To save me watching the video, can you articulate why you believe that Marx was influenced by Gnosticism and Hermeticism?

Is this the Popperian "Plato was an enemy of open society"?

Gnosticism has the pattern that there is a demiurge that created this world as a prison. This is the capitalist economy. Gnosticism says that those initiated into secret knowledge will become of aware of the real nature of the world and seek to wake everyone else up. This is the idea of the revolution fixing all problems and bringing about the great communist utopia by transferring all capital ownership to the state. Marx doesn't say a whole lot about how the Utopia would actually operate, those were details Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were figuring out in Vienna.

Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds. Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things. This applies to Marx's beliefs in the labor theory of value among other totally non-empirically backed beliefs being treated as ideological indisputable truth.

The credit for the labour theory of value goes to Adam Smith, specifically the Wealth of Nations. Whether it was true or not is a separate question, but it was based on empirical data available at the time. Marx is usually credited with it because he altered it, and saw a flaw in Adam Smith's version. The idea that "what something costs is what people are willing to pay for it" was something Adam Smith was familiar with and addressed in the Wealth of Nations.

> Those who believe the things should be treated preferentially, and those who don't should be persecuted because they stand in the way of the implementation of those things.

The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history. The Cathars were wiped out, and Giordano Bruno, an early proponent of the Copernican model of the solar system was burnt at the stake by the inquisition. It seems to be the other way around.

> Hermeticism, specifically the emerald tablet, says that we can make things become believable by just willing them with our minds.

I don't think this is correct, but I can't prove a negative.

> The Gnostics and followers of Hermes were one of the most hounded and persecuted groups throughout history.

And for good reason, as we later found out in the 20th century.

You're talking about genocide and religious discrimination.

Wikipedia: Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century,[110] referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".[111]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

I thought the demiurge was simply ignorant not malicious. It found itself in a chaotic world and tried to make sense of it. In doing so it mistook itself for a god. That said I'm not an expert in gnosticism.

Whether the truth is found in Sophia or quintessence, I think transcendent claims are the real problem. This applies to both the orthodox traditions in the west as well as the esoteric traditions.

Gnosticism is not a term that can be used to define a uniform metaphysical system. There are a variety of metaphysical schools that are bundled together in the modern usage. For example, in what German scholars of early 20th century came to call "Iranian Gnosticism" (in reference to Manichaeism [1]) it is in fact the Father of Light that "sacrifices his sons" as 'food for daemons' so that the battle between Light and Darkness is taken to 'their turf'.

> Capitalism

Interestingly enough, another Iranian gnostic school derivative of Zoroastrianism - that of Mazdak [2] - shared everything, including "women".

In general, one should be careful to be quite specific as to what metaphysical school of thought they are referencing when using the currently ambiguous term "Gnosticism". ~

Mani's metaphysical vision is rather wild. I was just reading up on it the other day - apparently he even resorted to diagrams to make things clear.

[1]: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/cosmogony-iii

[2]: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/cosmogony-iv

One of the criticisms of Gnostisicm, even going back to the ancient Greeks is it never makes positive assertions about what the new world will be like. It's only negative saying things like "all this is illusion," "all this is bad." It never puts up its own program for criticism. So if you say anything about Gnosticism, the Gnostic can just respond, our faith isn't that, it's better than that. However, they never tell you what it actually is so it can be objectively criticized.

I'm wondering how you square this with fascists being largely responsible for the body count and the most egregious human rights abuses (particularly, for the purposes of this conversation, those attributed to Imperial Japan).

Communists believe that classical liberalism does not exist. That all systems are an arbitrary unprincipled prejudiced exercise of power with law and merit being clever illusions hiding raw power and prejudice, so if the communists are not exercising it arbitrarily and with no concern for any principal except raw power on behalf of the proletariat, then someone else must be exercising it on behalf of whoever they think should exercise tyrannical power for the greater good like the Japanese, or the Germans racists.

The fascists have the same gnostic and hermetic beliefs as the communists. For example, the Nazi belief in the control of the world by the inferior and evil races, representing the demiurge and all that garbage.

Liberalism, on the other hand, is based on the idea that there are no special people. No enlightened people with the true knowledge of the world, or special truths that would become true if only everyone started believing them.

Among the communists, I think both types could be found, it is just that the more idealistic, moderate and anti-authoritarian people always lose out in those revolutions. An organized, amoral and unscrupulous minority has a big advantage over them. Classical liberalism suffers from the same issues, and systems designed by classical liberals also often get subverted by minority interests.

>Classical liberalism suffers from the same issues, and systems designed by classical liberals also often get subverted by minority interests.

Yes but in classical liberal states, when the minority interests subvert established norms, it very rarely leads down a path of mass bloodshed and wanton destruction. In heavily authoritarian communist revolutions, one mistake of letting the "more extreme" (because even the less extreme figures in these kinds of regimes tend to also be fanatics) reach power gives you a regime like Mao's or Stalin's. Even in less extreme examples, few people would call a government like Castro's preferable, or claim that if Trotsky had come to power, then repression and mass shooting would have ended in the USSR.

Beyond just ideology, the type of state institutions and their fundamental tendencies of respect for the rule of law (or a lack of this respect) are important factors in deciding how far the unscrupulous can go even if they do come to power.

This is why in a country like the U.S. with very stable liberal traditions and strong state institutions built with these traditions in mind (if imperfectly), having someone like a Nixon or Trump get into power gives results that are nowhere near as bad as they are when a Hitler, Castro, Mao or Lenin comes to power in a country with much weaker bulwarks of liberal history.

Fascists are 100 percent part of this Gnostic and Hermetic tradition though.