I'll offer some excerpts here from an interesting article that taps into the recent gnostic trend in internet rabbit holes and political decay. This is a collaborative essay from two writers named Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope- ... ses-to-end
There's some heavier stuff on Hegel and Nietzsche that we might need kokorodoko to pull apart, but the general points are fairly clear to me.
They do a good job defining gnosticism:
"1. A radical dualism between “a good transcendent God and an evil world,” which is to say, a dualism of transcendence and immanence as the fundamental binary for making sense of experience.
2. The estrangement of the transcendent God from the world, a God crucially understood not only as “hidden and concealed” but also “not the creator of this world.” This world is the creation of a lesser and evil Godlike power that is “always at odds with the one true transcendental Godly power”—the result being an immanent world of materiality and embodiment, with earthly systems of moral judgment and status attainment that are inherently corrupt, profane, and unredeemable.
3. Human existence understood as “torn between worldly existence and divine and hidden inner essence,” the latter being not just alienated from the social structures and physical laws of the given world, but radically alienated from them, to the point that even felt moral sentiments and obligations are understood as deriving from the immanent, profane world as well.
4. The conviction that Gnosis, the secret knowledge possessed by the select few who have seen the evil-made world for what it is, enables them to connect with the true, the good, and the transcendent by means of a radical rejection and violent overthrow of what is in front of them.
5. That as a spur to action and thought in this (demonic) world, Gnosis provides guidance for bringing about the end of this world and the beginning of the new—or as the German émigré intellectual and political philosopher Eric Voegelin put it (at least in the wording popularized by his followers), for immanentizing the eschaton."
Later they refer to gnosticism as a driving force in the violence of Stalinists and Nazis:
"In these movements, the very relationship among violence, politics, and necessity was given a new understanding. Arendt explores this at length in Eichmann in Jerusalem when she considers the specific way in which mass annihilation became possible through a stunning moral inversion. Inside the Nazi machine, killing became necessary and one’s basic human instinct for sympathy and capacity for judgment had to be repressed or suspended, because the intensity of the renunciation of sympathy and judgment corresponded to the intensity of one’s belief in the radical newness of the world to come. The secret knowledge (Gnosis) of the coming world guaranteed that what seemed immoral now was, in reality, the only moral thing to do—one had to pierce the veil and create, for future generations, an entirely new humanity with a new history."
Lastly, if you're as dense as me you'll have to look up thymotic (the part of the psyche that feels shame, pride etc).
"Thymotic needs are hard to meet, especially in a world in which the gig economy is increasingly entrenched and an ever greater relative deprivation resulting from stagnant wages and rising costs is normalized. As the world in common evaporates, the search for significance quickly attaches itself to stories unrelated to the world as it actually is. The Gnostic impulse, feeding on alienation and disrespect, generates conspiracy theories, messianic expectations, and new certainties available to those who “do the research” in the strange loops of QAnon. Gnosticism flourishes because, in the absence of a world in common, significance is sought and secured without evidence or reason. This political culture stands in the strongest possible contrast with an Arendtian conception of “the public” as a space of appearance in which citizens exhibit the inherent plurality of the human condition, in regard both to what we might call their primary identity markers and to their political commitments, and in which citizens come together to bring about something in the world that could not be achieved privately. "