German Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk highlights a world defining power of Gnostic difference in his After God (2020: 192 p.). He illuminates a one difference but with two competing realities of: “in the world” and “of the world”. These Gnosis dark psychics offer inner worlds of the “After God”; an “I” subject is here opposed to the outer space of the Illuminated world; in either version of difference a subject of the “I” is walled off from the “in” placed in any moment (2020; 64 p.).
Accordingly, the Gnostic truth of difference creates two new languages of dissatisfaction with the world. Here a “bad infinity” world is grounded in contradistinction to a “good infinity”. Nevertheless, this truth is being tested in the Cold War 2.0 Gnostic division manifesting in real time and real horror in the struggle over Ukraine’s ascendency; a Ukraine torn apart by the competing Negations of the: “Petrodollar Hollywood Imperialism” and “Pragmatic Eurasian Multipolarity”.
This “sick” world of Cold War 2.0 is a struggle between two competing subjects. Both are grounded in an “I” orientated by past difference and walled off re-imagining of the Cold War 1.0. For instance, “Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union”, or “NATO is the continuation of the Nazis”, and so on. Therefore, Gnostic “I” is sustained by a difference separating the outer space of the Illuminated “world-pain” playing out as a consequence of the direct capitalist conflict of Gnosis realities between Ukraine and Russia.
Nonetheless, a Gnosis in the world is captured in its highest resolution via the classic satire: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In this dark comedy classic, the world laughs at the traumatic global struggle and stalemate between the global superpowers, a stalemate of Gnostic difference that can only be broken by a nuclear conflict between the Soviets and the U.S.; with the film even beginning with an American B-52 bomber = ordered to attack while flying two hours from the U.S.S.R.
As a result, the apocalyptic logic in the world is announced in the opening moments of the film and accelerates in absurdity toward an inevitable sacrifice-driven ending where negotiations fail due to the prejudices in the world. A logic following on form a crazy fluoridation conspiracy where a right-wing general orders this nuclear attack on the U.S.S.R despite his ignorance of their newly instituted doomsday mutual destruction defensive strategy.
From our historical perspective the Cold War 2.0 cannot help but resemble the Cold War 1.0 of Dr. Strangelove, since the fate of the world rests on a global game of chicken played between petty and ignorant Gnostic players’ willing to sacrifice all for the myth of difference in the world; a contradiction heightened to absurdity often; as with the famous: “Gentlemen. You can't fight here this is the war room!”.
While a Negation of the highest level of generality opens up a Gnosticism of the passions via worldwide annihilation. Since, the fact of the world always already precedes every negation, and the Gnostic thesis cannot be Negated by any antithesis – its Thing always remains. Therefore, the Gnostic thesis allows vast mythological and theological energies to emerge against repression in portals of new potentialities of psychological negativity.
Moreover, in the film this nuclear apocalypse lurks in the background as inevitable, yet the Gnosis’s is mediated as a difference in the world by the military and politicians in the “War Room”. It is here where Dr. Strangelove recommends a select group of 200,000 people should be relocated into a deep mine shaft; a bunker established with a gender ratio of "ten females to each male"; and the General Turgidson rants that the Soviets will likely create an even better bunker than the U.S. and argues that America: "must not allow a mine shaft gap" in the world.
While Sloterdijk himself reminds that Gnosticism in fact discovers a “place” that would not be of “this world”, as it is still “here” and yet already “there” (After God; 48 p.). Thus, a world/non-place of difference drove the Cold War 1.0 and continues to drive Cold War 2.0, it is a “place” beyond the pre-actual realm of presupposed being. This timeless Gnostic distinction is always-already a continuation to be accomplished in a world ending field of Negations.
A universal hegemony of Capitalist freedom of Negation coalesced under the Cold War over the prior century. This hegemony is in crisis under Cold War 2.0 where two spontaneously opposed Gnostic Hegemonies are posited as the One global frame (“A Great Awakening” vs. “A Great Reset?”). Under this new crisis all data is left to a Gnostic logic of algorithms without the Christian law of love or practical moralism.
Subsequently, will the real world of Cold War 2.0 follow the “represented” Gnosis “world” of mutual nuclear destruction made virtual under Cold War 1.0? Well Dr. Strangelove, makes the point that this gnostic logic of a founding religious murder in the world will lead to an inevitable will-to-will fury of self-destruction, a destruction opening up a new world. For example, Dr. Strangelove is giddy at the “Will to Power” of creative self-destruction is in the world, and thus he bolts out of his wheelchair, shouting "Mein Führer, I can walk!".
Then abruptly, the film ends with a new world emerging against the barrage of nuclear explosions, an apocalypse accompanied by Vera Lynn's famous World War II song: We'll Meet Again - A gap that is fundamentally religious. The result being that despite the film’s destructive ending it reveals a universal fate in the world “that’ll meet again”, a fate beyond the absolute ending of the individual and the world.
This psychotic arrogance comes from the vapid world leaders who see themselves always-already in the world. Religiously, these subjects of arrogance tap into an infinite reservoir that persists even after global nuclear apocalypse. Therefore, the Gnostic subject believes themselves to have access to the infinite in the world and always meet themselves again.
Nevertheless, in the film the human culture is divided by an in-group/out-group gap enabling distinction. The Gnosis is a hypermimeticism that intensifies rivalries until they explode to destroy the order of dominance patterns. This mimetic crisis as “gap” allows a “scapegoat mechanism” of victimisation to restore a new mimetic order solution – except in the last instance when it leads to mutual self-destruction by destroying the gap in the world.
This subjectivity of empty abstract will: wills nothing but itself. This freedom of free limitation offers an indeterminacy and is not true freedom but limitation as a one-sidedness distinction between in the world from of the world marks a revolution in the power of negation. A theological splitting of the atom where the possibility of negating from the world becomes metaphysically attached to a redemptive alien god (2020; 54 p.). Hence, the world leaders of both Cold Wars’ draw upon their own redemptive alien god in pushing a global apocalyptic war.
Unlike the real Cold War 1.0, the film’s ending is essentially against Girard by taking his theory to its natural end of infinite regression. As Rene Girard and others argue famously, sacrifice grounds communities via an in the world process of mimetic repetition of the founding sacrifice; a repetition engendering very gradually the (re)production of social and political institutions, be they funerals, marriages, and all cultural rites of passage.
Therefore, a political-economic process of mimetic repetition that has formalised sacrifice all the way up to the community level of international institutions. Here sacrifice is an invention of ritual sacrifice that is more than the first properly human initiative but is its last human initiative. For instance, in Dr. Strangelove the ending is sacrifice in the world, a tragic apocalypse that asserts a continuity along with the ending of everything.
Unlike the real Cold War 1.0, the film’s ending is essentially against Girard by taking his theory to its natural end of infinite regression. Here the continuity of the audience endures as the Thing via a presumed audience (big Other) in the world for which this is all sacrificed for, and to meet again (as Cold War 2.0?).
Subsequently, all sacrifices are never equal in different societies, yet they are observable. While US and Soviet Empires of Cold War 1.0 introduced authentically as a Human historicity of the whole world; a logic strangely extending from Rene Girard, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. A Gnostic difference whereby sacrifice acts to establish a bridge in the world allowing an ascension between the sacred society and the profane society.
Nonetheless, the very source of life is a self-sacrifice in the world, an essentialisation of human time arrival giving rise to an emancipatory path-thinking where the human being is a liberal creation that has already arrived before its time (2020; 58 p.). Therefore, any founding imitation of the establishment murder in Cold War 2.0 is the re-invention of the “Thing”.
Furthermore, ever since the miracle tricks of Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy and Scientology, the Thing is intoxicated with a sense of Gnostic mystery in the world, a difference in service of exploitation and violence. While in the Cold War 2.0 the Thing of the Now is in service of world historic multi-level-marketing and sexual manipulation, a violent leap of difference where “Gnosticism” is a bourgeois fictitious realm of translating esoteric matters of capital into the exoteric Imperialist realm in the world.
Unfortunately, this arrogant transcendental infinite perspective of the Thing is a Gnostic heresy. It is a false miracle of Thing that justified the Cold War 1.0 Girardian “ritual sacrifice”, and it continues to drive the ongoing Cold War 2.0 violence. As a result, these false miracles in the Thing justify an immolating of a new victim so as (re)produce the same old “life” effects; an occultic scam in the world, a “sales pitch” of “direct access” along a “bridge” to manipulate humanity toward its own destruction all for the perceived benefit of the psychotic Imperialist elite.
PART 2 COMING SOON