23AR28-05

AR 28:5 - "New Gnostics" and the Internet's "strange quasi-faiths"

In this issue:

GNOSTICISM - it's "almost never about collective redemption"

SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM - Copyright controversies

Apologia Report 28:5 (1,602)
February 18, 2023

GNOSTICISM

Chances are pretty good that a year or two ago you heard about the GameStop stock trading explosion. Chances are equally good that you didn't hear the whole story.

Malcom Kyeyune's feature, "The New Gnostics: From neopaganism to cryptocurrency cults, the Internet today is full of strange quasi-faiths" (City Journal, Autumn 2022), links GameStop to all the above, and ... another universe.

In early 2022, a video-essay creator named Dan Olson uploaded a two-hour-long exposé to YouTube. "Line Goes Up - the Problem with NFTs" quickly became a viral sensation, accumulating nearly 9 million views by August - an incredible number for a seemingly niche topic. ("NFT" stands for "non-fungible token," the name of a very small subset of the still fairly obscure online cryptocurrency system.)

"Olson had done his homework. The video begins with the real-estate crash of 2008....

"From there, Olson explores the early days of the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and its various features, promises, and problems. Olson moves on from Bitcoin to other digital currencies ... he is interested in the social implications of 'crypto' hype. The crypto world, according to Olson, is filled not only with hype but also with professional scammers, broken promises, predatory and antisocial behavior, desperation, greed - and rage. ...

"Less than half a year after Olson's video appeared, TerraUSD, the biggest so-called stablecoin (a cryptocurrency intended to maintain a price peg to another asset, often a national currency), crashed overnight. ... Amid the financial carnage, the feelings of anger deepened. ...

"Crypto, it turns out, is not unique. The intense online world centered on digital currencies that Olson explores ... is today just one among many online. From radical feminism and anti–seed oil activism to neopaganism and 'esoteric' online racism, the Internet today is full of strange new quasi-faiths, many offering competing narratives of what went wrong after 2008, each offering a secret knowledge - a gnosis - through which an enlightened few can hope to escape and purify themselves.

"Indeed, one of the under-explored effects of the great financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent collapse of Western society's model sequence for attaining professional success and social esteem ... has been a privatization of meaning among younger millennials and members of Generation Z. It's broadly accepted today that many in the younger generation face a future where they will be materially poorer and less professionally secure than their parents and grandparents. Such monumental shifts in economic reality invariably produce dramatic shifts in people's social reality, as old expectations and beliefs no longer match up with the way things are. In earlier eras of American history, major crises, as well as the ideological and religious revivals that often followed them, played out in streets, churches, tent meetings, and lodges. Now the process takes shape primarily online, where the new Gnostics preach.

"According to Olson, the average profile of someone inside the more speculative part of the crypto boom was as follows: middle class, but downwardly mobile, with a susceptibility to the confidence tricks and fraud.... [T]hese people tended to exhibit the unstable emotional mix of hope, confusion, and righteous fury that Olson identifies. ...

"If this sounds like a sort of hyper-libertarian world, with each economic actor out for himself and himself alone, the truth is more complicated, as was shown in early 2021, when the stock price of the video-game retailer GameStop suddenly exploded. ...

"What everyone noticed was that this particular short squeeze wasn't the usual story of Wall Street firms trying to make a quick buck. It was about something else: large numbers of retail investors, jumping at the chance to 'punish' the powers that be. ...

"Still, the short squeeze illustrates the same dynamic that Olson noted with cryptocurrencies and NFTs: an ethos of social awareness and anger at an unfair system, coexisting with a sort of dog-eat-dog philosophy, in which the light at the end of the tunnel, the 'exit,' is always a personal one. ...

"A striking illustration of this phenomenon was an introductory montage to a Fox News special, hosted by popular TV host Tucker Carlson, called 'The End of Men.' ...

"The casual observer can be forgiven for thinking that some sort of vaguely 'fascist' imagery is on display. But look closer, and a different picture emerges: what you see advertised is a form of messianic, almost millenarian, self-help - about as far as one could get from an ideology of violent collectivism. ...

"Seed oils are not merely bad on some empirical level; they are evil on a spiritual level. Seed oils corrupt the body. By eliminating them (and by preaching such elimination), one cleanses oneself of impurity and helps others achieve salvation, as well. In this narrative, which the Carlson special echoes, many contemporary young men have been robbed of their true potential due to an environmental toxicity. If the toxicity is removed, a higher, more natural state of being opens up.

"This is a modern form of Gnosticism, the early-Christian-era belief system that postulates that humans contain a piece of God or the divinity inside themselves, to which they then lose access because of the material world's corruption. Through proper spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, that connection can be rekindled, and the enlightened person can then break free from the corruption that surrounds him. ...

"It's hard to overstate just how full the Internet is with itinerant prophets, holy fools, hustlers, fraudsters, and soothsayers. One of the biggest figures in this ecosystem, 'Bronze Age Pervert,' or BAP, is a former academic and poster on an obscure Internet forum who published a book, Bronze Age Mindset, which has become a cult classic <www.bit.ly/3lOL0ZC> for part of the dissident Right. ...

Back to Dan Olson - he's "a millennial, and thus his exploration of crypto isn't hindered by the slang terms, the ironic distance, or the various cultural mores of those who, in the parlance of our times, are 'Highly Online.' He knows what the various terms mean, he knows when people are being ironic and when they're not, and so his harshest criticism targets the actual ideology of the crypto ecosystem, rather than remaining a surface-level critique of what it says it's about.

"For older people, this interpretive penetration is clearly harder. Michael Anton's review <www.bit.ly/3YXEApg> of Bronze Age Mindset for The Claremont Review of Books is suggestive in this regard. ... Anton's review concludes with a rebuke of his fellow (older) conservatives: the kids no longer listen to them, and thus the need to try to understand the younger generation can't be put off. ...

"What has taken over the young - both inside and outside the Right - is not BAPism but the ideology (or quasi-religion) of self-care. ... Before you know it, you're no longer on the right, but on the extreme left, with competing feminist or transsexual 'mindsets,' all holding out the same promise of personal betterment, career advancement, or some other lifestyle benefit as the ultimate reward for the enlightened. ...

"In earlier eras, social crises often ignited religious revivals; the United States has a rich history of Christian revivalism in periods of rapid social change. Nowadays, Christian conservatives like Rod Dreher bemoan the lack of religiosity among the young. Is this really the case, though? ...

"Through ritual, through secret knowledge, through purification and removal of the self from [our culture's many popular taboos] the individual seekers hope to find enlightenment.

"The hypocrisy of cryptocurrency chatrooms - people enraged at getting scammed while simultaneously hoping to participate in the scamming of others - is natural in this context, because gnostic belief is almost never about collective redemption." <www.bit.ly/3XsyAEC>

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SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM

According to a Dec 22 '22 press release from Andy Roman, publisher of Advent Messenger, an independent Adventist news and media website: "The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists Filed a Three-Count Federal Lawsuit Against Fellow Believers."

Imbedded within we are told that "Under Ted Wilson's leadership, the [SDA] General Conference has used and continues to use the federal courts ... to provide law enforcement and protection for the General Conference Corporation."

Roman finds that "Seventh-day Adventism is no longer a belief system that is defined by our sincerely held religious convictions. No, the term 'Seventh-day Adventism' now refers to a federally protected trademark...."

That conclusion has as its basis that "On May, 9, 2022, Ted Wilson's General Conference Corporation filed a three-count federal lawsuit <www.bit.ly/3YYpfEL> against Joe Gresham, Sterling Trice, Linda Trice, Bill Mathis, Gaye Mathis, and John Does - all of whom are evidently connected with the 'Berean Church of Free Seventh-day Adventists' and the 'International Association of Free Seventh-day Adventists.' <www.bit.ly/3XEECRM> These are fellow believers who believe in the second coming of Jesus and the seventh-day Sabbath. These are brothers and sisters who sincerely believe in the Three Angels' Messages. ... They are people who believe in Seventh-day Adventism, and the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has filed a lawsuit against them for violating the church's trademark in the following ways:

Count 1 - Federal Trademark Counterfeiting

Count 2 - Federal Trademark Infringement

Count 3 - Federal False Designation of Origin/Unfair

Competition

"The General Conference, back in 1981, registered their church and trademarked the name Seventh-day Adventist with the United States Trademark and Patent Office."

Roman invokes SDA prophetess Ellen G. White for support:

1) "When troubles arise in the church we should not go for help to lawyers not of our faith. God does not desire us to open church difficulties before those who do not fear Him."

(Selected Messages, Book 3, p.299)

2) "This is what inspiration says: 'In order for the United States to form an image of the beast, the religious power must so control the civil government that the authority of the state will also be employed by the church to accomplish her own end.'" (The Great Controversy, p.443) <www.bit.ly/3IY6sol>

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