Dr. James Lindsay is rapidly becoming one of the nation’s leading intellectuals. He has done what few people have done before him, namely, to examine leftism’s historical development critically. In a four-hour presentation on his podcast, New Discourses, he presented his findings. He identifies the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) as the grandfather of leftism and shows how his philosophy is the operative system of the left, even today.
The Anti-Enlightenment
The Enlightenment barely managed to produce its only political child – the United States – before it was killed by the Anti-Enlightenment, which German philosophers dominated. The lodestar of this movement was Hegel.
He was a mystic in the tradition of the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato believed in perfect supernatural ideas living in idea heaven. He thought that specially gifted philosophers could access these ideas through revelation, and he, therefore, outlined a perfect communistic dictatorship ruled by philosopher-kings in his book The Republic.
The Dialectic
Hegel added to this viewpoint the idea of God being in a constant process of discovering himself through the process of history. Once God becomes perfectly self-aware, history ends.
The process by which God manifests himself in the world is by a triad called the dialectic. One model of society manifests itself as a thesis, and counterforces produce a revolution – antithesis. When the dust settles and the bodies are buried, a new model emerges from the ashes as a synthesis.
Thus, Hegel did not believe in one dictatorship of philosopher-kings with perfect access to idea heaven, but rather a chain of dictatorships achieved through bloody revolutions.
Furthermore, he believed that even when the dictators performed genocide and oppressed their people, they were still heroes because they brought the dialectic forward toward the utopian end of history.
For the same reason, he saw the state as the manifestation of God on earth, the source of meaning, fulfillment, and order in the world. Even when ruled by the most brutal despotic corrupt thugs imaginable, the state was still the manifestation of God in the process of self-discovery.
One can understand how people with “Dark Triad” personality traits (malignant narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) can find Hegel’s dialectic appealing.
Alchemy
Hegel was obsessed with the German concept Aufhebung, which in English roughly translates to “conserving through destroying.” Lindsay connects Hegel’s interest to the fact that he was an alchemist. Alchemy is a mystical tradition of refining ordinary materials into better ones – turning lead into gold, for example. Indeed, his strange concept of God is an alchemist conception.
The dialectic is best understood as a continuous process of destroying the world and thereby refining the golden spirit of God. That is why progress comes through bloody revolutions that burn everything to the ground.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was a student of Hegel, and although he dialectically critiqued the religious aspects, he synthesized a new philosophy that he called dialectic materialism.
He claimed that this was Hegel without the woo-woo, but he still retained the mystical idea of inevitable “progress” through the dialectic. Although Marx removed God from the equation, he kept all its alchemical ideas. That is why Marx didn’t have a plan for what to do after the great communist revolution. He believed that the great society would emerge magically and spontaneously after capitalism had been demolished.
To this day, progressivists are still mystics of this golden future utopia that somehow magically will appear at the end of the history rainbow.
The Modern Left
Many members of the Frankfurt School were great fans of Hegel, but they dialectically critiqued and mutated it into new forms. Its latest iteration is critical race theory.
Lindsay notes that although the particulars change, the core idea of the dialectic and alchemy is retained in all forms of leftism. He calls the alchemic dialectic the operating system of the left. Somewhat surprisingly, he does not connect this to the great-grandfather of the left, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed in the “born good” myth. Rousseau believed that humans would be good if left to their own devices, but layers of culture corrupt human society.
This belief fits perfectly within the alchemic tradition of the left. That is why progressives believe that no plan is needed to create a good society. All that is required is burning everything to the ground. From this deconstructed state, the good nature of humans would be the golden seeds of utopia that spring forth spontaneously when unhindered by capitalism, patriarchy, systemic racism, and whatnot.
One can see how second-rate intellectuals who cannot create are attracted to such a philosophy. It placates their envy of creators and elevates the act of destroying – an art they master competently.
The Operating System of the Left
Lindsay finally concludes that the purpose of leftist education is not to teach the children any one idea but rather to install in them the operating system of the left. They want to rewire your children’s brains to think dialectically, finding meaning in revolution and destruction as a purpose in itself.
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Read more from Caroline Adana.
