Eternal Ingratitude
Part of an ongoing discussion. A reader with the singular and egressive name of Exit Only asks why no descendants of Union soldier families, who suffered so egregiously in warring to abolish slavery, are included in discussions of reparations.
He asks: “Where is the gratitude, for those who gave the last full measure of their devotion?”
Ingratitude is the hallmark of any cult whose slogans were forged in hell.
The foremost cult, and the one which provokes mass murder on scales never seen before his history, is socialism. Socialism is a parasite philosophy, not a true philosophy, and so it adapts and changes its camouflage each century as its vices and insanities are exploded and exposed.
In this generation, Wokeness is racial Marxism (Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi). Wokeness springs from cultural Marxism (Gramsci) of the Twentieth Century, which springs in turn from the political Marxism (Lenin, Marx) of the Nineteenth Century.
These are the intellectual heirs of Hegel in the late Eighteenth Century and the heretical mystic Jacob Boehme in the Seventeenth, whose thinking follows esoteric Hermetic teachings from earlier centuries.
Hermeticism is a syncretic chaos composed of fragments of Neoplatonism, Roman, and Egyptian mysticism, but its basic outline is consistent. This consists of two elements: syncretism and anthropocentricism.
First is Syncretism.
Syncretism holds that all religions are half-remembered fragments of an eternal and ancient religion, which will be recombined once mankind learns all the knowledge of nature and heaven, and becomes God, or reconciles God to his malign creation.
The various forms of Hermeticism teach that all religions or schools of thought are scattered parts of what once was or what will one day evolve into a unified whole, called the prisca theologia (“primordial theology”) or the perennial philosophy.
Christ is not seen as a sole and only way to heaven, nor as the final fulfillment of the promises and hopes darkly glimpsed in pagan myths. No, Christ, if mentioned at all, is regarded by syncretism as one Ascended Master among many, and the Resurrection merely as a teacher’s demonstration of the power mind over matter granted by mystical enlightenment.
In Hermetic thought, the crucifixion is not a unique event, and, more to the point, it is not a sacrifice. No sacrifice is needed nor desired, since the path to salvation lies entirely within oneself, namely, in the inner deity or divine being resting inside one’s own soul.
Marxism likewise teaches that in the primordial past, all tribesmen were communists, and freely owned all goods in common, nor was man alienated from his labor, as he neither bartered away his labor, nor the fruits of his labor. The law of supply and demand did not exist; there was no disutility of labor, no scarcity of resources.
Let us pause a moment to contemplate how utterly absurd and risible this conception of noble savagery is. If Marx had said man talked to animals like Doctor Doolittle or flew through clouds like Mary Poppins in the primal past, he would not be making assertions any less foolish and untrue.
The evidence of prehistory shows it, if anything, to be the antediluvian world where the hearts of men dwelt on evil continuously. Anthropologists report that half the skull fragments recovered from Neolithic remains betray that they were clubbed to death by their brother man wielding truncheons taken from thighbones of antelopes. Slavery is known in all ages and races of man, save alone where Christians abolished it.
Marx takes his vapid daydreams of noble savagery from Rousseau, who merely concocts a secular version of Eden out of empty imagination. Obviously no iota of evidence supports the idea that the scarcity of resources, or the struggle for survival, are solely due to manmade economic institutions; for this conceit is logically impossible. Economic institutions are invented and upheld precisely to alleviate the scarcity of resources that naturally obtain for any goods (aside, perhaps, from air and sunlight and seawater, which are found in such abundance that they need not be, nor can be, economized).
The collective group-mind the primitive tribes enjoyed before the coming of private property is the Marxist version of the perennial philosophy from which all mankind comes and to which evolution one day shall return him. All other philosophies are false self-justification or “intellectual superstructure” meant to mask the class interests of the exploiter class, or an opiate meant to benumb the awareness of the exploited class.
Marx teaches that sequential evolutionary stages of economic growth must be suffered, with each stage being destroyed by the innate contradictions hidden within, until the final stage. The primitive tribal communism will return, but now be freed from its tribalism, so that one mind, one consciousness, one ideal, will rule the world from pole to pole, without nations, religions, or opinions.
In other words, for Marx, no other school of thought is legitimate and honest. All of them are false consciousness, meant only to rule one stage of successive stages of history, each being destroyed by its own self-contradictions, until the universal truth of universal consciousness emerges spontaneously. All laws and social institutions will drop away, unnoticed and unneeded, as Man evolves beyond all sin, and achieves godlike perfection.
This unified universal consciousness of a classless, nationless, godless universe is the prisca theologia of the socialist, merely recast in secular terms.
Second is Anthropocentrism.
Hermeticism places Man as the center of the universe, is creator and redeemer, not God, who is cast as an opponent to Man, not a father, lord, nor loving creator.
Like Gnosticism, Hermeticism teaches that man is not made in the image and likeness of God. God is a Demiurge, a blind or morally crippled creator being, who makes the material earth only, not heaven and earth. When Man achieves enlightenment, he will remake God into his own image.
The God of Abraham makes both the seen and unseen order, both earth and heaven, material and spiritual. Whereas the God of Simon the Magician makes the material world as a trap and snare meant to humiliate the spirits held in bondage to desires and appetites of the flesh, and to bedazzle and beguile the trapped souls with worldly pleasures and ambitions, so they forget their true and glorious pre-incarnate nature.
There are various schools and variations of Hermeticism, but a recurring theme is that God the Demiurge is confused, unborn, and incomplete.
Because the God is perfect, he does not understand imperfection and suffering. Hence the perfect being, since he is incomplete, is imperfect.
In order to understand imperfection and suffering, he made Man to be a sinful being, and suffer for sins, in order that later, growing and evolving to higher consciousness, Man will serve as teacher and redeemer to God, the two will commingle into one homogenous identity, spirit and matter become one, all things become one with the universe, and Man become God. All history aims at this cosmic utopia to come.
There is no Eden, no first perfection, to which we return. God must incarnate as Christ in order to learn what suffering is, since, being merely omniscient, He would have no knowledge of what this was like. The perfection is a last perfection, once Man and God are reconciled and unified, and God is finally made God.
God is the Devil, and the creation he had made is evil, which lured and trapped the spirit of pre-incarnate Man in a world of carnal lusts. For the Hermeticist, creation is the Fall.
Let us pause a moment to meditate on the sheer absurdity of this doctrine. The perfection of God renders him imperfect, and he must become one with man to learn what suffering is, in order to fill in the blanks of his omniscient foreknowledge. To do this, God, or, rather, the Demiurge, must create man as sinful and suffering intentionally, and visit evils on his creature in order to learn what evil is — which, being perfectly good himself, he cannot otherwise know. Therefore the perfectly benevolent being visits unnecessarily evils on beloved children who have only instrumental value to him, because his perfect wisdom renders him ignorant, et cetera.
Marxism, and the cultural Marxism of Gramsci, and the racist Marxism of the Woke, are secular and materialistic philosophies that parallel the mystical spiritualism of Hermeticism. The two basic elements, syncretism and anthropocentrism, still exist, but in non-spiritual and non-literal form.
Likewise, in Marxism, instead of a god-made universe of evil in which Man is unwittingly trapped, Marx tells of a man-mad social order of evil, in which Man is unwittingly trapped. Likewise utopia will flower once man achieves a consciousness of cosmic oneness: for the woke, this is enlightenment (“wokeness”) for the Marxist this is socialist man.
If the world is a jail cell, and the social order is a world-wide conspiracy aimed at humiliation and oppression, one can feel neither patriotism nor home-love for it. Certainly one is not grateful to God for the created world, or His providence in arranging human events. The Hermetic God is unwise, adversarial, inimical to Man, and only the enlightenment of Man will redeem God, and undo the evil which is creation.
If God looks on everything He made and declares it evil and wrong, Man cannot think to love or defend it. If God is a devil who will only develop into good once Man achieves enlightenment, God is a son of man, not the father of man, in a very real sense, hence merits no worship, no adoration, no obedience. In Hermetic thought, God is a Devil, something to be overcome, in order that a greater and more perfect God will arise in times to come.
The sacrifice of Christ on the cross, or the blood sacrifices of Jews and gentiles in times gone by, are either meaningless in this worldview, or counterproductive.
Likewise, in Marxism and in Wokethink, loyalty to the current social order of capitalist racism, is unthinkable. The social order is so radically evil that its violent overthrow is not merely permitted but required. Marx loved the line that comes from the devil character, Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s FAUST: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
This is fundamentally a Hermetic belief, namely, that the Creation was the Fall, that the world is radically evil, or, in the case of Marx, the social order is radically evil. Merely by existing, merely by being trapped in a material life subject to degrading pleasures and agonizing pains, creation offends all creatures, and so must be destroyed.
No Marxist is nor can be grateful to the social order, or any its cultural products. This is why, for example, it is always Year One to the revolutionaries: history, to them, is the enemy.
This is why, for example, Wokethink art and popular entertainment is unrelentingly vulgar and ugly and disgusting. No prior tradition of art or architecture is fit for their enlightenment. This is the nature of “deconstruction” which proposes sinister secret motives, meant to uphold an evil and oppressive status quo, lurks behind everything unenlightened man does or ever did.
The Woke vomit all things made by Man into the ashheap of history. History takes sides, and has a right side (godless collectivist anarchy) and a wrong side (individual rights granted by divine law to be upheld by human law).
The point here is that there is no room whatsoever for the smallest particle of gratitude in the Hermetic worldview, or in Marxist or Wokester philosophy.
If the world is evil, the world is hated. There is no giving thanks.
Gratitude is the fountainhead of virtue and joy in life which makes life worth living. Gratitude turns wages into gifts. Gratitude replaces self-centeredness with humbleness prompting courtesy, brotherhood, love. Instead of waiting impatiently for one’s due wage, every day is a Christmas gift. Neither family nor friendship nor fellowship nor patriotism is possible without gratitude. It is from gratitude that the faithful send prayer and sacrifice to God, and the receive the sacrifice of Christ.
Ingratitude drove Satan out of Heaven and Eve out of Eden. She wanted to be like God, or moreso, and hence the paradise God granted, to her ungrateful mind in the hour of her temptation, was not enough.
Surely, we might suppose, ingratitude is the proper and due reaction to when one is being cheated or oppressed. That supposition is a pragmatic one, and worldly wisdom cannot disagree: but Christ teaches and deeper and stranger doctrine.
The serf who suffered under the Czar of Russia, the peasant under the Emperor of China, the commoner under the arrogance of the French Monarchy, perhaps saw little need to be grateful to the social order exploiting them, and could not be thankful to the tyrannies plundering their wives and molesting their women. But if they had been grateful, and reformed those laws rather than revolting against them, the Terror, the Gulag, and the Cultural Revolution would have piles no skulls high as towers above seas of blood.
Let us close with a tale.
Corrie Ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place repeats the following wartime anecdote:
Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp and were assigned to a dormitory cell crawling with lice and fleas. They were plagued and bitten. Betsie, quoting Thessalonians 5 asked her sister to “give thanks in all circumstances,” and offer prays of thanksgiving for their current circumstances, including the lice. Corrie, quite understandably, objected, did not understand, but followed her sister nonetheless. Corrie kept faith with the teachings of the saints, despite seeing no sense in it.
Hence the two women faithfully read their smuggled Bible with other prisoners every day, at first in secret for fear of the guards. But the number of prisoners praying in the bug-infected cell only grew, and could not be hid. Yet the guards never entered the cell to halt them. Moreover, these two women were not molested by the guards, as was a commonplace fate of female prisoners.
Only later did the sisters learn that the guards refused to enter their dormitory cell because of the plague of those selfsame lice and fleas infesting there.
Ponder this, dear reader. Regardless of its many imperfections (for utopia is not to be found in this life) our civilization remarkably just, wealthy, great and happy. When compared to what the great majority of men present and past, in every land and era, routinely suffer, is abundantly blessed.
If a faithful woman in a Nazi concentration camp can learn to give thanks even for the lice and bugs tormenting her, only to find that thanksgiving is perfectly fit and justified, then perhaps we, in our comfortable lives, can learn her humble lesson as well.
And, if we are witty, we can find cause to be grateful even for the peevish grumbling of the ungrateful, for this means that freedom of speech in this land is not yet wholly dead. Rejoice!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
