demand deference to spurious expertise, because to possess dominion capital is to enjoy automatic authority to judge.

Meanwhile, Arnold Kling responded to Lorenzo’s previous essay over at his place.

The publication schedule and links to all Lorenzo’s essays are available here.

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The next release (already recorded) later this week features Dr Who and Coronation Street scriptwriter Gareth Roberts, author of Gay Shame: the Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia.

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Source

US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson being asked by a Republican Senator to define “woman” and replying she was not a biologist is a marker moment for modern weirdness. As James Lindsay comments, she needed an expert to state the truth of her own being.

For most of us, adult human female is a perfectly adequate definition of woman. As sexual reproduction via small, motile gametes conjoining with large sessile gametes has been going on for for at least half a billion years, being able to recognise male and female is one of those things sexually reproducing organisms can just do. Hence the problem transfolk have with passing.¹

What we see in such moments—what would have been incredibly bizarre just a few years ago—is deference to inflated notions of expertise. As James Lindsay also points out, Her Honour got which expert wrong. To defer to a biologist to define woman is to engage in biological essentialism. The correct expert would be some form of Queer theorist, Gender Studies professor, or someone appropriately trained in such matters—a diversity officer, perhaps.

This is not merely exaggerated deference to expertise. It’s an expanding pattern of deference to spurious expertise. DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) is built on spurious expertise—as MIT has evidenced in abandoning DEI criteria for academic selection. Spurious expertise is deeply tied to the growth of idea laundering in our increasingly dysfunctional universities.

The anti “disinformation” push is also about turning what should be political debates—so up for contestation by citizen-voters—into alleged expertise. This expertise operates as a modern version of the medieval inquisitor, applying the principle that error has no rights while claiming the “expertise” to determine what is error. Claims about The Science instantiate the inquisitor’s principle.

What someone with the correct critical consciousness would come up with to define a woman is something like:

A woman is anyone who identifies in a state of identity associated with but not limited to being female, so long as that identification is deemed authentic.

The spread of such inflated deference to expertise—and particularly to spurious expertise (“white fragility,” anyone?) able to determine the appropriate authenticity—is dominion capital in operation. As defined in my previous post, dominion capital is:

the skills, knowledge, motivation and networking to coordinate entry into organisations and institutions, shifting them so as to serve the status and social-leverage strategies of those who possess said capital.

That is, a matter of skills (human capital) and connections (social capital) coordinated by commitment to shared beliefs, narratives, and patterns of discourse. This means using terms that are distinctive to the in-group and/or which have both a vernacular meaning and an in-group meaning. Activists use your language, but not your dictionary: “diversity” has in large part been destroyed as useful English vocabulary thanks to this phenomenon.

Dominion capital operates not merely to boost its possessors’ authority, but to deny authority to others, so as to create a relationship of domination. The pattern is to deny epistemic authority: you are naive/ignorant/stupid and then to deny moral authority—you are evil/maleficent/bigoted/complicit in oppression. If this doesn’t work, there’s a move to deny psychological authority—you are deluded/paranoid/a conspiracy theorist. It’s very much an attack on the concept and authority of citizenship.

Those who fail to adhere to the coordinating precepts are dishonoured. Hence fondness for the rhetoric of moral character destruction: racist, transphobe, homophobe, Islamophobe, misogynist, etc. All can be bracketed together as deplorables.

The possessors of dominion capital know how things “really” work, so they have epistemic authority. They are committed to correct, morally urgent, politics, so have moral authority. Indeed, part of having dominion capital is owning morality. They see things clearly, so have psychological authority by being Serious People.

These are all patterns of exclusion through inflation of expertise. Thus the term Our Democracy is regularly used to gate-keep legitimacy against declared error, depriving folk of the authority otherwise implicit in citizenship.

Intersectionality creates a moral caste system, with the intrinsically dishonoured identity of white, cisgender, heterosexual male at the bottom and and the transformative identity of transgender person of colour on top. These identities are not, however, sufficient in themselves. To maintain the primacy of dominion capital, Theory trumps identity. Hence, someone who rejects the precepts—who fails to adhere to the discourse purity code—has their identity card stripped from them.

Thus Larry Elder becomes the black face of white supremacy, while Peter Thiel gets his gay status revoked. Ethnic minority members of Westminster’s current Conservative Cabinet tell a similar story, with attacks often descending into outright racism (“coconut”, “banana”, and “Uncle Tom” are abusive favourites). To possess dominion capital is to have authority to judge authentic identity.

Note, none of this requires that practitioners understand from whence their animating ideas come. They merely have to be trained to play the critical consciousness game without needing to embrace the term critical consciousness. That is, to apply correct (i.e. structural) critique to everything based on the equalitarian principle and to recognise what marks one as member of the moral in-group and what does not.

This social imperialism requires characterising ever more social action domains as evidencing structural oppression, followed by demands for the application of expertise to “address” said oppression. Folk can thus apply Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance update of the inquisitorial principle without ever having read Marcuse…or Freirean other ways of knowing without ever having read Freire.

Theory predicts action

In a previous essay, I pointed out that the Marxist oppressor-oppression template has proved to be readily updatable:

In the original Marxist model there are the bourgeois who possess capital creating the system of capitalism within which the proletariat are alienated and exploited.

In the realm of sex, there are men who possess masculinity creating the system of patriarchy within which women are alienated and exploited. In the realm of race, there are whites who possess whiteness creating the system of white supremacy within which people of colour are alienated and exploited. In the realm of sexuality, there are normal people who possess normalcy creating the system of cis-heteronormativity within which the queer are alienated and exploited. In the realm of education, there are the literate-knowing who possess knowledge-literacy creating the system of power-knowledge within which the knowledge-lacking are alienated and exploited.²

In each case, capital/masculinity/whiteness/normalcy/knowledge-literacy is a form of property that excludes those who do not possess it. 

So, apply The Iron Law of Dialectical Projection. Adherents of various forms of the Dialectical Faith think power works in an inherently oppressive fashion. This, by the way, is how they behave when they get power³:

There are the enlightened (“woke”) who possess dominion capital (i.e., coordinated understanding) that excludes from legitimate discourse all those lacking such moral, epistemic and psychological authority, creating our democracy (the politics of sustainable social justice) within which ordinary citizens are alienated and exploited.

The various template depictions of “oppression” are mechanisms to motivate and justify their propounders’ domination over various organisations, institutions and public discourse. The various versions of Theory—from Marxist to Queer—are moralising rationalisations for domination: we Homo sapiens being excellent at rationalising and moralising our self-interest.

I have previously discussed the pattern whereby a core of believers in various forms of the Dialectical Faith generate various status- and social-leverage strategies that a periphery of (university-educated) folk either go along with, or actively engage in. While the core are typically invested in some version of the Dialectical Faith, the periphery are mainly driven by how left-liberalism has metastasised. 

The claim that “everything is political” means that everything is subject to the authority of those possessing dominion capital. Hence the adoption of the Jacobin model of politics: politics unlimited in scope—everything is political—and in means—anything that serves the legitimating political project is justified. Adherents have moved from the centrally-directed Jacobin Party of Leninism to networked Jacobinism intensified through social media.

A notable feature of OG Marxists is how much they despise “wokery”.⁴ Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn was an early critic of identity politics. Terry Eagleton got stuck into use of French Theory. Perry Anderson and Freddie deBoer have both been trenchant critics of “wokery”. The 2024 Marxism Conference at Melbourne University had a well-attended session denouncing Queer Theory.

This is not a dispute between different social groups. None of these people (or their ideologies) represent the social groups for which they claim to speak. It’s a struggle over which dominion capital network(s) will be able to recruit, motivate and coordinate more effectively. 

Various techniques are used. As Martha Nussbaum says in her famous critique of Judith Butler, sufficient obscurity can, in effect, bully the reader into accepting that they are being told something profound and/or so exhaust them they have little cognitive energy left to assess the truth of what is being stated. There’s also what I call guru mode: write sufficiently obscurely so that those who accept the writer’s authority have to keep consulting the guru.

Hegel is, of course, the great exemplar of profundity through obscurity. As is Heidegger. Comparing the philosopher Heidegger with the (equally Nazi) lawyer Carl Schmitt—or key Zen Buddhist writers who grappled with the same issues as Heidegger—indicates how shameful Heidegger’s ridiculously dense prose is.

Nor do you have to recruit activists explicitly, you can play the odds so as to recruit the like-minded. DEI (Didn’t Earn It) and ESG (Environmental and Social Governance)—which are both cartelising mechanisms—operate in this way. Diversity statements for academic and other job applications work similarly.

Inclusion uses authenticity to sort into the correct-minded—those who manifest Inclusion—and those who are Not-Inclusive, so represent bigotry, oppression, make folk feel unsafe, etc. The administrators of Inclusion have the expertise to judge who has possession of the required authenticity. Adherence is compulsory because, of course, silence is violence. No refuge is permitted from moralised demands, from moralised dominion.

As James Lindsay notes of Marxism, and its Critical Theory derivatives:

(1)   The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution (i.e. their authority and control).

(2)   Their praxis is to criticise something as classist (bourgeois), sexist, patriarchal, racist, transphobic, etc., until they control (or destroy) it. They de-legitimise the existing version of what they seek to replace or control.

Practitioners of the Dialectical Faith do not care if they destroy what they fail to control, for that is also a victory, as the destroyed thing cannot resist their dominion over institutions and public discourse, nor be a refuge from such.

Their apparent hypocrisies are enforced moral hierarchies. As Michael Shellenberger points out, on one hand there is the principle that “to victims everything should be given [but from whom] nothing be required”. Think how various tech companies treated trans folk as untouchable, which enabled relentless bullying.

All these methods advantage the possessors of dominion capital. A structure of critique is created where any uneven outcomes between groups can be used to de-legitimate an institution or realm of action. Hence the need to apply spurious expertise. Pushes to “de-colonise” whatever operate similarly.

If one is seriously concerned with promoting human flourishing—rather than the social dominion of like-minded folk—there is a large problem here. Any policy position based on labelling those who disagree as wicked/stupid/dysfunctional is, or will become, dysfunctional. It’s not merely that truth doesn’t need a coercive bodyguard. It’s that such de-legitimising of disagreement kills feedback, undermining accountability and reality-correction.

If, however, you are a promoter of social alchemy theory—where destroying the existing social order means that the utopian future will emerge, like gold from base metal—then social decay from dysfunctional public policy is just fine.⁵ If you are plugged into a welfare state that expands by colonising social pathology, there may be more direct benefits. The homelessness industrial complex is a case in point.⁶

What we see is various layers of progressive Gleichschaltung (i.e. coordination or synchronisation). The Nazi takeover of Weimar Germany is the only operative template for how to create totalitarian rule in a Parliamentary state by purely internal means (without the Red Army or equivalent standing over you). Of course there is going to be a convergence in techniques, with politics that declares all is political and denies any refuge from its moral demands.

Before you label such comparisons overblown, remember that Nazism even in 1938 looked very different by 1945. Moreover, there are underlying similarities in ideological structure between Nazism and the Dialectical Faith. One is right-hand-path progressivism—the progressivism of rightful mastery. The other is left-hand-path progressivism—the progressivism of anti-oppression liberation, except it always creates new masters.

Nazism was the Jacobin political model applied to the project of Aryan volkisch racism, just as Italian Fascism was the Jacobin political model applied to the project of Italian national greatness. Both Nazism and Marxism create Party-States, where a political project so dominates the state that mass killing of potential taxpayers—reclassified as noxious social parasites—overturns the pacifying role states usually play.

Intersectionality has enabled the outbreak of open Jew-hatred on American and other campuses by characterising Jews as an oppressor group. While claims of spurious expertise—supported by complicit media and compromised professional bodies—has presided over the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of hundreds, even thousands, of minors. This spurious expertise is entirely analogous to spurious expertise in “race science”.

Queer Theory provided the rhetorical cover, the motivated and coordinated networks, and the status- and social leverage strategies, for this to happen. With an “evidence base” that was either lacking or fabricated. The laundering of ideas through the forms—but not the substance—of scholarship was used to generate utterly spurious expertise. It’s a particularly vicious example⁷ of a much wider pattern.

In 1938, which European state was institutionally most like the Soviet Union? Nazi Germany. The institutional convergence with the Dialectical Faith in power is even greater now that the CCP has presided over a massive surge in commerce within China. Meanwhile, the dominant Western forms of the Dialectical Faith have abandoned “vulgar” Marxism with its class and economic focus. Of course we see progressive Gleichschaltung in action. This is how the Jacobin model and dominion capital operate, whether via networks or central direction.

The process of denying authority to anyone but the possessors of dominion capital means that schools and universities have evolved to propagate correct Theory. Hence, as academic refugee Peter Boghassian points out, large sections of universities (and schools) increasingly do not provide their students with an education. Rather, their miseducation provides a set of ready-made outlooks with pre-set answers that support the authority of dominion capital. Critical Pedagogy is structured to create and sustain dominion capital through a process of conscientisation.

Truth is optional

To be effective, dominion capital has to motivate and coordinate. Its claims do not, however, have to be true. In social and institutional milieus sufficiently insulated from reality tests, it only has to be able to motivate and coordinate.

As I have previously discussed, willingness to rationalise the otherwise ridiculous is an excellent sorting and display device indicating one is “sound”, that one is a reliable member of the righteous in-group. Believing that someone with a penis is a woman because they say they are is as ridiculous a claim as any explicit religion has made and performs the same signalling commitment role. It is, after all, a form of gender transubstantiation based on the idea of a gendered soul.

The various forms of the Dialectical Faith have proven well able to create devoted actors: folk who do not merely take an instrumentally rational approach to matters but treat some things as not subject to trade-offs. It has proved well able to generate zealots.

Marx’s adaptations from Hegel produced a system that reproduced the features of gnosticism without requiring supernatural claims:

•    The world is bad: it is the world of the Demiurge of a malign, controlling power of bourgeois capitalism. (In later versions of the Faith, demiurgic power is given to patriarchy; white supremacy; cis-heteronormativity; and so on. Later versions also have their versions of the following features.)

•    The world is fake, is not what it seems: capitalism exploits and deludes via ideology.

•    There are evil forces behind what happens: the interests of the ruling oppressors structure social outcomes.

•    There is esoteric knowledge that others do not share: possessed by those who have the correct critical consciousness.

•    We are a piece of the good God thrust into this world of darkness: we are alienated from our labour due to exploitation by the owners of the means of production.

The gnostic pattern can be highly motivating, imparting a sense of shared understanding and grand purpose. It also creates an intoxicating lack of restraint. The patterns and lessons from the benighted past do not apply to propounders of the Faith, nor do the rules therefrom. That primes gnostic activism to attract Cluster B personalities and other morally disordered folk.

Leninism is an extreme version of this pattern within the Dialectical Faith, claiming that all humanity’s painful lessons on how to cope with the paradox of polities—we need the state to protect us from social predators but it is the most dangerous of social predators—does not apply to believers armed with correct, transformative knowledge.

The West increasingly suffers from petite versions of this arrogant stupidity. Universities now permit anonymous denunciations of bullying, suggesting no-one in authority has ever read Suetonius or heard of the Stasi. Of course, some are very well aware of the corrosive power dynamics created—Lenin surely was in overturning all that painful learning about restraining state power—but others have so much stupidity of arrogance they think such dynamics do not apply if operated by good people like them.

A sense of empowering knowledge fighting against pervasive wickedness also protects the motivating beliefs. Not even the past of the Dialectical Faith itself applies, as each previous failure just shows that “it was done wrong”. The latest iteration has the correct, or corrected, version and so will avoid all those historical problems.⁸ Besides, the present holders of dominion capital are so much more up to the challenge than their not-yet-enlightened enough predecessors. Their Theory is so much better than the previous versions.

Communists—historically the most powerful version of the Dialectical Faith—along with pastoralist conquerors, have been the biggest killers in history, as both believed themselves entitled to kill human dross. That the Dialectical Faith is—with the partial exception of Nazism, the political philosophy which is most like it—the most murderous philosophy ever, killing in a few decades more people than all religions combined across millennia, creates the need to talk endlessly about Nazism as “Fascism” to provide “look, Holocaust!” cover for the tyrannising mass-murders of the Dialectical Faith.

This record of tyrannising mass murder also creates the need to dismiss all previous instances of the rule of the Faith as “not authentic”. Remember, judging authenticity is central to how dominion capital’s spurious expertise operates—hence the authority of authentic “lived experience” and wickedness of “cultural appropriation”.

The other great advantage of a gnostic pattern is that is an excellent parasite. It takes whatever is an actually existing system of belief or practice and claims to be the best version of it, the version that better understands its inner truth.

Christianity (or any other religion);⁹ Liberalism (or any other form of politics); Science; Democracy (or any other system of government), and so on: in all cases, the gnostic version is the “true” form. Marxists are forever claiming that only Communism provides True Democracy.

If this seems all very religious, that’s because it is. The difference is any dogmas are not about the divine in the sense of some supernatural realm, but about societies in the here and now. Its divine, its realm of authority from which there is no recurrent feedback, is the imagined future.¹⁰

The evolutionary lens

Religions select for resilient coordination and motivation. St Augustine’s Scriptural exegesis—that which is not literally true, is nevertheless metaphorically so—can be, as biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein point out, readily updated for the evolutionary lens.

A successful religion may have many doctrines that are literally false, yet metaphorically true. That is, it’s an advantage for lineages if members act as though the claims are true. Over the long term, there is selection for what creates and sustains a resilient community; including by creating sufficient, and sufficiently well-directed, devoted actors.

The Dialectical Faith, in all its versions, selects for motivation and coordination, for dominion capital. As for longer-term resilience, the picture is much more mixed. The collapse of Communist regimes during the c20th speaks against its resilience as rulership: we will see how good the CCP is at bucking this. It is very focused on doing so.

The continuation and updating of the Dialectical Faith’s networks within the West speaks for its resilience in motivating and coordinating belief, in generating dominion capital—though in very specific milieux. Nevertheless, the Faith continues to generate devoted actors and to demonstrate the power of an intolerant minority—especially one with the capacity to dishonour (or worse) dissenters.

In my next essay, I’m going to talk about genuine expertise becoming spurious over time. The case studies above concern expertise that was always spurious.

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References

Books

Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, State University of New York Press, 1997.

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), Penguin, [1970] 1993.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Books, 2012.

Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class , Forum, 2024.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Robert Jay Lipton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China, Norton, [1961] 2022.

Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, Red Pill Press, [2006] 2012.

Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships, Basic Books, 2000.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011], 2013.

Articles, papers, book chapters, podcasts

Scott Atran, ‘“Devoted Actor” versus “Rational Actor” Models for Understanding World Conflict,’ Briefing to the National Security Council, White House, Washington, DC, September 14, 2006. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6801978.pdf

Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, ‘Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution,’ Science, Vol. 317, 24 August 2007, 1039-1040.

Paulo Freire, ‘Education, Liberation and the Church,’ in The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation, (trans. Donaldo Macedo), Begin & Garvey, 1985, 121-142.

Zachary H. Garfield, Kristen L. Syme, Edward H. Hagen, ‘Universal and variable leadership dimensions across human societies,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 41, Issue 5, 2020, 397-414.

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

Ryan Grim, ‘The Elephant in the Zoom,’ The Intercept, June 14 2022.

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://ssrn.com/abstract=980844.

Rob Henderson, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update,’ Quillette, 16 Nov 2019.

Jacob Mchangama, ‘The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws: A tenacious Soviet legacy,’ Hoover Institute, December 1, 2011. https://www.hoover.org/research/sordid-origin-hate-speech-laws.

Manvir Singh, ‘The cultural evolution of shamanism,’ Behavioral And Brain Sciences, 2017 Jul 6:41:e66. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28679454/

Manvir Singh, Richard Wrangham & Luke Glowacki, ‘Self-Interest and the Design of Rules,’ Human Nature, August 2017.

Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta, ‘Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior,’ Evolutionary Anthropology, 12:264–274 (2003).

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021,  100-136.

J. Watanabe, J. and B. Smuts, ‘Explaining religion without explaining it away: Trust, truth, and the evolution of cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport’s “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” American Anthropologist, 1999, 101:98-112.

Daniel Williams, ‘The marketplace of rationalizations,’ Economics & Philosophy (2022), 1–25.

1. Secondary sexual characteristics evolve as part of sexual selection. Mammary glands, for example, evolved as part of the live-birth reproduction strategy of mammals. But they also have a display and differentiation function. Homo sapiens are in shape and features—though not in size—the most sexually dimorphic of the primates. Our cognitive plasticity—which means biologically expensive children—has driven particularly intense sexual selection.

2. I have slightly re-written the last sentence.

3. Rule by Dialectical Faith regimes has typically proved to be far more exploitive and alienating than their mercantile (“capitalist”) alternatives. Lenin proportionately and Stalin absolutely extracted for their purposes far more surplus from less territory and population than did Nicholas II, doing so far more tyrannically and murderously. Same with Mao in China, the Kim dynasty in North Korea, Tito in Yugoslavia, Castro in Cuba, etc compared to previous local regimes.

4. OG Marxists oppose the “re-Hegelisation” of Marx, emphasising Marx as social scientist. Gyorgy Lukacz kicked off this re-Hegelising, and was denounced at the time by Grigory Zinoviev for doing so. This distinction was also somewhat spurious. First, Marx saw his “science of history” in very Hegelian terms as superior to “ordinary” science. Second, even before the publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932, it was clear that Marx’s system was all about wrestling with Smith and Ricardo to support the conclusions he had reached in the 1840s: see The Communist Manifesto.

5. The Critical Theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse operates on this basis. As Max Horkheimer says:

The Critical Theory which I conceived later is based on the idea that one cannot determine, what is good, what a good, a free society would look like from within the society which we live in. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society, which we want to change.

In the words of Herbert Marcuse:

What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society are sufficiently “abstract,” i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any attempt to identify them in terms of this universe.

No existing society can shine as splendidly as the vision in their head, hence becoming is always superior to being. This aids in motivation but also makes the various versions of the Dialectical Faith catastrophically unserious about the demands of order for human flourishing. Hence, they always make things worse — e.g., Soviet rule was far more brutal, murderous and exploitive than that of any Tsar: a recurring pattern whenever the Dialectical Faith gains power.

6. Continuing the theme of being more exploitive and alienating but not taking the problems of order-for-human-flourishing seriously, progressive-dominated cities in the US extract comparatively more resources for the advocacy-state and its non-profits while delivering more dysfunctional government.

7. That Queer Theory has, from its beginnings, supported the sexualisation of children should have been sufficient to block it from mobilising the forms of academe to legitimate itself.

8. Paulo Freire’s Critical Pedagogy solution is to demand that revolution be eternal, otherwise it solidifies into a sclerotic status quo.

9. Liberation theology—Marxism parading as Catholicism—is a classic example of a gnostic-pattern parasite.

10. Unlike explicit Hermeticism and Gnosticism—where authoritative knowledge comes from the primordial past—in the Dialectical Faith, authority comes from the imagined future. Nevertheless, their notions of the divine being incomplete, and human consciousness being required for the completion of the divine, made Hermeticism and Gnosticism open for such a shift.