The Per Ankh Trick

The theme is that throughout the whole of human history, there is a pattern:

Major educational institutions are split between the religion and some mechanistic teaching. (I don’t use the word “scientific”, not even for modern universities, for reasons I hope to explain in another post).

For the Per Ankh, the “House of Life”, these were what you might call today “religious” universities - which taught a bunch of who cares mystic woo, but also significantly medicine, which they intertwined with the mystical teachings. That’s how they got the name “House of Life”. Later these Per Ankh’s would expand into other subjects and become more of a generalized academy.

But the efficacy of the medicine served as proof of the mystical teachings.

This is also what effective “cults”, or non-hegemonic religions, do. They’ll take something that works in the real world - maybe some medical, dietary or psychological teaching, which works, and then somehow intertwine that with the religious content. Fasting is a very common example of this. It’s something that nearly always works, will often clear up health issues “miraculously, and it’s something that few will do without being told to.

Scientology has, whether by something Hubbard read, his personal experience or just happenstance, all manner of little self-help and reframing tactics that do work. And they are all woven into the sci-fi religious woo, and work as a kind of proof for it.

This is likely why scientologists stick to the religious content for so long, because they’re using a whole bunch of well-worn self-help tactics that work every day, which functions as a kind of daily proof for the religious content.

One of the reason Jordan Peterson’s “cult” is so successful is because he intertwines well-worn self-improvement tactics into the lolbert religious content. I personally don’t believe Peterson did this knowingly, as I believe he is a very stupid man and isn’t smart enough to know to do this.

The Per Ankh is the oldest known example, and the “Per Ankh Trick”, as I’m calling it, can be done in institutional and non-institutional settings. For example, if you just read scientology books, and do the exercises, and they help with procrastination, and then you go on to believe in the thetans or whatever - okay well you’ve been Per Ankh’d in a non-institutional setting. If you do that through formal Scientology courses as a member of the Church of Scientology, you’ve been Per Ankh’d in an institutional sense.

Obviously the relevant target of what I’m talking about is the modern University, but I just want to make it clear that the Per Ankh trick can happen institutionally or non-institutionally, and can be done intentionally or be accidental. For example, Jordan Peterson’s “cult” is, IMO, accidental, and his Per Ankh Trick is accidental, and his “cult” is very informal and non-institutional.

So lets just burn through some boring examples:

From the wikipedia article on Madrasas:

“The curriculum generally consisted of logic, philosophy, law, history, politics, and particularly religious sciences, later incorporating more of mathematics, astronomy, geography, and medicine.”

This is something well-known today, which is that the Per Ankh equivalents in places where darker-skinned Caucasians tend to live - teach Judaism 3.0 right alongside scientific and mechanistic things.

We also know that Monastic and Cathedral Schools, originally established to train clergy on how to run a parish, evolved over time into what we call “Universities”. The first to use this name, supposedly, being “the University of the Students and Masters of Paris”. And of course they taught all of the Judaism 2.0 alongside everything else that came to be taught at Universities.

In India, the Mahavihara, were known to teach Buddhism along with Medicine, and perhaps other subjects over time.

The Chinese Academies generally taught Confucianism, alongside their first non-religious subject of water management, before eventually branching off into all manner of topics.

If you care to, you can deep dive yourself, and just continually confirm this all you want. But the confabulation of religion and science / mechanism is a universal.

If you hold to the Faulkian conception of organizations, this makes sense. Given that the Per Ankh Trick is a great way to grip people, to provide a kind of “proof” for the religious teachings - even if just by association (medicine and astronomy, which we know works, is being taught on the same campus with the same course structure as mystic woo, so there must be something to it), then those religions which use the Per Ankh trick will do better than those which fail to.

This then gets into the “communist” or “marxist” religion of the USSR, and how in their Per Ankh equivalents, that religion was taught right on top of the science and mechanism. And any great breakthrough was indirectly praised as being made possible by the wonderful “communist” or “socialist” system which enabled men to make such breakthroughs.

In the USSR and Warsaw Pact, it should be noted that, just as a matter of brute fact, as theistic religion was purged from the universities, the political religion was put in place.

So that is the context in which you should see the current political religion. What came into prominence as theology fell into the dustbin at NATO-EU Universities?

Whatever that is, likely constitutes the modern religion (or soon-to-be), and is probably wrong. And it is buttressed by the same Per Ankh Trick that, seemingly, all successful religions end up using.