Why Jordan Neely Matters

Understanding the new religion of the left

Illustration by Daniel Zender

Earlier this week, protestors took to the streets. Once again it was a reaction to the death of one human being at the hands of another human being.

Jordan Neely is a name we are all going to get familiar with in the coming weeks. But why? What exactly is it that’s special about Jordan and why do we need to know and “say his name”? Of course we should prosecute any individual who takes another life outside of those exceptions already outlined in law, but something different is happening here.

Hundreds of people are killed every year in New York alone, many of them being “people of color.” Almost none of them spark any protests like the ones we are seeing now or will see in the near future. No politicians seem to be interested.

The reason Jordan’s death will create protests and social unrest is because his death, for followers of the leftist faith, presents an opportunity for their version of progress. To understand how they view progress, you have to understand how their faith sees the world and how they believe it is best served.

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” — Mark Twain

Gnosticism

Leftist faith today is nothing new. It’s simply a recasting of an old idea we’ve had with us for centuries called gnosticism.

Gnosticism is a disposition that views the world as a prison we were all flung into by an oppressive power — a demiurge. With gnosis — special knowledge about the structure of being — you can have special knowledge which allows you to see the prison and at least in a spiritual sense, escape from it.

For old school gnostics, the Christian God is a demiurge that kicked us out of the garden for eating from the tree of knowledge and getting closer to being like Him. For them, the serpent was trying to help us become like gods and God was jealous. The current nature of our being is a punishment that requires a special knowledge about the nature of reality to see.

This is what leftists now refer to as having a “critical consciousness”, which is why the term “woke” is appropriately attached to this movement. They consider themselves awake to the true nature of the system which oppresses the authentic expression of each individual’s humanity. The only thing that modern gnosticism has changed is the location of the oppressive power, or the “demiurge”.

• Marxism places the power in the bourgeoisie who use private property ownership to gain and then maintain power over the working class. By gaining a critical consciousness, the working class can see their prison. The abolition of private property, which is an expression of individualism in ownership, can destroy the prison and bring man back into a sense of communion with the whole as one, or as they say, “at-one-ment”.

• Modern feminism places power in the patriarchy. The patriarchy is the demiurgic power that oppresses women and keeps men in power over them. Once you see that oppressive nature of society, you can then challenge it. They don’t necessarily hate men, they just resent the structure of the prison and those who actively participate in it.

• Transgenderism sees the nature of human biology as a prison. Human beings are flung into existence. They didn’t ask to be here, but still their souls are forced into an existence inside of a body that may or may not fit the nature of their soul. Their bodies are the prison, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that or allow for anyone of any age to adjust their expression and now their physical reality is participating in this spiritual form of incarceration. This is why you’ll hear people talk about the divinity or sacredness of transgender people. They are seen to be challenging — or as they say, “queering” — the very nature of our spiritual prisons at the deepest and most profound levels.

• Intersectionality takes all of the demiurges and places them together to understand how they all overlap and use the power of oppression in parallel.

And this brings us to the framework within which the Jordan Neely protest and actions are taken: Critical Race Theory (CRT).

CRT frames the world as a power struggle between racial groups. White people, or as they call it, “whiteness”, is the demiurge that wields cultural power over our society. “Whiteness” keeps people of non-color in power through the oppression of any people who are not white. This is what they call “white supremacy culture” and any reference to cultural changes in any non-white group are challenged with such ferocity.

Their challenges to “whiteness” for them are an effort to identify and reveal the nature of the prison that keeps non-white people from expressing and living as their authentic selves. This is why non-white people who do not follow suit are said to be, like Larry Elder, the “black faces of white supremacy.” “Whiteness” is not simply a skin color to them, but a disposition that can be taken and expressed by anyone who wishes to accommodate the demiurge and its power. And as such, “blackness” is much more a disposition in opposition to whiteness than simply a skin color.

Because Jordan Neely was allegedly killed by someone who at least visually is part of the culture privileged by “whiteness,” this is an opportunity to reveal the nature of this prison and take action. The death of a poor, homeless, and destitute black man by a white Marine is a symbolic representation: a microcosm of the structure of society as a whole. This is exactly what happened in the summer of 2020 and why you and I know the name George Floyd.

Once the nature of this gnostic prison is exposed, the work to rectify is activated.

The Leftist Dialectic

In order to destroy the prison that has just been exposed, we must now have a strategy by which it can be challenged and taken apart. This process is what leftist literature calls the “dialectic process”.

A leftist dialectic challenges the nature of things that are oppressive until they are no longer oppressive, moving us towards less and less to critique. We cannot know the nature of what should be within the framework of our oppressive existence, but we can recognize oppression and challenge it.

Critical theory is the process of leftist dialectics that criticizes the oppression and removes it, constantly reducing it until there is none left. Whatever remains is ‘utopia’. It does this in order to seize the means of production which is to say that it seeks to control what produces society. It can be material or cultural and/or both.

“We invented the critical theory because we realized we cannot articulate the view of the good society and what is right on the terms of the existing society, but we can criticize the aspects of this society that we wish to change.” — Max Horkheimer

“Negative thinking necessarily becomes positive because it frees the seeds of the ideal society from the constraints in the existing society.” — Herbert Marcuse

“Ruthless criticism of all that exists.” — Karl Marx

This is why all of a sudden, everything is racist and everyone is looking to find racism and other forms of oppression under any rock it might be thought to exist. For them, the process of progress itself is defined by the identification, challenging, and removal of all forms of oppression. Finding oppression, pointing it out, and then challenging it is their moral imperative. This is what they refer to as “praxis”.

That’s why, as Steven Pinker has said, “Progressives hate progress.” To leftists, progress is only achieved through identification of oppression and injustice, not by recognizing progress and copying it forward.

It’s very similar to ancient mysticism called hermetics. Hermeticism helps humans achieve divinity by challenging and removing distinctions until the realization that all is one and we are as God. In the case of leftist dialectics, they are removing distinctions between gender, race, and class by challenging the oppressive nature of their interactions in order to bring all human beings into one, or again, at-one-ment. Or as Karl Marx called it, a classless society. No distinctions between individuals, which is what they call “equity”.

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But how is it that a bunch of people who consider themselves to not be religious, and actually actively fight against and voice disdain for religion, find themselves doing religious things?

It’s not surprising at all in a society that has become ever more “secular”. Humans are driven towards active participation in social groups that have a purpose. If we remove one purpose, like that which is provided by a religious framework, it leaves a hole to be filled by another. We still need something to do and that something must have a moral framework.

Still, it is true that most of the people actively participating in the upcoming or previous protests and activism have never read the literature that outlines these frameworks. They have likely never heard of gnosticism. It’s highly unlikely that they know what hermeticism is and have never read critical theorists like Judith Butler, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer or are familiar with the extensive writings of Karl Marx. People who say only those oppressed can see oppression have likely never even heard of Eve Sedgewick’s Epistemology of the Closet that outlines the basis for why only black people are now allowed to say what is and is not racist.

But the same could be said of newly baptized Christians.

How many born again Christians, those who are being dunked by a pastor (or priest?) have a deep understanding of the Bible? It’s an ancient literature that is written in ancient languages and often mistranslated which causes confusion about stories written for people who were steeped in symbolic views of the world that contain a cosmology modern people are unfamiliar with. Nobody would ever challenge that these people are in fact Christian, and sometimes even more fervently so.

What people do is much more a modeling of their peer group than it is a reasoned and articulated set of principles they are following. What leftists, like any religious converts are doing, is modeling the behavior of their social group. That social group is animated by the principles of ideas that few of them fully understand, but have been slowly dispersed through academic institutions and now supported by corporate and governmental institutions.

“People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.” — Carl Jung

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In the upcoming weeks, as details and updates come out about the Jordan Neely killing, pay attention and think about what people are doing and why. It won’t matter what exactly is revealed about the history and behavior of either the victim, or the perpetrator(s). Most everyone has already picked out their stance and even in the face of evidence to the contrary, nobody will change their minds.

Look at the headlines and see how the framework of white and black, privileged and oppressed, are juxtaposed. Think about the hundreds of other people killed in New York City and ask yourself why these protestors and politicians didn’t speak up then. The next time this happens, before any headlines come out, make a prediction based on the above framework and see if it’s predictive.

I promise you. The world we are living in and the non-rational behavior of people will start to make sense. It’s a religious movement sweeping the nation. It’s nothing new. What it is, is a mystic manner of looking at the world that has been with us for centuries, and will continue to show itself as an alternative to modern reason and religious faith.