Humpty Dumpty, Wokism, and Gnosticism

by Robert Gear (October 2024)

 

Notions given satirical airing in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871) have been ingested and spewed out again by squadrons of leftists, wokists and maladapted weirdos, whether ideologically inclined or just keen to exhibit their virtue in lieu of any other reason for living beyond a substitute theology.

Perhaps such posturing has always been the case, but no doubt the tendency was most avidly disseminated by the gnostic scribbler, Karl Marx, who may have read (who knows?) deeply into the genre of nonsense literature.

Here is the much-quoted passage from Lewis Carroll:

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all. Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

 

We have clearly reached the age of Humpty Dumpty. Language is used to mean ‘just what they choose it to mean’ —a tendency fictionalized by Orwell and now spread around like clouds of spores in a damp forest.

So in the days when Marx was scribbling away, nonsense literature was ‘in the air’ so to speak, and no doubt our ‘materialist gnostic’ was au fait with the tendency—if not with the precise literary models of this genre. The English novel at least as far back as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759 —1767) had reveled in obfuscation and impenetrable jokiness. One of the leitmotivs of that work is that the narrator, Tristram, fails to explain anything simply, but wanders down and around rabbit holes of commentary (as did the interlocutors of Alice a century later) providing much humor and interest but avoiding any obvious plot outcome. The novel ends as follows:

 

L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? —

A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick—And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.

 

What is the cock and bull story so enthused over and hoped for by the socialist brand of gnosticism? It is that Man will have completed a destiny devoutly to be wished—and goaded towards, which will come at the end of history when division of labor is abolished and humankind returns to the prelapsarian condition of Genesis ll. To arrive at that point ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish’ —Mephistopheles’ words from Goethe’s Faust that he was fond of quoting.

According to Eric Voegelin in Science, Politics and Gnosticism, all gnostic movements start with certain premises: the belief that the world is intrinsically poorly organized, that salvation from the world of evil is possible and can be changed historically by human action, and finally that methods can be devised and prescribed to construct a better world through knowledge—gnosis. Various forms of gnosticism have proposed differing teleological visions, but they have much in common. For Voegelin, the mystical activist Karl Marx, had a gnostic disposition to return to a utopian Garden of Eden in which the institution of private property and division of labor have been eliminated. Through the proletarian revolution, man will be transformed into a communist superman in which bizarrely:

 

…nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (From The German Ideology)

 

Thus history is completed within the mundane world without the intercession of a supermundane being.

This work-shy sponger wasn’t joking; and his modern day acolytes certainly are not joking despite the clownishness of many of their pronouncements. Marx’s hatred of humanity was strikingly clear from his earliest witterings. Later, his anti-semitic virulence, his despising of non-scholars and of the actual working class, his attacks on competing versions of socialism and on Christianity (a different theological pursuit) became pervasive in all his actions and scribblings. Paul Johnson’s essay in Intellectuals is a wonderfully concise dissection of this unhappy mystic; the chapter’s subtitle ‘Howling Gigantic Curses’ is taken from a line in one of his youthful poems, ‘I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.’ When he wasn’t engaged in non-work, abusing his family, impregnating his unpaid maidservant (which he blamed on BFF Engels, of course!), conning his friends and associates and behaving in a variety of other disgraceful ways he took his poetic eschatology seriously. Like gnostics of other stripes, his aim was, as Voegelin writes, ‘the destruction of the old world and passage to the new.’

The latest eructations of this gnostic creed can be found in the pronouncements of the wokist tendency (a term hard to define—but we know it when we see it—especially since many of its devotees seem to have partaken of Kool Aid (or is it’ Kook Aid?).

At a deeper level, this wokist silliness is a species of the genus of Marxism which in turn is a genus of the family of Gnosticism and is descended from a long line of academic grievance-mongering, from the malcontent Frankfurters and their ungrateful griping to today’s tertiary—schooled and schooling propagandists. Clearly the world is not what they like, but from this shared and almost universal disenchantment they manage to produce a cascade of virulence and fake victimhood in the guise of virtue.

The current prize eructation is the belief that men can be women and vice versa. We all know this is the world of Humpty Dumpty believed in by many of our betters including: one supreme court justice, cowardly politicians, assorted academics, soi disant journalists, and other such opinionators who espouse this view so vehemently.

Why would anyone believe (or pretend to believe) such a patently false notion? The answer depends presumably on what level of analysis one wishes to apply. At the most superficial level it is just an accepted solecism of the younger generation who have been put through a certain amount of brainwashing during their incumbency at schooling institutions. When one adds in the propaganda of the legacy media and influencers on social media, the young have few ways of seeing such silliness for what it is—or portends.

Why certain individuals are so easily hoodwinked must be a matter of searching psychological investigation. A good start may be found in Erik Erikson’s framework which seems to go some way towards a useful explanation; that some adults seek power over others in order to get by force what was not given to them in childhood.

The pretense that males and females are more or less interchangeable quickly leads to other insupportable nonsense such that men should be allowed to fight women in Olympic boxing swimming and weightlifting competitions. This is a source of humor for many, although not presumably for the female victims. You would think that the spectacle of a man beating up a woman at a sporting event would give the most ardent acolyte pause. You would think.

Many other trends associated with wokism have recently cascaded from and into the corporate media which then beguile low-information consumers with correct opinions. They slide into our consciousness one after another like prayer beads on a devilish rosary of DEI sacraments, surreal in their strangeness. Readers may have their own favorite examples of present-day madness. These include inter many alia commandments about the absolute necessity of wearing face nappies to protect us from tiny viruses, the settled belief that the riots that ensued upon the death by drug overdose of a petty criminal in Minnesota were mostly peaceful, that all cultures are equally valuable and worthy, that misogyny is a form of terrorism, that immigrant ‘communities’ that fail to integrate are a cultural asset, that ‘equity’ is a desirable or remotely possible goal, that we need to check our thinking, that we should engage in ‘pronoun hospitality,’ that it is illegal to call a fat politician ‘fat,’ that Kampala Haggis would make a suitable President of the United States, that Constable’s The Hay Wain (to take a random recent example) is ‘classist,’ that we need ‘comfort rooms’ for triggered university students, that we have a climate crisis, that blasphemy against a particular demographic must be punished, that ‘whiteness’ should be abolished, that forest fires are caused by racism, that the countryside is racist, that young children can choose their sex, that drag queen story time is a wholesome entertainment for youngsters (or for anyone). The list of really silly ideas goes on and on. But truly there is no possibility of enumerating all the latest wokist opinions since they proliferate alarmingly and in unforeseeable directions.

Have we reached peak woke? Who knows? Most stupid ideas come to an end but then metamorphose and go searching out new territory and new suckers on whom to latch.

To receive what cheer we may, it is well to remember the almost universal ability of adolescents to reject and despise their older generation’s expectations and values; this could pave the way for a reversal of at least some of the most idiocratic propaganda. And just possibly the hoi polloi may get altogether fed up with the controllers’ tiresome and now brutal efforts at preventing opinions contrary to their own. Some recent events in the UK have hinted at this possibility. Naturally these ructions were put down enthusiastically by police forces and a judiciary known nowadays for not interfering with the disgraceful protests and riotous behavior of certain other ‘demographics.’ This ‘two-tiered’ approach is supported by a newly elected authoritarian government testing just how far it can go in undermining British life and culture.

Just quoting passages from Churchill’s The River War, or for that matter 1984 may be sailing too close to the wind:

 

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within … But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet—!

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Robert Gear is a Contributing Editor to New English Review who now lives in the American Southwest. He is a retired English teacher and has co-authored with his wife several texts in the field of ESL. He is the author of If In a Wasted Land, a politically incorrect dystopian satire.

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