“How dare you accuse us of what we said”
This website collects quotations from academic literature representing a broadly “left-wing” worldview. The view gives visual map of the relationships between these ideas. Each idea is also accompanied by real-world examples showing how this academic worldview shapes the world around us.
Why?
The purpose of this website is to help explain the confusion in our worldviews. Why do “liberals” advocate restricting free speech? Why do anti-racists insist on focusing on racial identities? And why do people insist that a man can be women regardless of biology?
The short answer is that, while we believe our culture and institutions were built according to liberal and Enlightenment principles, the ideas living within those institutions has gradually shifted from liberalism to the “Left,” causing significant clashes in how we understand the world. Although both sides use similar words, such as liberty, the Left explicitly opposes Enlightenment and liberal ideas as they were originally conceived.
This website seeks to clarify that confusion by gathering the words of influential intellectuals: those who create and shape the ideas operating within our institutions. It shows, in black and white, what they actually say and how their ideas have been pursued and successfully implemented.
The aim is to put a repository of evidence in your pocket, so that no one can dismiss these claims as fabricated.
Reasons for the Confusion
Liberalism vs. the Left
Liberalism was built on Enlightenment principles: individualism, negative liberty, opposition to tyrannical power, and the cult of reason.
The Left was built on collectivism and identitarianism, pathos as a higher form of reason and a force of historical progress, and liberation from existing society.
The Story of the Left
The broader story behind this worldview resembles many general narratives that human beings have told again and again over the millennia. Reduced to its most basic form, its blueprint sounds like this:
Reality as we know it is actually a tainted and corrupted shell that conceals the true world. To reach a higher plane of being, we must shed or break through this shell and ascend to a higher form. All the apparent layers of reality are fallen representations of a truer reality.
This idea ultimately offers a “true” version of reality toward which people must strive. Only those who follow the prescribed direction are considered truly “free,” “awake,” or “liberated.” The process requires a struggle against an oppressive, fallen, and deceptive world.
How It Travelled
To many readers, this may sound remarkably close to a mystical worldview. The controversial point is that you are right. It can be summarized as a form of alchemy or mysticism translated into, and validated through, scientific and sociological language. The claim may be surprising, but the similarities are undeniable.
An alchemist might say:
The lower, tainted material is merely a shell concealing a purer substance. It traps and veils the material’s true, higher essence. We must discover the process by which we can purify it, cast off the base matter of lead, and reveal its hidden seed of gold.
A mystic might say:
The lower plane of existence in this world obscures true spiritual reality. It was built to hide or imprison us. We must reject the current material world and find a way to ascend to a higher form of existence. We can do so by spiritually discovering the hidden seed of that higher essence.
A progressive leftist might say:
This is a fallen and oppressive reality that conceals and exploits our true potential. Ideology veils true existence and legitimizes oppressive structures. We must raise our consciousness—the true spark of genuine understanding—problematize, criticize, and deconstruct the current social order, and progress toward a higher plane of freer social relations.
Calm Down. What Are We Actually Saying?
It may be difficult to accept, but the contemporary left-wing worldview descends from precisely this line of thought, not from the liberal Enlightenment tradition. Because this is difficult to accept, Snakeology documents the quotations “From the horses mouth” that make this case directly.
This may be hard to conceive, but it is not, in itself, extraordinary. Liberalism is only one of many worldviews, while mystical traditions have been a normal and recurring phenomenon throughout history.
This lineage runs from Hermeticism in ancient Greece, through Plato’s cave and Saint Augustine’s Neoplatonism; through Gnostic movements within Christianity and the Cathars of thirteenth-century Europe; through the Arab world and alchemy; and then back to Florence through Hermes Trismegistus, Newton, and finally European philosophy and science through Hegel, Marx, and others.
Mystical ideas have always attempted to legitimise themselves in the real world. In the age of science, they must present themselves as scientific doctrines, supported by evidence and statistics, in order to claim the status of truth. This website begins with Hegel because this is the point at which such ideas were translated into—and laundered as—“Science.”
Again, this is not a controversial observation. Just as the idea of electricity might sound unbelievable to someone who knows nothing about it, this constellation of philosophical worldviews may seem strange simply because we do not generally study it.
Most people have not been educated about these philosophical traditions. Their understanding has been fractured by confusion over words, especially because both worldviews claim the language of liberty.
The central point is that this philosophy became legitimised by, and incorporated into, some of our most prestigious institutions. The resulting struggles and confusion emerge when a philosophy that is explicitly anti-liberal and opposed to our society is implemented within our institutions, norms, and individual interactions, grinding against everything already there.
Worldviews of this kind are neither rare nor mysterious, nor are they uniquely arcane doctrines. They are normal and recurring phenomena in history. Unfortunately, so are the disasters they produce.
Why It Doesn’t Work? They Seem to Have a Point!
The world is full of imperfections, but addressing them requires competence and goodwill, not entitlement. This worldview instead legitimises hostility and resentment by presenting them as part of a healing process.
Within this worldview, deconstruction and its particular form of criticism are not processes aimed at improvement. The underlying assumption is that breaking the shell will release the golden essence trapped inside it. As a result, hostility itself becomes healing.
Real issues are used as pretexts and sources of motivation for attack. That is why the criticism is sometimes valid and sometimes ludicrous. The point is not to solve the issue, but to use it as a vehicle for relentless attack.
We have been tricked into fighting not for liberty, but for liberation from society—and from our world itself. This means constantly eroding, criticising, and decolonising it because, according to this worldview, only from the ashes can the phoenix be reborn.
This is also why some criticisms appear valid while others are patently absurd. The only constant is that the attacks cannot stop until everything has been torn down.
When ill, the body needs a surgeon—not a sadistic butcher.