Gnossis Politics

Chris Bowers at Open Left is riffing off of something that has been floating in the back of mine, the particularly sharp edges of being at an intellectual/political edge and the temptation to engage in gnostic politics.

Yes, there is a certain eschatological feel about some of the writing coming from the Draft Gore movement, which one can also find at times from peak oil junkies. For both groups, the end of the world / second coming is always near, and the unfaithful are often mocked for their ignorance.....

I think I gave $10.00 to Graft Gore in the summer of 2006 and I have been following the ideas behind Peak Oil since soon after I started to blog.

The other two areas of edge thinking that I have routinely engaged in has been 4th Generation warfare, or at least non-traditional kinectic defense thinking, and the initial argument that the housing market was massively out of whack with reality and it was propped up by massive amounts of easy credit. When I first came across these ideas, opinions, theories, and storylines, they were fringe opinions with highly estoric knowledge required to understand them.

Who the hell outside of a small group of strange intellectuals heard of Lind? Who thought of decision making as OODA? What the hell is Hubbert Linearization? Secondary bubbles --- what are they and do they form only with glycerin? The terminology was different, the initial operating assumptions were in stark contrast to prevalant majority group assumptions, and the predicted end results are significantly different than consensus forecasts. And right now the Housing Bubble folks, and the 4th GW/alt. defense strategy thinking are being heavily validated by reality conforming much closer to their expectations nnd predictions than predictions made three to five years ago by the consensus groups. Peak Oil is still in the undecided category, although the evidence is starting to come in that there is at least a global plateau if not a peak in conventional crude production.

Alternative theories have done a better job of describing the behavior of the economy's primary growth sector, the critical production bottleneck of expansion, and the (in)ability of the state to impose its will through force than traditional theories this decade. And here I am worried; both that the consesnus explanations are so consistently wrong ---- 30,000 troops in Iraq by Christmas 2003, New Housing Paradigm, and the Alberta Oil Sands will save us ---- and the fact that the initial creaters and early adapters of non-traditional explanations operate at the margin and submargin of debate.

The initial steps of understanding that debate is a revelation and a rejection of the commonplace, and here exists the danger of gnossis, a dismissal of the everyday world. There is a temptation of contempt, and distancing of oneself from the common debate. Election revealed through the knowledge of an alternative explanation is a strong current in American releigous-political history, and the quasi-secret but open source knowledge that is available for anyone to stumble across invites an inward turn....