One of the most ubiquitous uses of the term “red pill” from the 1999 film The Matrix is associated with the right.1 On online networks, “taking the red pill” broadly refers to beginning to see that universities, corporations, churches and other religious organizations, and even the military reflect the hegemony of the left. On the social media network Gab, which is fiercely dedicated to free speech and thus has become a home to many on the right, a search for “red pill” yielded not only hashtags but people posting under titles like “Red Pill Times” and “Red Pilled Nation,” as well as groups that include “Red Pill 101,” “Red Pill Help & Resources,” and “Red Pill Recon.”2 In other words, “red pill,” taken from the neo-gnostic film The Matrix, is firmly established as referring to those who “are awake and fighting for our religious and constitutional freedoms,” and/or those who recognize “the ridiculous world of identity politics, virtue signaling, and political correctness,” or as a well-known conservative online outlet put it, “to get red pilled . . . became a popular phrase among conservatives to describe the moment when someone breaks free of the mental control exerted by the establishment media and other left-wing forces.”3The term “red pill” has enough elasticity of meaning to include not only coming to embrace conventional Republicanesque conservatism, but also movements or perspectives that could include variants of libertarianism, Trumpism or MAGA, “Men Going Their Own Way,” “The Alt-right,” the Q-Anon movement, White Nationalism, and various others on the right. But “red pill” is not the only meme from arguably neo-gnostic films that is widely used on the right. And it is not just happenstance that essentially neo-gnostic memes are well-established across the right range of the political spectrum.4 In fact, as we will see, neo-gnostic language is definitely found in the contemporary dissident right.In this article, we examine a neo-gnostic symbolic system in the online culture of the dissident right and identify two principal levels of political and spiritual awakening along which such expression tends to self-organize. I begin with a general appraisal of the term “neo-gnosticism” in the contemporary culture of the American right and analyze this culture with reference to what is often self-described as “the dissident right.” What we find is a widespread cultural understanding of gnosis expressed in what we may term levels. The first level hinges upon the paradigmatic symbolism of the red pill and entails an awareness that something is awry in society, which can be described as a pathocracy or as pathocratic control; the second is an awakening awareness of higher spiritual dimensions to human life, understood in various terms ranging from a new Christian Great Awakening to lightworking to meditation or other contemplative practices.A word on terminology before we go further: in general usage, an upper-case word “Gnostic” refers to an “heretical” Gnostic of late antiquity, whereas the lower-case “gnostic” applies to someone who had or has direct inner spiritual knowledge. Thus the word “gnostic” can be applied to, for instance, a modern mystic whether Christian or outwardly religious or not, whereas in the strictest interpretation, the words “Gnostic” or “Gnosticism” refer to “heretical” figures in antiquity. The term “neo-gnosticism” in lower-case is generic, analogous to the use of a term like “communism,” and refers to the use of elements drawn from twentieth-century accounts of ancient Gnosticism, applied in a clearly contemporary, typically political context.I've listed these ten elements attributed to ancient Gnosticism: a hostile cosmos (Gnostic antipathy to nature);a demiurge, or ignorant creator responsible for botched creation and hostile to human spiritual awakening;dualism: opposition between the realm of light and the realm of matter;an elaborate mythology;myths concerning Sophia (Wisdom) and her fall and restoration;belief in a hidden God (not the demiurge);difficulty of spiritual progress due to the archons or other hostile powers in the cosmos; ignorance the inherent (fallen) human condition;existence of the ogdoad, or eight spheres (including the seven planetary spheres) and possibility of their transcendence;the necessity of gnosis, or direct spiritual knowledge from the realm of light;a revealer or redeemer figure to show the way to the realm of light.5For our purposes, it doesn't matter much whether or to what extent these elements of Gnosticism existed in antiquity or not, because they definitely exist in twentieth-century accounts of ancient Gnosticism, and also reappear in contemporary films, literature, and social media memes.6To distinguish the contemporary phenomenon of Gnosticism recurring in the contemporary context from ancient forms of Christianity, I use the term “neo-gnosticism.” Neo-gnosticism does not necessarily correspond to an organized religion—it is, broadly speaking, a symbolic system drawn from ancient Gnosticism that is adapted to a modern political, religious, or cultural context. Neo-gnosticism is a contemporary development that employs terms or symbols from ancient Gnosticism(s) (demiurge, archons, and so forth), but in a new, modern, technological social context, as in films like The Matrix, They Live, and The Truman Show.We see neo-gnostic memes replicating on Gab, or www.gab.com, the free-speech social media network founded by Andrew Torba (b. 1986). But first, some background. Gab's primary logo is a green frog. While a full history is too much to delve into here, the green frog harks back to Pepe the Frog, which emerged during the first Trump campaign era in 4chan, and subsequently appeared in an array of dissident right critiques both of the left, of course, but also of the conventional Republican right. The ubiquitous green frog images on Gab indicate that the Pepe symbol has not disappeared; if anything, it has proliferated and lost some but not all of its specificity from the era in 2016 when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton formally denounced Pepe the Frog and the “deplorables” of the American populace.7 The Clinton campaign pronounced “that cartoon frog . . . more sinister than you might realize,” generating derision from an array of perspectives.8 But as it turned out, despite the high-profile denunciation, or perhaps because of it, that cartoon frog had quite a long subsequent life as a political symbol.A cartoon frog lived on as a symbol not only of the alt-right in the mid-2010s, but also more broadly as a light-hearted symbol of a broader populist right manifested on Gab. Because of its emphasis on the principle of free speech, Gab became home to many across the spectrum of the right, especially after the numerous mass bans, prohibitions, and specific speech controls instituted by Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms on political, medical, or other grounds, around and after its founding in 2016. A green cartoon frog was featured in a Christmas sweater, holding a mug of hot chocolate, and in numerous other anodyne images, whereas a more generic frog, and frog green, characterized Gab and Gabwear like hats or shirts.A close study of what is happening on Gab provides some interesting insights into the right. By “right,” I mean the full range of the emergent American and to a lesser extent European right that can be understood as sharing a disdain for the career political class represented in the different political parties. Many on the right themselves reject terms like “extreme” or “far,” but rather are self-understood in affirmative patriotic or nationalistic terms, and increasingly in religious terms. For this reason I sometimes use the inclusive term “dissident right,” which includes both those who see themselves as the “dissident right,” as well as patriotic or Christian nationalist figures or movements that don't necessarily self-identify as dissidents but do reject what many term the “uniparty” of Democrats and Republicans.Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, is an outspoken evangelical Christian whose motto is “Christ is King.” In numerous posts and Gab newsletters, Torba has argued not for the victory of Republicans—in general, he seems very disenchanted with the Republican political class, which he sees as consisting largely in “grifters”—but for the creation of a “parallel economy,” by which he means Christian patriots buy from and sell to Christian patriots, outside an economy dominated by leftist-supporting corporations, universities, NGOs and media.9 Torba writesSupported by and integrated with the free-speech social media and Gab television network, as well as with the Gab payment system, Torba seeks to position his company at the center of a new and transformative economic and political movement.There are competitive social media sites, including Truth Social, Gettr, and Parler, though these are subject to varying degrees of censorship, and for uncensored discourse, there is also an extended network of decentralized social media sites called the Fediverse, which function as “instances” using the Mastodon open software as Gab initially did, or using Pleroma, a blogging server software that federates with other supported servers. Pleroma (after Mastodon the second leading server software) was created 2016 by a user named “Lain,” and is cleaner and less resource intensive than Mastodon, allowing decentralized, anonymous posting of, for instance, dissident right thought. Of course the name “Pleroma” (“fullness” in Greek) derives from Gnosticism in antiquity.11It is clear that the dissident right more broadly perceives itself as oppositional to the existing corporate, political, educational, and media systems. This is an important point. Reagan Republicanism, or the Republicanism of Main Street in the United States, was not so clearly self-perceived as oppositional to the mainstream economic, political, educational, or media establishments. But what we see in the emergent dissident right is something qualitatively different and new. It is not supported by corporations such as Amazon, known for banning dissident right books; its adherents are frequently banned by social media corporations like Facebook or Twitter; it has no visible presence in the universities or colleges. The dissident right is fundamentally an oppositional and transformational movement.Let us take two primary examples. The first is Greg Johnson's The White Nationalist Manifesto, published in 2018. In his manifesto, Johnson puts it bluntly: “if Whites have no future in the current system, then we will simply have to set up a new one. That is the goal of White Nationalism. To give our people a future again, we need a new political vision and new political leadership.”12 His manifesto is organized to put forward an oppositional metapolitical agenda. He begins with the demographic decline of Europeans in Europe, but also diasporic European populations in the United States and elsewhere in the world.Johnson then proceeds to the solution, which begins with a White ethnostate. An ethnostate means “not just racially but also ethnically homogenous sovereign homelands,” “wherever that is possible.”13 In particular, he is thinking of European ethnostates, and not of a unified European superstate, which in the case of the EU has already been weaponized against whites, and were it to fail, it would be a catastrophic failure.14 Hence one must have European and European diasporic ethnostates, and “the leadership caste of each ethnostate will be selected to be both deeply rooted in its own homeland but also to have the broadest possible sense of European solidarity,” encouraging “pan-European cooperation.”15 In essence, there are two aspects to Johnson's manifesto: first, that Europeans both in their homelands and in diaspora are endangered by uncontrolled immigration; and second, that the solution is establishing ethnically homogenous ethnostates.That this manifesto represents oppositional transformative metapolitics would seem to be obvious, but to underscore the point, on 24 February 2019, Johnson's White Nationalist Manifesto was banned by Amazon—not just banned in the sense of not offering the book, but banned by leaving no trace that it existed: even its Amazon customer reviews vanished. Johnson makes the point that although his book was banned by Amazon, the same company continued to retail copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto, the Unabomber's Manifesto, and the writings of Osama bin Laden, to give only a few examples.16 The point here is to underscore the importance of the word “oppositional.”To give a second example, let us take John Q. Publius's The God that Failed: Liberalism and the Destruction of the West (2020), this one also banned by Amazon shortly after publication. This is another book offering a clear agenda for sociopolitical transformation. The God that Failed is a full-frontal attack on “the equality lie,” “the many lies of diversity,” “cultural corruption,” “liberal censorship,” and “the religion of markets,” arguing the underlying connections among feminism, social atomization, and consumerism. It is not just a well-documented jeremiad, however.The last chapter of The God that Failed offers an agenda for the future. Although the list is too long to quote in detail, here are some of the main points: Immediate cessation of property taxes and the ability of law enforcement to engage in civil asset forfeiture;End unnecessary foreign “aid”;Institute severe penalties for job outsourcing and for offshoring;Forgive all interest-based accruals to student loans and establish a fair payment plan;End government subsidies of private oligopolies;Term limits for House representatives and senators;Ending of affirmative action and all race-, sex-, and sexuality-based hiring and collegiate acceptance quotas;Establish severe penalties for pollution.Now I offer this selection from the book's much larger set of specific proposals in order to show that although the agenda here is clearly oppositional to the “nameless” system of global consumerism, many elements of the agenda (like restoring civics, or protective tariffs) are also relatively contiguous with historical conservatism.17 What's more, a number of elements in this agenda are usually associated more with the left, such as forgiving student loans, penalties for polluters, and more national parks. It is a somewhat heterogenous list that, without saying so directly, does not correspond to a clear division between left and right and that harks back to the left–right fusionism of National Socialism in Germany, something the mention of parks and wilderness reserves signals.18Although in Publius's book National Socialism is in the background, it is explicitly discussed in Johnson's White Nationalist Manifesto, where it is termed “the Old Right,” by which he means “German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and related interwar national-populist movements.”19 Johnson sees the Old Right as having emphasized themes including nationalism over globalism, the common good over individual liberty, and ethnic commonality over pluralism, but he arrived at the same conclusions more or less independently.20 Hence although he sees the Old Right as similar, he sees it from a “critical distance,” with “an open but critical mind.”21 “The least productive engagement with the Old Right,” he concludes, “is when people who lack a worldview of their own go shopping for a complete and ready-made system of ideas that they can adopt as a package deal. Common examples in our circles include Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Traditionalism, and National Socialism.”22 Instead, he encourages readers to develop their own independent perspective. Although “the Old Right” “has much to teach us,” “it is dead, and it needs to stay that way.”23We find references to ancient Gnosticism in the dissident right, for instance, in the pseudonymous, popular writing of a man who calls himself “Bronze Age Pervert,” who began with an acerbic Twitter account (later banned) that had a substantial audience and some influence, and who published a book titled Bronze Age Mindset, a book aptly titled because it expresses in a meandering and largely unedited way not an argument so much as a perspective—of a highly intelligent and well-read devotee of body-building who encourages a return to a bronze age worldview—that pervades the whole.24 To give a sense of its popularity, the book has over 1,500 reviews on Amazon at this writing. In it, the author observes that a man today “can't help but experience this new state of things in late civilizations except with dread, the dread suspicion . . . an uncanny suspicion . . . that the world is artificial. He begins to sense that this hothouse he lives in is the malevolent creation of a demiurge that likes to observe our sufferings, that He and his minions feed on them.”25Gnosticism is not a primary theme of the book, but it is definitely a familiar reference point visible in it. In the future, the author speculates, should “the evil of human innovation continue unchecked, we really will live in the world the Gnostics feared, and that spark of vital life and energy that is the gift of nature to all youthful peoples born from its womb, that spark will remain entrapped in ‘matter wrongly configured,’ matter entirely foreign to its inborn desires and workings, but fashioned instead for the benefit of something else.”26 In many ways, he continues, “the world we inhabit now already anticipates this living hell of the Gnostics, and the response of those in whom the pain of civilization and modernity is most advanced, the transsexuals, unwittingly help to further uncouple reality from nature and to make our progressive domestication more totalitarian and aggressive.”27 Hence, he provides the avuncular advice to “discredit authorities, to mock all public pieties, to show the leaders of government, bureaucracy, finance, corporations, big tech, and media for the pathetic ghouls they are. Keep up the pressure of true samizdat.”28It may well be that outgroups or dissidents of almost any variety in a centralized society will resonate with neo-gnostic metaphors, but there is obviously a synergy currently between what I am terming the dissident right and neo-gnostic metaphors. This resonance is intensified by censorship and banning, which in turn adds to the mystique or fascination of that which is banned, in turn confirming the neo-gnostic metaphors of hostile archons, digital demiurge, and the like.But it is valuable to begin with some contextualization, beginning with aspects of a conceptual structure provided by Andrew M. Lobaczewski (1921–2007). Lobaczewski was a Polish psychologist trained at Jagiellonian University in Krakow who, under Soviet communism, began to secretly study with some colleagues the nature of psychopaths in organizations. Of course, this kind of research was threatening to the communist authorities, and Lobaczewski says that he had to destroy his research manuscript in a furnace moments before a communist security search. He later sent a copy to the Vatican, which apparently disappeared without a trace, and so he created a third copy, which was published under the title in English Political Ponerology (2006). It is a book about evil (ponerology) understood in terms of psychopaths in political and especially organizational contexts.In Political Ponerology, Lobaczewski discusses the psychological factors that contribute to the macro-social degeneration that takes place when pathological people gain control of the levers of power, as under Soviet or Chinese communism. He discusses the psychology of psychopaths or “spellbinders,” and how they use “states of societal hysterization” to gain control. Such a society under the domination of psychopaths he terms a “pathocracy.” Lobaczewski writes “A pathocracy takes hold during “a period of a society's general spiritual crisis, and cause its reason and social structure to degenerate in such a way as to bring about the spontaneous generation of this worst disease of society.”29A pathocracy, once in power, seeks to generate more pathocrats, and to suppress all those upon whom it preys, that is, normal people. Lobaczewski continues: “In a pathocracy, all leadership positions (down to village headman and community cooperative managers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party) must be filled by individuals with corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule.”30 However, he continues, a pathocracy cannot last forever: “The achievement of absolute domination by pathocrats in the government of a country cannot be permanent since large sectors of the society become disaffected by such rule and eventually find some way of toppling it. This is part of the historical cycle, easily discerned when history is read from a ponerological point of view. Pathocracy at the summit of governmental organization also does not constitute the entire picture of the ‘mature phenomenon.’ Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down.”31Lobaczewski's insights are valuable for understanding sociopolitical gnosis. In the original context, Lobaczewski's insights concerned communism, in particular Soviet communism, but also communist China, Cuba, North Korea, and so forth. But just as his hopes were dashed by the Vatican when he sent an earlier copy of his book manuscript covertly to them, so too his hopes for the United States were dashed when in New York he could not generate much interest in the insights represented by his book, nor did he land a publisher. He returned to Poland, where he died in 2007.So let us try a thought experiment. Let us imagine that in the United States—to which Lobaczewski came as a political refugee—an enforced consensus of thought was imposed in academia, corporations, and government, across virtually all of mainstream society, including films and television, and further, that dissent on the internet was vigorously censored through thoughtcrime bans, “deplatforming,” removing the ability for financial transactions, all to enforce an official thought consensus. Let us imagine an example in this fictional world someone who, in creating a social media network, experienced all kinds of bans, censuring, and deplatforming when he insisted he would not budge on the principle of free speech. In such a context, from the perspective of a dissenter who identified with the principle of free speech and with the creator of the network, what would “gnosis” consist in? Its first stage would be seeing that something is amiss in the prevailing system, perhaps even that much of what previously the dissenter took for granted about society was not true.Political gnosis in this context consists in believing that one sees through the lies imposed and perpetuated by the system as a whole. It is not necessarily spiritual or religious, though it could be that too, but it is primarily a political-cultural realization. This realization can be expressed in different ways, symbolized most commonly on the dissident right by the terms “red pill,” along with “white pill” and “black pill.” As previously noted, “red pill” comes from The Matrix, whereas “white pill” refers to information about the dissolution of the prevailing system, and “black pill” to pessimism based on information about even stronger suppression of alternative views or about the further intensification of the prevailing system and its paradigm.On the most basic level, gnosis can be understood in political terms as realizing one's separation from the prevailing social system. In a post on Gab, Andrew Torba wrote “Going ‘into town’ can be pretty black pilling when you live a happy and peaceful rural life.”32 He compares the city dwellers as “masked and triple vaxxed zombies,” and adds that because he doesn't wear a mask, “some even physically jump away from me when I pass them. It's so sad.” He adds that in the city “I'm always watching my six for something crazy to happen and prepared to defend myself and my family if needed. It wasn't always like this. I no longer recognize my country.”33The following day, Torba posted remarks about how “our enemies refer to the Gab community as the ‘fringe far right’ but the reality is the things people post here are what tens of millions of people in America are thinking, but are often too afraid to say out loud.” People having “the courage to state the obvious out loud” means “more and more” will “join our cause.”34 This post was followed by numerous community member comments, confirming and expanding on Torba's remarks. One commenter remarked “they love to call us far Right only because they themselves have moved so ridiculously to the Left.”35 Many of the commenters identify themselves as centrists in the past, but some go further, like one who wrote “They fear you because they know when you full[y] learn what Gab has to teach you, you will never go back. You normie conservatives who think Gab would be better off without the Nazis, know that the Left agrees with you, because they don't want you realizing that we are correct, and the implications of that.”36It's important to recognize here an epistemological hierarchy of knowledge. (1) At the bottom is an unreflective acceptance of social conditioning as well as more or less wild emotional reactivity, which is typically intensified by social media technologies, including of course Gab. (2) Above that is gnosis understood as a more limited awakening from social conditioning. This is not absolute freedom, but relative. Gnosis can be understood as a spectrum of movement from one level to the next. Gab is itself a social media platform that consists primarily—though by no means exclusively—in short posts and topical information, thus representing the same kind of dynamics visible on Twitter or Facebook. Social media platforms like this, with their vast array of posters, do provide immediate knowledge of events and event background that is not necessarily available on mainstream media. And they also provide access to opinions or perspectives not widely available previously. Gab is different than these others because it does not engage in the suppression of unpopular views, and as a result can be understood as a use of social media not as an extension of the prevailing system, but at least to some extent against it.It is true, of course, that broadly speaking, social media platforms can exercise a centrifugal force on consciousness, intensifying political rancor and mob thinking, and creating more objectification of others and generating an array of negative emotions, including fear, anger, jealousy, and so forth. There is actually ample literature on the negative effects of social media. Indeed, when I have spoken before large groups of students about anxiety and stress, and meditation practice that addresses these, the students consistently have cited the number one cause of their anxiety and stress as social media, in particular, Instagram, and to a lesser extent Twitter and Facebook. They said that they and their friends create falsely happy online profiles and streams, and as a result they feel insecure, stressed, and anxious about their own actual lives. In general, social media platforms reinforce social conditioning as well as negative emotional reactivity.37Gab, being a social media platform too, is subject to similar dynamics, but Gab also effectively reverses this dynamic by providing an open forum for a wide range of views, many of them dissenters from the prevailing system. Of course some posts generate anger or fear—emotional reactivity is certainly present on the platform. But nonetheless, by so firmly insisting on the principle of free speech, Torba and his platform provide a place where dissident views can be expressed openly (albeit under pseudonyms for the most part). For this reason, it is valuable for looking at the transition from level 1 to level 2, that is, recognition and rejection of social conditioning.The subject of memes is itself interesting. Memes are typically images with text embedded in them, designed to crack or break a conventional perspective on a subject—they are effectively a visual rejection of social conditioning, while themselves conditioning towards a new perspective. Neo-gnostic memes convey condensed neo-gnostic themes related to our broader subject—for instance, they show archons controlling the American government, or differentiate between “hylic,” “psychic,” and “pneumatic” people, those who don't know, those who are beginning to awaken, and those who have taken the “red pill.”38 The phenomenon of meming is interesting, not least because its visual medium to some extent evades, or is designed to evade, textual censorship or banning. A collection of memes related to this article can be found at arthurversluis.com.39To return to Lobaczewski's work on pathocracy, level 2 begins, one could say, at the point of becoming aware that the prevailing system is unhealthy, or in his terms, pathological. In the former Soviet Union, dissent itself was often characterized as disease and even treated as mental illness—something that also happens in communist China. The reverse would be the realization that the system itself is pathological, and that health requires being free from it. This would begin with the realization that something is wrong with society. The only way to prevent such realizations is to suppress them, banning and criminalizing dissident thought, and this only works to a limited extent. The famous Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, for instance, became world-renowned despite being incarcerated in the gulag and having his work circulated by samizdat, clandestine distribution networks.In a political conte