Eyes Wide Shut: Compelled Speech: Imperiled Silence,
                                Nullified Conscience.

W H Auden’s term the ‘Age of Anxiety’ captures the mood in epochs of moral and material
insecurity. War, economic havoc, plagues along with disillusionment in political leadership and
distrust in institutions (e.g. the law), the demise of received religion and science bring about
uncertainty, existential angst and social anxiety.

An Age of Anxiety is often accompanied by a wave of pessimism and loss of confidence in society
and its institutions. As far back as the first and third centuries AD, Simone Pétrement reminds us,
the two orders of reality and value could be ruptured and inverted by denying the value of the world
and creation.

In our own times, the familiar cultural furniture is considered no longer trustworthy because it is not
what it was or seems because it’s veracity and efficacy (and thus value) has been debased
becoming a mere image/ eidolon/simulacrum/ marketing archetype hollowed out of its original
content and significance .

How do we respond to this cultural wasteland of alienation? Rather than adopting a formal
doctrine, the ‘mind’s eye’ takes flight, negating existent reality, which is a prison, a “dominion of
fear… distress and desolation”. By a mental turning inward, it seals itself off to attain a utopia
through superior self ‘knowledge and faith’, known as gnosis.

Our present cultural anxiety tracks with that of the 1st to 4th Centuries AD: Catastrophically the
moral, cultural and institutional aspects of Roman Imperium failed, following wars, plagues,
migrations, invasions, and religious collapse, along with economic problems. (This has been well
outlined by E R Dodds.)

Today’s echo of this cultural psychic anxiety from the first millennium has spawned a response that
assuages the existential and psychological angst. It is highly religious but is in the modern dress (or
more appositely, in drag) of its Gnostic forebear. In this, Marxism plays a crucial role.

The Gnostic hue or tendency is now expressed and evident as Woke Cultural Marxism, which has
been interpolated into our culture and its institutions. Marx was a gnostic adherent, just as Hegel
was influenced by Swabian Hermeticism, which Dr James Lindsay has recently brought to wider
attention. Marx sought to resolve the alienation of mankind in the world.

A consequence of the Marxist inversion of Hegel’s spirit, in favour of the material, is that Heaven
and earth were severed from one another, not unlike the way Plato’s forms (eidolon) are severed
from the imperfect reality they exemplified. This leaves only the world “Below”- the new heaven is
on earth in the form of Communism.

The world “above“ has been replaced by the hyper-real world of unmoored intellects or wits. E R
Dodds describes it as “…an hypostatisation, a dreamlike projection of …inner experience”, Or of
“Depth” or what St Augustine called the abyss of human interiority (abyssus humanae conscientiae),
An “ego tormented by longing for ultimate truth”- or in the terms of the retreating minds’ eye .
The familiar modern narcissism of “My Truth, My story...”

This can be seen as the modern manifestation of The Gnostic tendency, which is profoundly
religious; querying what comprises our human nature has become highly contested publically and
lies at the heart of the culture wars. Gnostic ideas, as a psychic response, go to ‘the ground of
being’, informing conscience, from which moral and ethical human agency derives its priorities and
impulse to action. Clearly, this is exemplified in present-day politics, particularly in the United
States.

Patrick Deneem argues that Progressive Liberalism (derived from 19th-Century Hegelianism and
Marxism via, in ultimo, American Marxism) condemns the world, society and its polity as wrong, if
not evil, and harmful, corrupting the innocent, and thus humanity as a whole. Progressive liberlism
believes Human nature can be transformed by mankind alone through superior knowledge (gnosis).
Because human nature is not fixed, society – our world – can remade as a new Socialist Mankind.
The gnostic tendency is also illustrated well by Transgender ideology, in which a person is considered
to be haplessly “flung into this world” and so is alienated. The person is believes, and is believed to
be by others, in exile in the wrong body: transitioning is the escape from this world into the hyper-
real through gnosis of what one’s true being is.

The religious telos of transformatory salvation helps explain why transgender is such a hard fought-
over matter, and why it excites threats and violence. It is in ultimo fundamentally an existential
religious make-or-break matter. Denial of a transgender person’s identity is seen as an existential
threat.

Escaping this world into the values of the hyper-real comes with an evil corollary: Simone
Pétrement sets out that the consequences of giving the hyper-real priority over matters of this world
entail the devaluing of this world:

…the point of view of a value, a good that is above all things, that is foreign, like the God of
the Gnostics, that is finally absolute, apart, is in the end to justify all injustice, all lies, and all
evil from the moment they begin to exist. (A Separate God: The Origins and Teachings of
Gnosticism, 1984/1990, P31)

That is why free speech, freedom of conscience, Western Cultural values generally, and the rule of
law are shouted down and cancelled by the Woke, who claim to possess superior gnosis. It also
explains why this mode of thinking resulted in such a high body count from November 1917 onward;
something the World Economic Forum is on track to further experiment with.

Counterpoised to these tendencies is the Liberal Conservative- and traditional- view that human
nature is fixed but can be controlled and civilised by mankind in Lockean civil society. It takes the
view that we are what we are, and each of us bears both good and evil within us. Suffering is an
inevitable part of existence, and we must deal with reality as it is, seeing it clearly in order to
mitigate its adverse effects and problem solve.

Here again the ancient world has its echoes in the present. Jerusalem and Athens have been the
foundation of the West: The logos of creation ran in tandem with that of the logos of intellect;
however, the influence of third great city of the ancient world, Alexandria, the source of Hermetic
and gnostic ideas, has gone into periods of abeyance and at present lies dormant in the shadows,
but it is never lost. James Lindsay notes that our epoch has seen the flood of Alexandrian gnosis
surge back in.
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But how do these broad developments affect our daily lives, and what are the legal ramifications?
The mundane is far from being exempt from the alienation and anxiety of the modern world. A
simple ephemeral workplace example can serve to illustrate the infiltration of progressive liberal
ideas, the polarisation they bring, and their consequences for individual consciences, which is no
small matter.

Thursday 18 May 2023 was designated as an ‘Anti-Bullying day’ (that is, not “Against Bullying” or
“Stop Bullying”), an event taking its cue from the US social justice catchphrase “Anti-Racism”. The
Discussion here centres on an HR Memo announcing the event which compelled a dress code, and
considers what that entails.

Cleaved onto “anti-bullying” were the social justice terms ‘Diversity’ and ‘LGBT/trans’. The
grouping can be seen as rhetorical, as an alchemic ‘Motte and Bailey’ linkage is in play. By
conforming to the dress code, one is considered to subscribe to the notions of Diversity and
LGBT/trans also. A question arises: is assent to one assent to all?

It is generally agreed that workplace bullying is a bad thing as a matter of moral and social common
sense, because it is capriciously disruptive and destructive of employment relations. Bullying can
be terminal for the career of the victim, it may lead to mental breakdowns, health issues, financial
privation, the loss of home or the necessity of moving out of town.

Diverse people and LGBT folk are clearly fall into the class of people in the workplace and are
encompassed by the lead concept of anti-bullying, which makes sense because people simplicter
should not be bullied at work. Yet the terms ‘Diversity’ and ‘transgender’ bring with them a raft of
Underlying ideas about the world that derive from Marxist identity politics ideology, and involve
core beliefs that are partly gnostic. Hence the mention above of the alchemic ‘Motte and Bailey’, in
which terms are magically fused together that are far from socially accepted or agreed upon.

One view of the HR Memo, albeit a negative one, was that it used bullying as a means to engraft
Woke or Marxist tropes and seek agreement on all of the points set out by insisting on dress code
compliance.

An alternative, positive view, is that If this effect were unintentional, the HR Memo shows how an
ideology (in this case a Marxist Woke one in the form of modern gnostic tropes) may parasitically
permeate a public discourse, and change its character from the inside out.

Employees were compelled to wear an item of clothing coloured pink, preferably a
shirt. Compulsion effected, despite the lack of consensus or even consultation, public assent to the
terms ‘diversity’ and ‘transgender’. Indeed these are disputed at the fundamental level of beliefs
that are at the ‘ground of our being.’ There is clearly a conflict of world views involved here. Many
oppose cultural Marxist views, and its Gnosticism has been considered by normative beliefs to be a
heresy, which exposes the fundamental nature of the issues at stake.

The compulsory dress code, at the same time, contravened the freedoms of belief, conscience,
speech and expression set out in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. The signalling- was a
compelled form of speech by symbol- it gave assent to all the terms grafted onto ‘Anti-Bullying’ in
the HR Memo.

Compelled speech is on the pathway to the collective singing and slogan shouting in unison of
totalitarian regimes, and clearly has an authoritarian character to it.

Opposed to compelled speech, and in addition to free speech, is the overlooked right to silence that
exists in both the criminal and civil law, as a civil liberty and a human right which is given legal fiat.
In criminal law the right to silence protects the accused against self-incrimination. It also, as was
tested in the United States supreme Court in the 1950’s, extends to a person not being forced to
betray his or her conscience. Even Queen Elzabeth I declared she “would not open the windows
into men’s souls.” An eminent psychoanalyst, Joost Meerloo, writes that “a legal attack on the
right to remain silent “can become a serious invasion of human privacy and reserve. Undermining
the value of the personality and of private conscience…”Meerloo 129/1956.

Meerloo gives the example of the betraying friendship, which he ranks as a highly conscientious
matter: If “people are compelled to betray their inner moral feelings of friendship, … then that very
law undermines the integrity of the person, and coercion and menticide begin.” 1956/130.
‘Menticide’ is the destructive process of compelling and overbearing a person’s thought, speech,
will and conscience.

Menticide is evident in the concepts of “right think” and “group think”, by which people are
expected to hold only those opinions deemed proper to the collective and authority. Of the same
order is “hate speech”- a collectivist social justice term and not a jurisprudential one- which
envisages criminalisation and legal prosecution for speech and thus matters of conscience. These
are clearly neither matters of ‘Diversity’ nor ‘Inclusion’ but instead of anti- humanism.

Freedom of conscience requires, first, the right to withhold one’s private thoughts. A right to
silence in our civil law is guaranteed by virtue of International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
1966 (ICCPR 1966), which was incorporated into our law by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990.
Secondly, the right to privacy under ICCPR 1966, Art 17 was re-incorporated into our law by section
3 (b) of the Privacy Act 2020. Privacy, as with freedom of speech, goes directly to freedom of
conscience, and as Meerloo says, mental freedom – that is, the right to think (ICCPR Art 18 &19), to
verify and to choose which is the best and most truthful is inherent in the freedom of conscience.
Coherence to reality, in contrast to the mental constructs of the sealed mind in negation of reality, is
Implied intellectually, and expressly accepted in common sense.

Freedom of conscience enables and is the springboard of our human agency. It takes us to the
ground of our being. The contrary is the ‘Womb state’ or ‘totalitaria’. Meerloo notes that “when
people silence their conscience and compromise for the sake of convenience, at that moment they
begin to be disloyal to themselves.” (1956:P221).

That disloyalty and its consequences are set out by Czselaw Milosc in Captive Minds, Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago and recently by Rod Dreher in Live not by Lies.
These points regarding freedom of conscience clearly drill down to religious considerations and
involve a contest about our being and the world. In the gnostic view, which Rousseau and Marx
expressed best, the world is evil and bad and we are haplessly “flung” into it, alienated (e.g. in the
wrong body) and need to transition out of it.

Hegel, inverting Marx, argued that instead of a spiritual-cosmic alteration we can have an earthly
one. The Cultural Marxist Woke gnostic agenda, by possessing superior insight and knowledge
(gnosis), claims we can solve the evil and alienation of mankind by an endless critique of everything
that exists, thereby pulling everything down in the world.

However, it is clear to many that further destruction and pulling things down does not conduce or
add to human well-being.

Gnostic belief defies and negates reality, and seeks its destruction It turns into a sealed world of the
mind, or mere “wit” as Alexander Pope put it. The products of the gnostic flight are the
ruminating mental constructs which end with the Parody of the tragic clown Pierrot, in the
dystopian man, the Joker from Batman. To give one recent example, Dylan Mulvaney, as the
transgender face of Bud Light’s advertising campaign, parodies Audrey Hepburn and young female
‘bimbos’ generally, while the heavily made-up drag queens in the advertisements are gross
parodies of women.

Verbal constructs abound. Verbal alchemy is seen not in terms of argument but instead of
denunciation, as Plotinus had noted in The Enneads, catch phrases such as ’white privilege’,
‘systemic racism’, ‘colonial trauma’ and the perennial ‘Patriarchy’. Ibrahim X Kendi falls into this
trap when he declares ‘when I see an institution I see racism’ or systemic racism. But he does not
see.

The modern Gnostic’s eyes are wide shut. This is sitting in Plato’s cave with the fire out and
the lights off.

As J S Mill says, free speech, involving thought and conscience, either confirms an opinion or falsifies
it, and that is a social good. Compulsion of speech, thought and conscience precludes the corrective
to errant ideas and group insanity. But as Lenin famously asked, what is to be done?

G R Hill.
Nelson
2023/06/23-24, 27