The Gnostic Temptation, Antisemitism, and Your Favorite Podcaster

This blog was inspired by a conversation between Pesach Wolicki and James Lindsay. Their discussion raised a number of questions about Gnosticism, conspiracy thinking, and antisemitism that ultimately gave rise to the reflections that follow. The podcast can be viewed below.

Antisemitism is a witness, and witnesses are typically killed to protect the crime. It is a reminder that the cleavage caused by the incommensurability of transcendence and immanence will not be eliminated. When the facts of that cleavage become intolerable as witnessed, the Jews will become intolerable as witnesses. In these movements the most dangerous epistemological criminals are those who refuse to ignore what the theory leaves out; in the transition from movement to system this witness becomes its perpetual victim.

The theory will, like a corral, bring together in one place everything that fits in it; but it will always have to deal somehow with what will not fit, what is left outside the corral. This remainder poses a challenge to the completeness of the theory, and instead of revising the theory, the system turns on the remainder. What should serve as an occasion for humility becomes instead an enemy to be destroyed.

The Gnostic temptation lurks behind very many of these movements. Ancient Gnosticism took many forms, but they all shared a certain intuition: the world is fundamentally askew and its true condition is to be discovered through a kind of special knowledge. It’s not what it seems; hidden beneath its visible reality is a secret reality accessible only to those with eyes to see. Salvation comes not through repentance or reform or reconciliation, but through revelation: one must be taught the secret thing that explains everything. After the discovery has been made, the world’s complexity seems to dissolve into a single explanation. Thereafter, every instance of frustration, disagreement, setback, or lost opportunity serves to confirm the correctness of the diagnosis.

This brand of antisemitism is peddled by right-wing leaders like Steve Bannon, podcasters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, thinkers like Alexander Dugin, Russian Eurasianists, and Iranian revolutionaries, which all become connected through a common explanatory structure. Lindsey’s point is that many followers are not initially motivated by hatred of Jews. They begin with disappointment and then become attracted to systems that promise to explain everything.

While few modern political and ideological movements are genealogically Gnostic, they often recapitulate Gnostic habits of thought. The world is divided into those who are awake to the truth and those in the thrall of illusion. Surface explanations are not to be trusted. Hidden structures, shadowy elites, and secret machinations are the key to understanding what is really happening. Conspiracist worldviews often begin with observations that contain some truth, perspectives that treat concentrations of power with skepticism. They then swirl those true things, with comforting half-truths and outright falsehood. Spiraling ever farther from reality, the non-reality at the center of these worldviews is mostly perpetrated and maintained by people who sincerely believe in the veracity and virtue of their effort. The boundary between ordinary knowledge and more rarefied knowledge is reserved for those believed to possess special insight. Within this output, dissent is no longer regarded as an honest and honorable difference of opinion. And this becomes a moral and intellectual divide between those who rightly interpret reality and those who do not.

The appeal of figures like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens lies in a tendency to analyze problems in terms of ever-more-comprehensive explanations. Bannon talks constantly of civilizational decline, corrupt elites, and the need for national renewal. Carlson positions himself as revealing truths kept from the public by political, media, and institutional gatekeepers. And Owens likewise positions herself as saying what others are not willing to say. In each case, listeners are encouraged to believe that things are not as they seem, and that secret powers are pulling the strings. The appeal is not just political but epistemic: ordinary explanations are insufficient, and secret explanations offer a glimpse at a deeper reality. This is not to say that all such explanations are antisemitic, but they mimic the distinctly Gnostic form of thinking, in which truth comes from revelation, all complexity boils down to a single explanation, and frustration leads to a need for an agent behind society’s failings.

Antisemitism in the alt right and across the far-right spectrum functions as it has for centuries, as an explanation for national and individual disappointment: the mechanism remains consistent while the details change. Dugin, Lindsay points out, describes Russia as a civilization “held back and thwarted by hostile outsiders.” The explanation gives meaning to national disappointment: Russia hasn’t failed because it was unrealistic or structurally incompetent, it’s failed because enemies stood in its way of becoming what it was meant to be. This is exactly the psychological structure that we find again and again in antisemitism. A people considers itself destined for greatness, reality refuses to cooperate, and when a dream is threatened, self-evaluative interpretation is avoided in favor of pointing the finger at an outside force.

The most telling attribute that many of the societies described in this chapter share is not their animosity toward enemies, but their belief in fate. The land-based powers are fated to rule. The revolution is fated to triumph. The age of equality is fated to come. The nation is fated to thrive. History is fated to reach its glorious conclusion. The trouble is, the glorious conclusion never materializes. All societies, sooner or later, find that their ideals meet with resistance. Human weakness, competition from other societies, and the accidents of history impede any grand scheme. It is at this stage that antisemitism is appealing: it provides an explanation for why the glorious conclusion has not yet been realized. The explanation cannot lie within the idea itself; it must be the fault of the people standing in the way.

The plague swept through Europe in 1348. Physicians disagreed about its causes. Entire communities watched family members die within days. Faced with uncertainty, many preferred a false explanation to no explanation at all. Rumors spread that Jews had poisoned wells. Thousands were killed. The accusation did not explain the plague; it explained why people preferred accusation to uncertainty.

The search for roots does not automatically produce antisemitism, but it often produces the conditions in which antisemitism becomes attractive. A society searching for its roots is already searching for an explanation for its dislocation, and if it concludes that it lost its roots not to history but to enemies, those enemies must be identified. Antisemitism enters in when Jews are imagined as not just different but as agents of deracination; as symbols of the forces that have pulled the world up from its roots. It tells people that their world was not lost through the complicated tragedies of history. It was taken from them. The explanation is untrue, but it is psychologically satisfying – it turns confusion into certainty and loss into a story about traitors.

This is where Gnostic thinking and antisemitism often meet. The hidden cause acquires a human face. The Jew is the answer to what is actually an underlying question: Why has redemption not happened yet? Antisemitism supplies the answer any disappointed redemptive movement wants: an explanation for failure that leaves the promise unmodified. Instead of accepting the incomplete nature of history, it finds an enemy secretly responsible for history’s incompleteness.

Antisemitism thrives there because the accusation is no longer empirical; it has become mythological. The issue is not what Jews actually do, but what “the Jew” has come to represent in the minds of people searching for hidden answers. Contradictions are irrelevant, since the accusation is not descriptive, but rather symbolic. The Jew can explain everything because he has become the embodiment of the hidden force the theory requires.

The distinctive thing about antisemitic conspiracy theories is that they turn Jews into the hidden obstacle that is responsible for the problem of history itself. The Jew is not blamed just for this or that social failure, but for the fact that failures persist at all. If social divisions remain, it is because of Jewish influence. If the economy fails, it is because of Jewish influence. If morals fail, it is because of Jewish influence. If revolutions fail, it is because of Jewish influence. The charge becomes all-encompassing; the Jew is what makes the world what it shouldn’t be. Antisemitism therefore makes people into the answer to the question “why has redemption not yet occurred?”

Yet this still leaves a deeper question unanswered. Why are Jews so often the answer? Many groups have been marginalized. Many people have been considered outsiders. But few have so often been the answer to the question across civilizations so separated by geography, language, religion, and ideology. What is distinctive about the Jewish people is not just their difference, but the meaning of their continued existence. Jewish existence reminds the world that history is not yet complete. The biblical narrative puts redemption in the future, not in the present, and in the hands of God, not men. As long as the Jewish people exist, they are a challenge to the notion that any empire, revolution, church, nation, or ideology is the end of history. The Jew is thus threatening not because he secretly controls the world, but because he suggests that the day of redemption has not yet arrived.

In this sense, Jewish continuity functions as an epistemological remainder within Gnostic systems: it is a living reminder that history is mysterious, and cannot be reduced to secret knowledge or hidden explanations. The world is always too big for any conspiracy. People are always too complex for ideology. History is full of irresolutions and contingencies, and sometimes there are no answers. Jewish continuity is a testimony, for the Gnostic, to the limits of explanation itself: not every problem has a hidden cause, and not every disappointment has a secret enemy. Instead, it signals the possibility that some tensions are simply part of our human reality, that there are certain tensions that are not resolved by finding a deeper answer, and in that respect the Jew is a witness not only to the complexity of history but to the humility required to live in it.

The remainder is not just intellectual. It is historical. Every comprehensive theory “yearns for an ending”; every redemptive system “strives to prove that history is on the path to redemption.” And yet the Jewish people live on, through the demise of every civilization that pretended to have superseded them. Egypt is gone. Babylon is gone. Rome is gone. Medieval Christendom is fractured. The Soviet Union has fallen. But the Jewish people persist. And because of that persistence, there always remains the possibility that history cannot be mastered by theory; that no political project, ideological movement, or universal church holds the key to human fulfillment. Jewish continuity therefore becomes not only a historical fact, but evidence against the adequacy of every comprehensive theory.

Thus, antisemitism operates in a deeply Gnostic mode. It offers to reveal. It pretends to unmask. It proffers an esoteric explanation for existence’s disappointments. In this way, antisemitism is a false revelation. It substitutes accusation for the mystery of the world. The world as unfinished project becomes comprehensible since someone is withholding its redemption. The inexplicable is translated into conspiracy. That which should invoke humility instead invokes certitude. That which should give pause instead brings about blame. The mystery of the incomplete world is replaced by the illusion that someone is to blame for it’s incompletion.

It wasn’t simply the world’s tragedy. The secret never existed. The world is incomplete, not because the redemption was blocked by hidden enemies, but because the human condition is incomplete. History cannot be completed. Humans are finite. Each generation inherits problems it did not create. The Gnostic temptation is to ignore this reality, and to look for something simpler. Antisemitism is its most enduring form, because it presents every failed redemptive movement with what it desires most: a hidden enemy responsible for the fact that utopia has not arrived.