There is something appealing about possessing some bit of secret knowledge or trivia that is unknown to everyone, save a select few “initiates” fortunate enough to partake in the mysteries. The seductive allure of secret knowledge—or of just being “in-the-know” about some microniche subculture—seems to be a part of human nature.
We’d like to think in our modern age that we’re not superstitious sorts, but we are haunted everywhere. Scientists have elevated themselves to the level of priests in a cult of scientism, worshipping the emptiness of nihilistic materialism just as the pagans worshipped lifeless idols. Both are made of stuff—hard, material, unfeeling, insensate stuff—and both are equally empty.
But we here on the Right can fall prey to Gnostic fantasies as well. The Libertarian dreams of a utopia in which everyone engages in frictionless free exchanges and all uncomfortable disputes are settled with cash and self-interest. He’s as materialist and deluded as the mask-wearing mandatory vaxxer preaching loudly from the Church of Scientism. The hyper-nationalist dreams of some impossible ethnostate that never really existed in the first place. And so on.
Still, it’s seductive, the idea that we can possess the knowledge of good and evil, of true Reality. After all, that’s the original sin, isn’t, it? Eve, then Adam, could not resist the allure of being—so they were told, dishonestly—like God. But even—perhaps, especially–Christians can fall into this trap.
The Portly Politico 