Core to the rupture → elect-led repair arc is an operational program of ontological & teleological inversion. From Hegel’s reconciliation-shape plus the Hess-style activist turn comes a 'politics' of world repair that functions as secular theurgy presented as “the Science™”.

https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/2012745051420389548

You can thank @thepalmerworm for the snappy phrase “ontological and teleological inversion.” It packs the whole template into four words.

Simply put, it means two flips.

Ontological inversion flips what counts as most real and most authoritative. Instead of reality and moral order as the baseline, lived harm becomes the highest proof. Trauma becomes the marginalized group’s truth signal, and (false, oppressive) “systems” become the main actors.

Alienation is what makes that flip feel like realism. Alienation is the sense that the world is human-made but not ours, that institutions and norms confront people as an alien power. In that mood, “normality” stops looking neutral and starts looking like a cover story.

Teleological inversion flips the goal. Instead of aiming at a given human good like virtue, truth, or holiness, the aim becomes repair through negation. Identify the oppressor, name the false center, dismantle it, re-center the marginalized, and call that wholeness. The “elect” are the interpreters and organizers who raise collective consciousness to drive that repair.

By the way, that’s also the clean meaning behind the line “the leftist worldview is an inversion of reality.”

🧵The Development of Karl Marx in Three Phases: Before and After Meeting Moses Hess.

https://twitter.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/2002495125210210743

The Thesis is Marx’s intellectual evolution can be traced as a shift in the meaning of “practice.” He moves from the Young Hegelian notion of critique as practice (the idea that theoretical criticism itself is a world-changing force) to Moses Hess’s notion of praxis as deed, a fusion of thought and organized action aimed at repairing social estrangement, and finally to Marx’s own materialist recoding of that praxis. Crucially, Marx preserves much of Hess’s functional architecture of alienation and reintegration even as he rejects Hess’s mystical or ethical idiom (what Marx and Engels later dismiss as “True Socialism”).

https://twitter.com/conceptualjames/status/1361530570073923590

🧵Alienation is how it is sold. Praxis is how it is done. The victim–offender swap is how it moves, by controlling who counts as victim under the power principle.
Let’s do a little thread.

https://twitter.com/ne_pas_couvrir/status/2008503231148933123

Alienation is the theory that makes inversion feel true here for the foot soldiers. It trains people to experience human-made realities, money, institutions, norms, and “structures,” as external forces that rule them. Once that move lands, frustration becomes victimhood, opponents become aggressors, and activism becomes moral duty. Activism is life lived inside that inverted map. Praxis is the offensive move sold as rescue and repair. Alienation sells the story. The victim-offender reversal weaponizes it. Praxis executes it.

What you see here is the Material Turn 2.
Let’s plain speak the material turn, so material turn 2 makes sense.🧵

A “turn” is a change in what a movement treats as the main engine of society. Whatever it names as the engine is where it puts its effort. In left theory, the spotlight keeps rotating across three layers.

Mind is ideas, categories, legitimacy. Change the moral map and society changes.

Spirit is culture, norms, formation. Change the formation machinery that shapes people and society changes.

Body is material structure. Change property, production, law, resources, and infrastructure and society changes.

These layers overlap, but a turn is about what gets treated as primary.

https://x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/2006845683853042167

Mind turn: Descartes and the posture of withdrawal

Descartes gives the posture in one move. Cogito. I think, therefore I am.

The point is not the slogan. The point is the method. You start by doubting everything. You create a blank, a void, a total break. Then you rebuild knowledge from the inside out, anchored in the thinking subject. That is the modern mind move.

Descartes reconstructed knowledge “from the bottom up,” beginning with the self, and says knowledge only comes through first doubting everything, through an “utter rupture and void” of knowledge.

So the lever becomes mind. Certainty, categories, legitimacy. Get the map right and the world follows.

🧵Let’s “plain speak” the broad esoteric drama forming the structure of all of these Marxist and post Marxist theories. Each of these trace a cosmic drama: sacred unity contracts and shatters, forming false husks. Divine sparks scatter to the margins. Each theory seeks to awaken these sparks and begin the work of gathering what was broken and helping to restore the marginalized back into a repaired unity consciousness.

What this chart does is lay out the same drama again and again, row by row, but with different casting and different repair instructions. The column headings works like a legend on a map of (post) Marxist theories because they are structurally the same. Why? Because they are all built on this esoteric drama of rupture→elect-led repair→return to wholeness.

The Primary Power Relations column names the axis of rupture. Dominant Groups names the human face of the false center. Ideology or Framework names the story that legitimates it. Preeminent Systems or Structures names the machinery that sustains it - the false husk. Marginalized or Oppressed Groups names where the "sparks" land in exile (or not exiled and within the false husk). Consciousness-Raising Goals names awakening. Aims or Objectives to Agitate For names the (beginning) repair program that starts the process to a return to wholeness, back to unity consciousness.

https://x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1693045691377946972

Stage one: Unity consciousness and contraction.
Every row implicitly assumes an original moral coherence, a sense that human life could be integrated. People can belong without being degraded. Work, recognition, family life, identity, culture, and nature can fit together without one group having to be sacrificed to stabilize the whole. Theories disagree about how to describe that wholeness, but they share the same background intuition, a properly ordered life would feel reciprocal, integrated, and real. That is why each row can name distortion with confidence. A wound can only be named if there is some tacit sense of what an un-wounded order would be.

So why does withdrawal happen in this Esoteric reading of (post) Marxism? The inference is that these theories need a “contraction” step to explain how domination can exist without being natural. If equality, reciprocity, or shared human dignity is the moral baseline, then hierarchy has to be explained as a break, not a given. Contraction supplies the condition of possibility for that break. It creates distance, opacity, and separation, the space in which a false center can form.

For Luria specifically, contraction creates room for created autonomy and multiplicity, and that room carries risk because vessels can fail. In the Marxist and post-Marxist register, the contraction is translated into historical and social equivalents: the mediation of life by abstraction, money, bureaucracy, classification, borders, and institutional power; the thinning of direct reciprocity; the introduction of scarcity logic; the loss of a shared measure of the good; the conditions that allow power to occupy the gap where wholeness used to be felt.

Different rows in the chart narrate the contraction differently because they choose different “first openings” in the social fabric. The Marxist row will point to dispossession, enclosure, and the creation of wage dependence. The postcolonial row will point to conquest, extraction, and epistemic domination. The feminist row will point to the capture of reproduction, authority, and embodied legitimacy. The critical race row will point to racialized law and institutional ordering. The queer row will point to the tightening of normativity and the policing of intelligibility.

The chart really shows how (post) Marxist's theoretical diversity is surficial, because the structure is shared. One there was a unity with the divine consciousness, but it withdraws, and a rupture happens. An elect can see this rupture and can help the divine to lead a raised consciousness to repair this break and restore wholeness. You can read more about this turn here in this other thread: x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir…

🧵When people say "the constitution is left, and to be on the side of the king is right", they are conflating two very different modern intellectual lineages: one that shaped the American constitutional tradition, and another, esoteric line of political thought running from Descartes through Rousseau, Hegel, Moses Hess, and Karl Marx, and post-Marx.
Both arose in the modern era, but they’re built on completely different assumptions about human nature, the role of the state, and how (or whether) history needs to be "repaired."
Let me walk it out in a loose "plain speak" the best I can.

https://x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1997140629399523667

Where does "left" & "right" actually come from?
The terms left and right in politics trace back to the French Revolution, specifically the National Assembly in 1789. Rousseau is, of course, relevant here.

In the French National Assembly after 1789, defenders of the king, the church, and hereditary privilege sat on the president’s right. Reformers who wanted popular sovereignty and the dismantling of feudal privilege sat to his left. "Right" meant hierarchy, throne and altar; "left" meant revolution (See: Rousseau).

If [King / not King] is all anyone mean by left and right, then sure, the American Revolution was "left" compared to the British crown. The colonists rejected monarchy and asserted popular sovereignty. Sure.

But the intellectual DNA of the American founding is not French Jacobinism; it comes out of a very different stream of thought: English common law, Protestant political reflection, and Scottish "common sense" philosophy (SCSR). SCSR does not share the same basic storyline about history, rupture, and redemption that runs from Rousseau through Hegel, Moses Hess, and Marx.

To see that, we need to zoom out and look at two completely different modern projects, both with very different intellectual lineages.

Let's talk about part of "Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity" by Eli Rubin. A core idea is how a 16th-C idea of tzimtzum (divine contraction) prefigures Descartes’ mind-body dualism and the broader modern sense that being is discontinuous rather than seamlessly connected. The core argument, put simply is, before Luria, most mystical and philosophical traditions imagined reality as a smooth flow from God to the world (like a pyramid with God at the top). Luria dramatically reversed this: God had to withdraw completely to create space for anything else to exist.
Rubin shows this “rupture” is not just a mystical detail. It is the original model for modern experiences of alienation, dualism (mind/body split), and the sense that existence itself is fragile or problematic. Chabad Hasidism, over generations, wrestled with this rupture and turned it into a hopeful, existential spirituality that speaks directly to modern life. We're going to focus mostly on Descartes here though.

Let's do a few long posts laying out Hess's influence on Marx. 🧵
So, Hegel absorbs Böhme's Ungrund-myth and the Lurianic cycle into philosophy, drawing from sources like Johann Jakob Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae, whose treatment of Kabbalah is largely Lurianic, as well as Swabian Pietists like Oetinger who reworked Lurianic ideas and synthesized them with Böhme. Hegel encountered Lurianic Kabbalah directly through Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata, which he cited in his lectures, referencing Abraham Cohen Herrera's Porta coelorum (Magee). Pure Being contracts, like Ein Sof, in tzimtzum, yielding Difference and Nothing; this self-limitation explodes as Nature, a world of finite forms mirroring shevirat ha-kelim, where Spirit's light is refracted into opaque shards. History becomes the labor of Weltgeist, a collective agent gathering sparks through determinate negation (Aufhebung): each contradiction is preserved, lifted, and woven into fuller unity, a rational tikkun without human agency. The triad of Logic-Nature-Spirit thinly secularizes theosophy, with categories unfolding like the Sefirot in dialectical reconciliation, culminating in the ethical state where freedom realizes itself.

https://x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1979944825827778796

Hess inherits this Lurianic-infused Hegelian framework, blending it with Spinoza's monism from the Ethics, which treats thought and extension as modes of a single substance and informs Hess's vision of a reconciled community. While Kant's regulative teleology in the Critique of Judgment and his providential view of history in the 1784 "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim" provide a background for seeing progress as purposeful (albeit antagonistic), Hess anchors this teleology in human agency, secularizing it into praxis through his "philosophy of the deed" and making communal reconciliation the product of conscious action rather than inevitable unfolding (Hess, "Philosophie der Tat"; Avineri).

🧵Let me take some time to explain Neocons and the run up of the Iraq war, and how it comes directly from the neoconservative movement.
Paradoxically, the story of American neoconservatism begins on the radical left. In the 1930s and 1940s, many young intellectuals who would later become leading neoconservatives were ardent Marxists. They were typically second-generation immigrants who found in Marxism a cosmopolitan faith that replaced the traditional religious life of their parents. These fiery young activists were anti-Stalinist Marxists, that is, they believed in the socialist ideal but vehemently opposed Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s regime was seen as a betrayal of the Bolshevik Revolution. Instead, the neoconservatives’ youthful prophet was Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s exiled rival. Trotsky represented permanent revolution and intellectual rigor; he inspired these Americans as a figure who battled for “true” socialism against both capitalist democracies and Stalin’s Communist tyranny. In New York City, a vibrant intellectual scene developed around small socialist magazines and debate clubs. Figures like Max Shachtman, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, and Irving Kristol (who later became known as the “godfather” of neoconservatism) were part of this milieu. They spent their college days arguing about dialectical materialism and the fate of the working class, dreaming of reshaping the United States into a socialist utopia.

World War II and its aftermath became the first turning point for this group. As the Cold War dawned, the reality of Soviet expansion and the oppressive nature of Stalin’s rule could no longer be ignored by even the most optimistic Trotskyist. One by one, these anti-Stalinist Marxists became outright anti-communists. In the late 1940s, they abandoned the cause of world proletarian revolution in favor of aligning with Western democracies against the Soviet Union. This was not a simple or purely opportunistic switch, but rather a complex re-evaluation: they concluded that liberal democracy, for all its flaws, was preferable to totalitarianism. They saw the Soviet system as a new form of tyranny, one that betrayed the Marxist promise of human freedom and instead produced mass repression and alienation. These ex-Marxists came to view Soviet communism as a system that alienated the individual (politically and spiritually) far more severely than Western capitalism did. In their eyes, the USSR had perverted the ideal of human liberation and become an enemy of freedom. Thus, the early neoconservatives entered a kind of self-imposed exile from the left. They went from being insiders in Marxist circles to outsiders attacking global Communism, even as they still considered themselves men of the left in many ways.

Max Shachtman provides a vivid example of this trajectory. An immigrant socialist who had once championed Trotsky’s ideas in America, Shachtman broke with both Trotsky and Stalin during the war, arguing that neither side truly represented workers’ interests. By the 50s, Shachtman and many of his proteges had shifted into a staunch anti-Soviet stance, some even cooperating with U.S. labor unions and government efforts to contain communism. Another prominent intellectual, James Burnham, made a dramatic turn: he went from writing Trotskyist theory to penning The Managerial Revolution (1941), which predicted a new global struggle between bureaucratic elites rather than classes, and later became an adviser to anti-Communist policymakers in Washington. The common thread in these early experiences was a passionate anti-totalitarian ethos. These thinkers may have left Marxism behind, but they retained a radical temperament, a belief that grand intellectual schemes could remake the world and a moral urgency to combat what they saw as evil. This mind-set of the “warrior intellectual” would later define neoconservatism.

So, having severed ties with revolutionary socialism, the intellectuals who would become neoconservatives did not cease evolving. By the 1960s, they took another significant turn: from skeptical liberal anti-communists into assertive nationalists and interventionists. Several factors drove this evolution. One was the experience of the Cold War itself. As the United States became the principal power opposing Soviet communism worldwide, these thinkers, now mostly aligned with the Democratic Party’s anti-communist wing – urged a vigorous U.S. foreign policy. They supported American military build-ups and alliances as necessary bulwarks of freedom. They had once hoped for international working-class solidarity; now they championed an international struggle between the “Free World” and the Communist bloc. In doing so, they increasingly identified with American power and patriotic sentiment. The United States, in their view, had become the main engine of progress in world history, standing up for liberal values against totalitarianism.

Domestic political shifts in the 60s also pushed this group further rightward. As the Vietnam War and the counterculture divided American liberals, the early neoconservatives found themselves at odds with the emerging New Left. Younger radicals in the late 1960s denounced American intervention in Vietnam, critiqued capitalism, and in some cases expressed open sympathy for Communist revolutionaries in Asia and Latin America. To the anti-Communist liberals (the proto-neocons), these stances were anathema – it seemed the New Left had learned nothing from the horrors of Stalinism that the previous generation fought against. They viewed the counterculture and anti-war movement as dangerously naive at best, or anti-Western and subversive at worst. Magazines like Commentary and The Public Interest, led by editors who would later be labeled neoconservatives, started publishing scathing critiques of the New Left, campus radicalism, and the perceived breakdown of social order. They defended the importance of authority, tradition, and pro-American patriotism, sounding more and more like conservatives in the traditional sense.

An important event that accelerated the break between these intellectuals and the mainstream liberal left was the Six-Day War of 1967 in the Middle East. In that conflict, Israel (a young nation many of them admired) fought off surrounding Arab states. Many on the New Left and in the anti-war camp showed hostility to Israel’s victory, viewing Israel as an agent of Western imperialism. In contrast, the anti-Communist liberals were generally sympathetic to Israel, seeing it as a plucky democracy surrounded by hostile authoritarian regimes. The differing reactions to the Six-Day War created a fissure: the future neoconservatives were appalled that some American leftists sided with or at least did not condemn anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish rhetoric coming from radical circles. For Jewish intellectuals who remembered the Holocaust and Stalinist antisemitism, the left’s turn against Israel felt like a profound betrayal. This was deeply persona. Israel’s survival struck an existential chord, and it cemented their feeling that the radical left had aligned itself with the wrong side in the struggle between civilization and barbarism. As a result, many of these figures moved further toward the political right, at least on foreign policy issues. This also ties to a theurgic drive we'll discuss later.

By the early 1970s, the term “neoconservative” began to be applied to this loose cohort of thinkers. Originally, it was not a label they chose for themselves. It was coined by others (meant somewhat pejoratively) to describe former liberals who had, in the famous quip, been “mugged by reality.” Indeed, reality in the form of rising urban crime, social unrest, and perceived failures of welfare policies also pushed them to critique liberal domestic policy. Several of the early neocons wrote essays lamenting the decay of educational standards, the loss of social cohesion, and the unintended consequences of the welfare state. They argued that liberal social programs, while well-intentioned, sometimes made problems worse (for example, by creating dependency or undermining the family structure). This domestic critique went hand-in-hand with their foreign policy hawkishness. In both realms, they espoused a kind of tough-minded realism married to idealism: realism in that they distrusted utopian schemes and recognized the need for force or authority, and idealism in that they still aimed to defend and spread what they considered universal values (democracy, freedom, order).

This synthesis became especially apparent in the late 70s and 80s. Some neocons entered government positions or acted as advisers. They often collaborated with traditional conservatives on shared goals, such as opposing détente with the Soviet Union (which they saw as a dangerous accommodation of evil) and championing human rights (as a moral club against the USSR). Notably, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (a Dem known for his hard-line anti-Soviet stance) attracted support from these intellectuals. They were sometimes called “Jackson Democrats.” Under President Ronald Reagan, a number of neoconservatives finally found themselves in the halls of power. They took roles in the Defense and State Departments and at think tanks that shaped Reagan-era policy. They supported Reagan’s build-up of arms, his confrontational rhetoric toward Moscow (the “Evil Empire” speech resonated deeply with them), and interventions in places like Central America to roll back Soviet influence.

Neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick (who became U.S. Ambassador to the UN) argued that America should be unashamed to support “authoritarian” anti-Communist governments, because these were preferable to totalitarian Communist regimes and could evolve toward democracy over time. This indicated a pragmatic readiness to use U.S. power, even in morally complex situations, to serve what they saw as the greater good of winning the 'global struggle for freedom.'

So, by the end of the Cold War, the neoconservatives had thus fully transitioned from their leftist origins to a new identity as champions of American exceptionalism and interventionism. American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is a unique nation, destined to play a transformative role in world history due to its foundation on ideals of liberty and democracy. The neocons fervently embraced this notion. They saw the U.S. as not just any great power, but as the indispensable nation called upon to defend democratic values and, ultimately, to remake the world in their image. This sense of mission was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The sudden end of the Cold War appeared to vindicate their long-held stance that steadfast pressure on the Soviet system, combined with the inherent superiority of Western ideals, would bring about a historic victory. Many neoconservatives viewed this moment as an affirmation that they had been on the right side of history. However, rather than seeing the end of the Cold War as the conclusion of their struggle, they mostly perceived it as the opening of a new chapter – one in which American power must be used proactively to shape the post-Cold War international order. This leads into the infusion of philosophical ideas, especially those of Hegel, to justify an expansive vision for the future. Hegelian Philosophy and the “End of History”
To really understand neoconservatism’s ideological roots, we must unpack Hegel and his notion of historical progress. So Hegel was a 19th-century German philosopher whose ideas about history and spirit hugely impacted on Western thought (including Marxism, which in turn influenced the neocons’ mentors). Hegel proposed that history is not a random series of events but a dialectical process, meaning a rational unfolding of the World Spirit (in German, Geist) over time. According to Hegel, each era represents a stage in the development of human freedom and consciousness. Conflicts and contradictions drive history forward (the famous dialectic of abstract & it's negation yielding a concrete, and through this process, humanity gradually achieves higher levels of ethical and political order. Hegel saw the modern constitutional state as a pinnacle of this process, wherein the freedoms of individuals could finally be reconciled with a universal ethical life.

Three Hegelian concepts are particularly relevant: Geist, alienation, and universal history. Geist means “spirit” or “mind.” For Hegel it means an overarching collective force, almost like a world-soul, that seeks self-realization through the progression of history. One might think of Geist as the sum of human societies’ cultural and moral being, which evolves toward greater awareness of freedom and reason. Hegel’s Geist has a mystical / esoteric quality, giving it spiritual undertones. Yet Hegel presented it in thinly secular & philosophical terms. History itself is the story of Geist coming to know itself. History is on a road trip, trying to find itself, maaaaan. Anyway, the second concept, alienation (or Entfremdung in German), refers in Hegel’s usage to the Spirit becoming estranged from itself as it objectifies itself in the world. Put simply, at various points in history, human beings create institutions or beliefs that embody their collective spirit, but then those creations confront them as alien powers or constraints. For example, in a despotic society, people might be alienated because their own collective spirit of freedom is not recognized by their oppressive institutions. The spirit exists in itself, but not yet for itself. Overcoming alienation means that humans (and the Geist behind them) overcome these contradictions and recognize themselves in the world they have made. Finally, universal history is the idea that we can view the history of all nations and peoples as a single, coherent story (a universal narrative) moving towards some ultimate goal. Hegel believed this goal was the realization of human freedom in the form of a rational state and society; in his view, history had a direction and would effectively “end” when that goal was reached globally.

These abstract ideas filtered down (through many intermediaries, most importantly Hess, who we're going to skip for brevity) Let's just say, that Geists roadtrip of finding itself changes with Hess and Marx to where an elect actively change and shape Geist to achieve the endpoint. This is Praxis and it ties esoterically to the idea of Tikkun via Boheme, Hegel, and Hess. Anyway, the young Trotskyists and socialist intellectuals who eventually became neocons were thus originally raised, intellectually speaking, on a diet rich in Hegelian and Marxist assumptions: that history has a meaning, that it moves via conflict toward a clear end-point, and that ideological commitment can help hasten this progress. Even after they abandoned the Stalinist left, many of these thinkers retained this framework. They continued to see a drama of universal history unfolding that an elect can manipulate to its proper end. Only now, instead of communism representing the future, they came to believe that liberal democracy was the final stage of history that would (and should) spread worldwide.

This conviction was famously articulated at the very end of the Cold War by one thinker in the neoconservative orbit who asked: Have we reached the end of history? By this provocative phrase “end of history,” he did not mean that events would stop happening, but that humanity might have arrived at the final and best form of society: Western-style liberal democracy and market economics. This idea directly echoes Hegel’s notion (filtered through a 20th-century lens) that there is an endpoint to the ideological evolution of mankind. In Hegel’s terms, one could say the World Spirit would then have attained self-conscious freedom everywhere and have no new higher form to strive for. History, as a grand evolutionary process, would fulfill its purpose.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated, neoconservatives jubilantly embraced this End of History thesis. They saw the defeat of communism not just as one powerful country beating another, but as the vindication of a worldview. Liberal democracy had proven superior in practice and had no remaining global rivals with a compelling universal ideology. Fascism had been defeated in World War II, and now communism was vanquished in the Cold War. What remained was, as they saw it, the inevitable spread of liberal democratic principles to every corner of the globe. If necessary, aided by active encouragement from the United States. This is the active praxis, the active repair, the tikkun to achieve the end point. This is where their lingering revolutionary temperament met their new allegiance to American power. Just as they once might have believed in accelerating the coming of socialism, they now believed in accelerating the consolidation of democracy worldwide.

Also, the influence of Hegelian thought can also be seen in how neoconservatives framed the moral purpose of American foreign policy. They spoke in grand terms of universal principles and a universal history in which the United States had a leading role. One of their intellectual heroes, though not himself a neoconservative, was the British historian Toynbee who also described history as a series of challenges and responses of civilizations (more Hegel) the neocons interpreted the post-Cold War world as presenting a final challenge to extend the “Western idea” globally. They also had intellectual ties to scholars of modernization theory, which was implicitly Hegelian/Marxist in suggesting that all societies go through stages of development (from traditional to modern, from tyranny to democracy). The neoconservatives were essentially arguing that now no obstacles remained to the global triumph of the Geist of liberal democracy, except the will to make it happen.

It’s worth noting that neoconservatives also drew on more explicitly American ideological traditions that meshed well with Hegelian teleology. For example, they admired the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson (who had spoken of America making the world “safe for democracy” after World War I). Their pov was a much harder edge, insisting that American power must actively shape history’s course. They often criticized the pessimistic “realist” school of foreign policy (exemplified by figures like Henry Kissinger). To clarify, realists tended to emphasize a balance of power, national interest narrowly defined, and the inevitability of great-power competition, a view that can be seen as denying any moral arc or progressive trajectory to history. Neoconservatives rejected such cynicism. In their eyes, history had a clear arrow, and America’s values were destined to prevail; therefore, American statesmen should confidently bend circumstances toward that end rather than merely managing conflicts. They frequently invoked a kind of moral clarity vs. moral relativism argument, suggesting that those who failed to see the necessity of pushing democracy forward were stuck in old thinking or ethical lethargy.
We can linger more on theurgy, Hess, the 1967 war, the neoconservative's turn, but let's just jump into democracy building.

Let's🧵 "plain speak" collective consciousness raising esoterically. Collective consciousness raising works on two levels. There's an exoteric layer that's out in the open and helps bind people together. Then there's an esoteric layer that's more hidden and provides the deeper meaning or engine behind it all. Groups use these layers to wake up to some kind of perceived problem or rupture in the world and then chase a goal oriented fix. First, let's look at the exoteric layer. This is the out in the open coordination system.
What it is includes shared narratives, moral codes, catchphrases, and organizations. For example, things like "justice" in social justice movements or "our people" in ethnos movements.
What it does is get people moving through protests, pilgrimages, campaigns. It signals belonging with flags, hashtags, badges. It legitimizes leaders as interpreters of the story. It recruits and polices boundaries with membership rules, loyalty tests.
Where you see it is in schools, media, law, manifestos, etc. These lead to holidays, oaths, dress codes, policy talking points.
It scales to the masses, but it takes its direction from the hidden layer.

Good question. Let's do a🧵In this [withdrawal → rupture → repair → wholeness] model there is no separate demiurge. Distortion unfolds inside one reality. the decisive events occur within the One (say a unity consciousness, a Godhead, Geist), not by a rival maker, and they treat the break and the mixed condition that follows as the pivot of the story. This framework resists dualism. What can look like a secondary creator is framed as an appearance of the One’s activity rather than an independent being.

https://x.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1974603374147342747

The opening move is a narrowing that makes historical room, followed by a break in the ordering of things that leaves a residue. This process is internal within (the Geist, the oneness), and the framework is explicit re; the internality of this process and the persistence of a trace after contraction; this explains how fragments can still bear the mark of the source even in a damaged field.

The meme is undefeated

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1969074559602110509

The meme is undefeated.

https://twitter.com/johnpavlovitz/status/1969103912981434603

Sure. 🧵Let's start with the revolutionary period and the regions within the US. Woodard is instructive if we're to look at America's regions.
Treat the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths as asserting a realist natural-law ontology (inalienable rights grounded in creation order), taught in America largely via Scottish Common Sense Realism (SCSR) (Reid/Witherspoon), layered onto Lockean natural-rights politics and consent-based constitutional design. The question for each region is twofold:
1. Ontology: Did they accept the realist grounding of rights?
2. Application: How did they translate it into institutions/law?
The Northeast (Yankeedom): The Ontology was broadly affirmed. SCSR easily reinforced this “self-evident” stance.
Application? Town-meeting localism, compulsory schooling, moral legislation, clergy-statesmen—comfortable using government for public-good projects. In the Revolution, a leading edge for mobilization and institutional reform.
But there's a tension. This region tends to extend the moral order into programmatic state action, pushing beyond minimal rights-protection toward reformist (sometimes moralizing) governance.

New York (Dutch-rooted commercial pluralism): The ontology was bracketed in favor of practical coexistence. It's a trading cosmopolis prized conscience, press, and commercial freedom. it's more procedural than metaphysical.
Application? They were strong champions of pluralist rights (free exercise, press, due process). At Philadelphia, this translated into vigorous protections that crystallized in the Bill of Rights.
But there's a tension. This region can treat the realist-natural-law frame as optional background, insisting the polity work even when citizens disagree about ultimate metaphysics.

Midlands (ol Quaker Pennsylvania & German Backcountry): Ontologically, Quaker “Inner Light” and German pietism made elites cautious about metaphysical policing. Meaning, they could accept natural-law language yet refuse to weaponize it.
Application? It's anti-coercive, de-centered government; religious toleration, civil peace, local diversity of lifeways; steady support for federalism and suspicion of crusading projects that were more popular in Yankeedom.

Now, down south, lets look at:

Tidewater (Chesapeake gentry): They theoretically affirmed the ontology (Virginia rights discourse, classical republican virtue) but in practice, it's hedged by hierarchy and deference. The application is that there's rights and and consent for the gentlemanly order, and that coexists with slavery and estate power. So there's strong constitutional craftsmanship, but it comes with built-in aristocratic inflections.

In the Deep South (West-Indies inflected): The ontology is carved out in practice. Rights are a privilege for the planter class; and the enslaved people are excluded. Fast forward a few years, and you have a clash between Northern and Deep South interests.
Northern interests were for revenue for the new state and protective duties for shipping and manufactures; comfortable using national instruments to cultivate a common good political economy.

Meanwhile, the Deep South was interested in an export regime (rice/indigo, later cotton) needing low tariffs to import British goods cheaply and keep markets open; hostile to policies that raise input costs or empower a central fiscal state.

The divergence is visible from the 1789 Revenue Tariff and Hamilton’s program and hardens through the 1816/1824 tariffs, culminating in the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” and Nullification (1832–33).

Philosophically, it reprises the earlier fault lines described above: one side affirming a national capacity to order the common weal; the other resisting national encroachments that threaten its social order.

Again, they think they're an elect, awakened to a spiritual drama of rupture, exile, & obligated repair, where trauma defines authenticity. The goal is for them to lead a collective consciousness to elevate the marginalized, sublate the oppressor, & then utopia happens. Again, they think they're an elect, awakened to a spiritual drama of rupture, exile, & obligated repair, where trauma defines authenticity. The goal is for them to lead a collective consciousness to elevate the marginalized, sublate the oppressor, & then utopia happens.

🧵The real discussion online is not about facts. It's about controlling emotions & framing. Facts alone rarely change minds because people interpret them through lenses shaped by emotions, biases, & values. Framing builds & controls those lenses -which controls the conversation.

https://twitter.com/FedPoasting/status/1810392510277235013

So, what exactly is framing? At heart, it's a mental and communication trick where people, groups, or the media pick and choose how to package information. This influences how you perceive it, make sense of it, and react. In psychology, it's called the framing effect, a kind of bias where the way something's worded or presented, like focusing on the upside versus the downside, nudges your choices without altering the facts. It plays on quick brain shortcuts, making one side feel way more attractive. In broader fields like communication and social studies, framing builds whole stories by spotlighting some details, such as who caused a problem, the moral takeaway, or the fix, while shoving others into the shadows or cutting them out completely. Think of it like a picture frame: it highlights the main scene, draws your eye to certain colors, and crops out distractions, guiding your emotions and actions while setting boundaries on what's acceptable to talk about.
Think of this well-worn meme here. I'm sure you can come up with dozens of examples, like "mostly peaceful protests."

I omitted Rousseau here on purpose looking for a loose thread.
Fun fact, Rousseau’s role as a librarian-secretary in the 1740s placed him in direct contact with aristocratic libraries, which, by the mid-18th century, often included esoteric works. The Kabbala Denudata (1677–1684) was commonly found in well-stocked French libraries, and Pico della Mirandola’s works were widely accessible. Aristocratic libraries, likely including those of the Dupins, contained esoteric works due to the 18th-century fascination with occultism, fueled by cheap printing and Parisian dealers. Rousseau’s task of indexing such collections makes it highly likely he handled these texts in the 1740s and thus influenced Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762). Another is that Rousseau, in the 1740s, was closely associated with the Dupin salon as secretary and tutor; that salon was a key Parisian intellectual hub. The exposure is also plausible here, considering prevalence of such ideas in 1740s Parisian intellectual circles.

Mapping collective orientation & 5GW resilience globally, the 2025 US awkwardly straddles A and E, -fractured in spirit, loosely networked in form, & haunted by a fading memory of D(esque). Its collective telos is fading, yet legacy structures still offer some 5GW resilience.

https://twitter.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1927436205911683462

From a Game Theory POV
Atomised Individualism: Yields a low payoff due to its fragmented structure and susceptibility to 5GW’s narrative manipulation, making it an easy target for division into micro-tribes.

Fragmented Tribes: Offers a low payoff, as its localized cohesion fails to scale against 5GW threats, leading to deepened fractures and civil conflict under pressure.

Rigid Collectivism: Provides a medium payoff, leveraging high initial cohesion for resistance, but its payoff collapses sharply if the core telos is lost, triggering implosion.

Modular Collectivism: Achieves the highest payoff through a balanced strategy of high cohesion and adaptability, though this advantage plummets if the telos is lost, risking fracture.

Networked Coalitions: Delivers a high payoff via adaptable coordination, yet this is moderated by the risk of centralization or fragmentation if the telos falters, potentially drifting toward Rigid Collectivism.

🧵Each form of "woke" has a shared esoteric trunk. The development of Western Esotericism from antiquity to Boheme shows how the idea of an elect slowly shifts from personal escape to a collective repair of the material world.

https://twitter.com/Ne_pas_couvrir/status/1930691093370474808

Greek Magical Papyri (c. 2nd c. BC (ish)
The Greek Magical Papyri (PGM) are a collection of texts from Greco-Roman Egypt, containing spells, rituals, and invocations for purposes such as love, protection, cursing, and divination. These texts reflect a syncretic blend of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and other cultural traditions. In many spells, the material world is depicted as a realm of danger and illusion, from which the magus seeks to extract power or escape. For instance, spells often involve invoking deities or spirits to grant temporary power, after which the deity is dismissed to prevent entrapment in matter. This is a view of salvation as a "tactical exit" rather than renovation, with the magus (Magician) focusing on personal benefit or transcendence. The overall orientation is towards individual mastery, not collective repair.

For the PGM, salvation is a tactical exit, an escape of the material world; the dialectic is partial & incomplete, centered on withdrawal (escape) but lacking shatter or repair.

The elect are solitary practitioners, focused on personal power and transcendence, with no collective or societal responsibility. This marks the earliest stage, where the elect’s role is purely individualistic.

Salvation = individual tactical exit, not collective renovation.

The esoteric right seeks to restore sacred order. Its telos is a return to primordial hierarchy, cosmic harmony & rooted identity. Scale is civilizational or ethnic, steered by a disciplined minority of custodians of culture, warrior aristocrats or an ethical state. Their critique targets decadence rather than equality, viewing modern liberalism as a fall from transcendence. Awakening is selective, shaped by myth, ritual & inner discipline that elevate the few who can impose form on the many. Revolutions are taken as divine punishments that purge decline so this elect can rebuild throne, altar & organic community. History moves in cycles of rise, decay & rebirth; repair arrives by re enthroning transcendent authority, not by universal emancipation. The last major figure or node shared by both the esoteric left and right, before they diverge, is Jakob Böhme (1575–1624).

His mystical theosophy blends Christianity, alchemical symbolism, and Kabbalah, particularly influenced by Lurianic ideas of divine withdrawal, fragmentation, and restoration.

Joseph de Maistre, a quarter century before Hegel, saw history as a force that uses men, not one led by them. It moves through them to achieve larger ends, then casts them aside.
Both ideas have similar esoteric origins.
(Considerations on France: 1796)

https://twitter.com/ne_pas_couvrir/status/1789626296638517623