Hey everybody, it's James Lindsay. Welcome to another episode of a new Discourses Bullets

where I give you a bullet point summary of one topic from woke Marxism that you really

need to understand. Today, I'm going to pull back a big curtain. I want to explain to

you, I think that the woke movement, woke Marxism, critical Marxism before it, cultural

Marxism before that, Marxism before that, even hegaly and thought before that. Actually,

I don't know, that's a lot to unload at the beginning, but just roll with me. It's the

entire intellectual precursor set leading up to woke Marxism that we're dealing with today.

I think that it is all actually esoteric religion, the esoteric religions of the Middle Ages,

and even before that into the first century and before that into antiquity, rearing their

head in the modern and now postmodern era. These religions have names. They play a lot

of mixing and matching. I don't want to make this complicated. Nosticism is one. Hermeticism

is another, both rely on this concept of noses, which is a kind of specialized secret

knowledge. Nosis is the common Greek word for knowledge, but it doesn't mean common

everyday knowledge. The definition of noses, which is at the basis of gnostic or gnosticism,

is esoteric knowledge of spiritual truth, held by the ancient gnostics to be essential

to salvation. That's at least according to Merriam Webster. If we read from the American

Heritage Dictionary, it says it's intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths, an esoteric

form of knowledge sought by the gnostics. It's knowledge of the highest kind, specifically

mystical knowledge, and the deeper wisdom, knowledge of spiritual truth, such as was

claimed by the gnostics. So in this episode, I want to talk about

gnosticism. I'm not going to talk about noses further. I'm not going to talk about

Hermeticism. I just want to give you a rough picture of what gnostic, these gnostic people

...