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As Below, So Above - James Lindsay

1. Main Thesis

The speaker argues that much of modern ideological/political life (wokeism, CRT, Marxism, trans ideology, sustainability/globalism, etc.) is actually a revival of old esoteric religions–especially Gnosticism and Hermeticism–dressed up as philosophy, politics, science, or Christianity.
He focuses on the Hermetic maxim:

“As above, so below; as below, so above.”

and claims Marxism/woke ideology use the “as below, so above” part as a kind of social magic: change things “below” (society, language, institutions), and reality “above” (how people think and what’s considered true) will shift to match.

2. Gnosticism: The Motivation

Gnosticism (big-G) in his description:

  • The material world and body are a prison, created by an evil demiurge (false god).
  • Humans have a divine spark trapped in matter.
  • Salvation comes through gnosis (secret knowledge) of:
    • Who we really are
    • What we’ve fallen into
    • How to escape back to the “pleroma” (fullness of God).
      This produces:
  • A pessimistic view of reality (world = bad, body = bad).
  • A sense of alienation: “I don’t belong here; my true self is elsewhere.”
  • A special-knowledge elite: those who know the secret truth are superior and justified in doing things others can’t.
    He says this inner attitude (gnostic mindset) drives a lot of modern revolutionary/utopian movements.

3. Hermeticism: The Process

Hermeticism, by contrast, is:

  • Less about “the world is evil” and more about transcending it.
  • Focused on practice, alchemy, and dialectic—turning “lead into gold,” death into life, mundane into divine.
  • Deeply syncretic: all religions, philosophies, and even science are just facets of one hidden “Perennial Philosophy.”
    Key Hermetic principles (from the Kybalion and hermetic texts):
  1. Mentalism – All is mind; the universe is mental.
  2. Correspondence – As above, so below; as below, so above.
  3. Vibration – Everything moves/vibrates (vibes).
  4. Polarity – Opposites are the same in kind, different in degree; all truths are half-truths.
  5. Rhythm – Pendulum swings back and forth.
  6. Cause and Effect
  7. Gender – Masculine and feminine principles in everything.
    He claims the dialectic (Hegel, Marx) is just Hermetic polarity + correspondence: mixing opposites until distinctions dissolve and a “higher unity” appears.

4. Hegel, Marx, and the Fusion

He argues:

  • Hegel fused Gnosticism (motivation) and Hermeticism (method) into a philosophical “science,” especially with:
    • The cunning of reason: good emerging from evil actions.
    • History as Spirit ascending through contradictions.
    • The ouroboros-like circle that “presupposes its beginning at its end.”
  • Marx then:
    • “Turned Hegel on his head” → from idealism (above → below) to activism (below → above).
    • Made the process materialist, but kept the Hermetic/Gnostic structure.
    • Offered a creation myth where man is “created” by his own labor and by socialist society, instead of God.
    • Framed socialism as the “scientific” path to recover man’s “species-being” and overcome alienation (self-estrangement) → communism as the “negation of the negation,” the final stage before man effectively becomes his own god.
      So, for Marx (in this reading):
  • Society = stand-in for God.
  • The bourgeoisie = demiurge (false god) that must be destroyed.
  • Socialism/activism = gnosis + Hermetic praxis.
  • Communism = near-divine state where estrangement and property vanish.

5. Praxis = “As Below, So Above”

Marx’s key move is Praxis—changing the world instead of just explaining it.
The speaker frames this as:

  • As below, so above:
    • Change social conditions, language, institutions, law, rituals.
    • That changes how people think (the “above”), which then comes back down and reifies the new reality (makes the simulation feel real).
      He ties this to:
  • Hyperreality / simulacra:
    • You first create a fake version (simulation) of the world you want.
    • You enforce that simulation socially and politically.
    • Over time, the simulation displaces actual reality and becomes “actual” in people’s minds.

6. Modern Applications: Woke / CRT / Trans / Disability / Transhumanism

He argues that this same Hermetic-Gnostic pattern appears in several modern movements:

a) Critical Race Theory (CRT)

  • Whiteness = structural demiurge / original sin.
  • Anti-racism = “positive discourse of resistance,” an inversion of racism (racism “standing on its head”).
  • Equity is enforced as a simulation of racial justice until it becomes the “new normal.”
  • Whiteness is abolished conceptually, and with it, white people are structurally disadvantaged—justified as “for the greater good” by those with gnosis.

b) Transgender Ideology

Gnostic layer:

  • The body is a prison; you “didn’t choose your body.”
  • A doctor “assigned your sex” and society reified it through gender roles.
  • Salvation comes through inner knowledge of your true gender identity (inner “gender soul”).
    Hermetic layer:
  • You self-beget by:
    • First redefining yourself internally (identity).
    • Then reshaping the body (hormones, surgery) “as below” so that your spiritual/inner identity “as above” is affirmed.
    • Forcing social affirmation (“trans women are women”) until society fully reifies that identity.
  • Full transition is never complete; it becomes a perpetual becoming, needing constant social validation, medical intervention, and activism.
    From this lens, the line “Trans people are sacred” (from the Joan of Arc play) makes sense: they are seen as spiritually advanced beings performing a Hermetic rite of self-birth.

c) Disability / Fat / Deaf Culture

  • Older medical/individual models treat disability as a problem to fix or manage.
  • The social model pushed to an extreme says:
    • Society disables you; you’re fine, society is wrong.
    • Society must fully affirm and accommodate you; otherwise, it’s “genocide” (e.g., curing deafness, weight loss seen as “fat genocide”).
  • Again, identity is sacralized, and social affirmation is the mechanism of transcendence.

d) Sustainability / Globalism / Transhumanism

  • “Sustainable and inclusive” future = another totalizing world religion (like communism or Nazism), demanding total life-rearrangement.
  • “Circular economy” = ouroboros symbolism (economy feeding on its own waste).
  • Transhumanism (chips, metaverse, uploading consciousness) is read as:
    • Moving humanity from the “human” plane to the “etheric” and “astral” planes (digital, disembodied).
    • Toward a world-brain / AI god, a fake “return to Spirit.”

7. Thought Reform and Struggle Sessions

He uses Chinese Communist thought reform prisons (Robert Lifton’s work) as a concrete example of this “hermetic magic” in practice:

  • Milieu control – total control of environment and information.
  • Mystical manipulation – events framed to seem spiritually/politically meaningful.
  • Demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loaded language, doctrine over person, dispensing of existence – all to break down the old self and rebuild a new self that internalizes the Party’s viewpoint.
    Same pattern, he says, shows up in:
  • Corporate DEI trainings
  • School indoctrination
  • Online pile-ons and struggle sessions
    You are:
  1. Negated (your old self is declared racist/evil/ignorant).
  2. Given a new identity (racist, ally, transphobe, etc.).
  3. Forced to confess and repeat slogans until you believe it.
  4. At that point, the simulation becomes your lived reality.

8. Hyperreality, Fourier Series Analogy, and Why It Can’t Work

He uses a math analogy (Fourier series):

  • To perfectly “draw” a curve from circles within circles, you need infinitely many terms.
  • Likewise, to perfectly “draw” heaven on earth by approximations (policies, revolutions) is impossible, and each new approximation costs real lives.
  • Even if their mental image of utopia were correct (he thinks it’s not), the project is unworkable in principle.

9. Overall Warning and Call to Action

His bottom line:

  • Woke, CRT, trans ideology, global sustainability cults, etc. are not neutral policies or mere theories.
  • They are esoteric religious projects—Hermetic/Gnostic in structure—trying to:
    • Replace reality with a simulated “higher” order.
    • Abolish distinctions (male/female, good/evil, truth/falsehood).
    • Transition humanity into something post-human or “etheric.”
      He urges:
  • Recognize the “wizard circle” (the framing, language, and psychological manipulation).
  • Reject the framing, don’t just “adapt” to whatever program is handed down.
  • Help others see the cracks in the simulation (“red-pilling”).
  • Build a critical mass of people who refuse to go along, making the system too heavy and unstable to fully impose itself.
    In short:
    He’s arguing that what looks like progressive social engineering is, at its core, an occult-style religious project to remake reality, and that resisting it requires seeing and rejecting its underlying spiritual/ideological framing.