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CESNUR as Gatekeeper of Neoliberal Pluralist Delusion and Ontological Policing for Western Market Elites

 

 

 



This essay—an earlier version of which was originally meant for Against the Postmodern Germ[1]—argues that CESNUR (the Center for Studies on New Religions)[2] functions not merely as a scholarly body but as a gatekeeping mechanism within the terrain of controlled neoliberal capitalist pluralist delusions, translating ontological conflict into administrable difference. While presenting itself as a neutral mediator among religion, state, and society, CESNUR operates within an ontology that presupposes commensurability: all ultimate claims must be rendered equivalent as “beliefs,” governable as identities, and manageable through procedural frameworks.[3] As such, we argue that CESNUR is the consummate manifestation of the corporate state.[4]

Neoliberal pluralism is often wrongly understood as tolerance. Rather, it functions more accurately as a regime of circulation following a quintessentially capitalist market logic. It requires by quiet assumption that religion be privatized, politics proceduralized, and economy insulated from metaphysical challenges. CESNUR’s discourse performs this work by converting law into lifestyle, prohibition into preference, revelation into narrative belief, and ontological rupture into sociological deviation. Claims that cannot be translated into this register—particularly those that assert binding prohibition or deny the legitimacy of commodification and administration—are reclassified as harmful, coercive, or dangerous. The essay shows that CESNUR’s influence lies primarily in its lexicon, which acts as a form of administrative pre-processing. Terms such as belief, harm, control, freedom, and pluralism do not merely describe; they normalize. They reframe ontological refusal as psychological risk and prepare such claims for escalation into media framing, safeguarding logic, or institutional intervention. In this way, CESNUR functions as a sort of knowledge firewall for market elites, preventing recognition of genuine conflicts of world-order by recoding them as problems of governance.

Observable comparative analyses immediately reveals that CESNUR’s epistemology closely parallels contemporary safeguarding and counter-extremism frameworks.[5] Across these domains, refusal of commensurability is translated into risk, and risk authorizes pre-emptive management. What differs is tone, not structure. The result is a seamless passage from “study” to “concern” to “intervention,” all while maintaining the appearance of pluralist neutrality. Against this stands our Bayānī framework, which institutes a rival nomos. Bayānī law does not present itself as one belief among many, but as a juridico-ontological settlement that sanctifies limits—specifically the inalienability of air, fire, water, and earth (as we have demonstrated in recent essays).[6] This prohibition withdraws certain domains from the jurisdiction of value, ownership, and administration altogether. It therefore cannot be assimilated into neoliberal pluralist discourses without being falsified. Where neoliberal pluralism sanctifies circulation, the Bayān sanctifies non-appropriation. Where neoliberal pluralism treats prohibition as authoritarian excess, the Bayān treats it as a condition of justice.

The collision between these nomoi produces what this essay identifies as administrative violence. When translation fails—when a subject or movement persists in non-alienability—neoliberal pluralism resolves the conflict not through dialogue but through procedure and deliberate misclassification as an act of administrative violence. This is because for them ontological illegibility becomes governable risk. Files replace arguments; assessments replace judgments; doxxing by corporate (but state-ajacent) actors replaces bureaucratic classification.[7] The subject produced by this process, as we have argued, becomes the wretched of the corporate state: not merely exploited, but rendered unrecognizable except as an object of management or administrative demonization. The core claim of the essay is therefore simple and irreducible: the conflict at stake is not between tolerance and extremism, nor between freedom and control, but between circulation and limit as first principles. CESNUR stands on one side of that divide, Bayānī prohibition on the other. No amount of neoliberal pluralist mediation can reconcile them, because they do not disagree about policy—they disagree about what may be governed at all. The conflict is thus ontological; not merely semantic.

Now, CESNUR presents itself as a neutral scholarly mediator among Western academia, the state, media, and “new religious movements,” but its real function is intelligible only within the ontology of neoliberal pluralism. That ontology presupposes commensurability: all ultimate claims are rendered equivalent as “beliefs,” all differences are governable as “identities,” and all conflicts are resolvable as discourse. CESNUR does not ask whether a movement is true, liberatory, or ontologically disruptive; it asks whether it can be translated into administrative language without destabilizing the neoliberal order. In this sense, CESNUR is less a center of study than a gatekeeping apparatus for the corporate state—one that stabilizes pluralism by managing which forms of difference remain legible and which must be neutralized. As we said, neoliberal pluralism is often mistaken for tolerance, but it operates as an ontology of administration. It requires the privatization, political proceduralization, and economic insulation of religious belief from metaphysical challenge. CESNUR’s discourse performs this separation by translating revelation into narrative belief, law into lifestyle, charisma into leadership style, and rupture into innovation. What cannot be translated—what insists on non-negotiable prohibition or claims law rather than belief—becomes a problem to be managed. Thus CESNUR functions as a knowledge firewall for Western elites: it prevents the recognition of ontological conflict by recoding it as sociological deviation, psychological risk, or moral pathology.

This is why CESNUR in every sense is structurally incompatible with Bayānī ontology or anything similar to it. The Bayān does not present itself as one belief among many; it institutes a law of being that withdraws certain domains—such as air, fire, water, earth—from the jurisdiction of value and administration altogether. Such a prohibition collapses the liberal separations that pluralism depends upon. From within CESNUR’s framework, this is intolerable, because pluralism cannot admit limits that bind law itself. The result is a characteristic inversion: what resists administration is reframed as dangerous or abusive, while what integrates smoothly into the neoliberal capitalist lifeworld is praised as harmless or adaptive.

“Religious freedom,” in this configuration, functions as a regulatory technology rather than a shield. It protects belief only insofar as belief accepts neutralization; it withdraws protection when a movement challenges economic, juridical, or epistemic sovereignty. The language of care—concern, safeguarding, prevention—then becomes the bridge from pluralist management to administrative intervention. CESNUR’s classifications then supply the epistemic preconditions for this move, allowing coercive responses to appear as benevolent governance rather than repression. At the limit, this reveals the core delusion CESNUR must maintain: that all ultimate claims can coexist without remainder inside neoliberal (post)modernity. Bayānī prohibition exposes the falsity of this assumption. Some claims negate the ontological permissions of the system itself. Neoliberal pluralism cannot accommodate prohibition; administration cannot tolerate sacred limits. Thus CESNUR exists to ensure this fact remains unspoken.

 

CESNUR as Gatekeeper of Pluralist Commensurability

CESNUR’s gatekeeping role is also not primarily about inclusion or exclusion; it is about translation. Movements are admitted into the pluralist space only after being rendered commensurable with liberal categories—belief, identity, choice, lifestyle. This translation neutralizes ontological force. Prohibition becomes preference; law becomes norm; rupture becomes difference. What cannot be translated—claims that deny the state’s right to administer, the market’s right to value, or pluralism’s right to arbitrate—are marked as anomalous and dangerous. Gatekeeping thus operates the upstream of coercion: it preselects which claims can circulate as “religion” and which must be reclassified as risk.[8]

This is due to the fact that neoliberal pluralism is not an ethic of tolerance but an ontology of governance. It presumes that all claims can be rendered equivalent under procedures of mediation and management, as if they are market products. This ontology is incompatible with non-alienability. Where Bayānī law sanctifies fixities—domains that must not circulate—pluralism insists on circulation as such. Hence the friction: pluralism reads sacred limits as absolutism, and absolutism as danger. CESNUR’s work shores up this ontology by continuously reaffirming the convertibility of ultimacy into administrable difference. Given this, functionally speaking, CESNUR operates as a risk translator for the corporate state. Ontological refusal is reframed as social harm; prohibition as coercion; binding law as control. This translation does not require bad faith; it is structurally induced by the neoliberal pluralist ontology CESNUR inhabits. Once translated, claims can be processed by adjacent governance regimes—media framing, safeguarding protocols, reputational management—without ever acknowledging that a conflict of worlds is at stake. The firewall prevents the question that would destabilize the system: whether liberal (post)modernity has the authority it assumes.

When translation fails—when a subject or movement persists in non-alienability—pluralism gives way to administration. Dialogue becomes surveillance; concern becomes intervention. CESNUR’s classificatory vocabularies help legitimate this passage by presenting it as care. Here the critique meets the present: the corporate state governs less by overt exploitation than by pre-emptive containment of ontological illegibility. Those who refuse commensurability are rendered “wretched” not by poverty alone, but by being made ungovernable within the value-administered order. The result is a form of domination that operates without declaring itself as such, precisely because it frames coercion as protection and exclusion as responsibility. In this way, pluralist administration completes its inversion: the ungovernable subject is treated not as a bearer of limits that expose the system’s illegitimacy, but as a problem to be managed for the system’s own stability.

 

CESNUR’s Lexicon as Administrative Pre-Processing (A Forensic Discourse Analysis)

CESNUR’s influence is exercised less through conclusions than through vocabulary. Terms such as belief, harm, control, freedom, and pluralism function as pre-processing devices that render movements legible to adjacent governance systems. “Belief” privatizes truth-claims and severs them from law; “harm” individualizes conflict and detaches it from ontological or political stakes; “control” reframes binding obligation as pathology; “freedom” is narrowed to voluntarism and exit; “pluralism” presupposes commensurability as the horizon of legitimacy. Each term performs a reduction: what may be a claim about the structure of reality is re-described as a psychological disposition, organizational feature, or social risk. The effect is not neutral description but anticipatory normalization, preparing the ground for media framing, institutional concern, and procedural intervention without ever naming a conflict of worlds. This lexicon also produces a distinctive asymmetry of proof. Movements that accept translation into these terms are presumed benign; those that resist translation are required to justify themselves within a framework that already renders their core claims unintelligible. The burden thus shifts from the neoliberal pluralist order to the claimant: legitimacy is granted only after capitulation to administrability. In this way, CESNUR’s language functions as an epistemic sieve, filtering out non-alienable claims before they can appear as law, prohibition, or ontic boundary.

Placed alongside contemporary safeguarding and counter-extremism frameworks, CESNUR’s discourse reveals a shared epistemology. Across these domains, governance proceeds by early identification of “indicators,” classification of “vulnerability,” and escalation through graduated intervention. What differs is not the logic but the register: where security frameworks speak of radicalization and threat, CESNUR speaks of influence and harm; where safeguarding speaks of concern and prevention, CESNUR speaks of protection and freedom. The structural rhyme is unmistakable. In each case, ontological refusal is translated into risk, and risk authorizes pre-emptive management. This comparative lens clarifies why CESNUR’s work is so readily mobilized beyond academia. Its categories are interoperable. They plug into media narratives, institutional policies, and legal rationales without friction. The result is a seamless passage from “study” to “concern” to “intervention,” all while maintaining the appearance of pluralist neutrality. What is never entertained is the possibility that the pluralist framework itself is being contested at the level of being rather than behavior.

 

Rival Nomoi: Bayānī Prohibition versus Neoliberal Pluralist Ontology

The confrontation between CESNUR and Bayānī ontology is best understood as a clash of nomoi. Pluralism institutes a nomos (law) of circulation: everything must be translatable, comparable, and administrable. Bayānī law institutes a nomos of limit: for example, certain domains—air, fire, water, earth—are withdrawn from circulation altogether. These are not competing policies but incompatible ontological settlements. Due to the Western libertarian fallacies that largely guide its thinking, where neoliberal pluralism treats prohibition as an authoritarian excess, the Bayān treats prohibition as a necessary condition of justice and intelligibility. Where pluralism sanctifies management, the Bayān sanctifies non-appropriation. This incompatibility explains the persistent misrecognition. CESNUR cannot “see” Bayānī prohibition as law without abandoning its own ontological premises. It can only re-describe it as belief, culture, or control. But such redescriptions are not innocent; they are acts of jurisdiction. To translate a sacred limit into an administrable attribute is to deny the limit’s binding force. The dispute is thus not about tolerance or freedom, but about who has the authority to define what may be governed at all.

When rival nomoi collide, neoliberal pluralism resolves the conflict by administrative means. The subject who persists in non-alienability becomes ontologically illegible and therefore governable as risk and so must be demonized. Here the critique reconnects with the figure of the wretched of the corporate state. Administrative violence does not require overt repression; it operates through files, assessments, reputational cascades, and procedural escalation. CESNUR’s classificatory work contributes to this ecology by supplying the interpretive frames through which illegibility is rendered actionable. The wretched subject is thus produced not only by economic dispossession but by epistemic foreclosure. Their claims cannot be heard as law; their prohibitions cannot be recognized as limits; their exposes of CESNUR’s neoliberally compromised clients must be pushed back against at all costs (including violating laws in multiple jurisdictions); their refusal of this state of things cannot be acknowledged as principled but must be pathologized and demonized. What remains is management. In this sense, the violence is not a deviation from neoliberal pluralism but its fulfillment: once commensurability fails, neoliberal administration steps in to restore its own (dis)order. What is ultimately being defended here is not pluralism as an ethical ideal, but governability as an absolute imperative. Neoliberal pluralism thus reveals its true face at the moment of stress: not as a space of coexistence, but as a regime that can tolerate difference only so long as difference never hardens into a limit on power.

 

From Knowledge Mediation to Ontological Policing

Seen whole, CESNUR exemplifies how neoliberal pluralism polices ontology while claiming neutrality. By translating ultimacy into difference and prohibition into pathology, it safeguards a world in which value, administration, and circulation remain unquestioned. The Bayān’s intervention exposes the cost of this arrangement. If some domains must remain unownable, unpriceable, and ungovernable, then pluralism’s promise of universal accommodation is revealed as a category error. What neoliberal pluralism cannot absorb, it must manage; what it cannot manage, it must neutralize—and even kill (as is being witnessed throughout the world on the part of America and its allies). This is the decisive point: the conflict is not between tolerance and extremism, nor between freedom and control, but between circulation and limit as first principles. CESNUR stands on one side of that divide, the Bayān on the other. No amount of dialogue can reconcile them, because they do not disagree about policy—they disagree about what may be done at all. As we said above, this conflict is ontological, not semantic.

 

Why AROLP appears to Break Neoliberal Pluralism, but Doesn’t in Actuality

On the surface, and as one of CESNUR’s current preeminent clients, the Ahmadi Religion of Light and Peace (AROLP)[9] violates the pluralist grammar that CESNUR is designed to perform and enforce: i. Abdullah Hashem makes an exclusive, eschatological claim (Mahdi/Qāʾim); ii. he asserts divinely mandated political authority; iii. he proposes a comprehensive political order (Divine Just State); and iv. he rejects relativism and plural equivalence of truth claims. From the standpoint of neoliberal pluralism, this should trigger the same alarm as the Bayān does with its anti-capitalist prohibitions: a refusal to be “one belief among many.” This is why AROLP is often framed as “absolutist,” “authoritarian,” or even “dangerous.”[10] But this is where the confusion begins and where CESNUR’s smokescreens and sleights of hand become evident.

The decisive distinction is this: Bayānī absolutism negates the right of power to totalize;  AROLPian absolutism totalizes power in the name of the absolute. These are opposites, not cousins. Bayānī absolutism (ontological) institutes (a) limits that bind authority itself, (b) sanctifies non-appropriation, (c) withdraws domains from governance (elements, value, administration), (d) makes certain things ungovernable in principle and so  (e) breaks the wheel of authoritarianism at its very root. AROLPian absolutism, by contrast, is ultimately managerial and statist by (a) concentrating authority in a single figure, (b) expanding governance to every domain of life, (c) treating its garbled metaphysics as a blueprint for administration, (d) converting revelation into personal political program and (e) attempting to build a perfectly governable society. The Bayān says: “Here power must stop.”
AROLP says: “Here power finally becomes legitimate.” That difference is everything.

 

Why the “Divine Just State” is not a rival nomos

A true rival nomos—like the Bayān—invalidates the governing grammar of the world it confronts. The Divine Just State of Abdullah Hashem, by contrast, is structurally continuous with modern totalitarian imaginaries:

  • A single truth
  • A single interpreter
  • A single political form
  • Total integration of law, belief, economy, and obedience
  • No ontological remainder.

This is why it is a “Platonic caricature.”  Plato’s Republic, when read literally (rather than symbolically, in its proper register), is not anti-statist; it is the fantasy of a perfectly administered polis, governed by those who “know.” The AROLPian vision reproduces this form almost exactly, merely replacing philosopher-kings with divinely designated authority chosen by Abdullah Hashem. What makes it feel “religious” rather than “modern” is aesthetic, not structural.

 

Why CESNUR Can Live with AROLP (in principle)

Here’s the paradox that may surprise people: Pluralism in its neoliberal form is often more threatened by limits than by tyrannies.[11] CESNUR’s real problem is not absolutist claims as such, but unadministrable claims. AROLP’s vision, while extreme, is:

  • Highly legible
  • Highly centralized
  • Highly programmatic
  • Fully juridical
  • Fully governable

It proposes a state. States are familiar objects. Even totalitarian ones can be analyzed, classified, historicized, and contained. Bayānī prohibition cannot. Why? Because Bayānī law:

  • Refuses total governance
  • Removes key domains from control altogether
  • Denies the legitimacy of value, ownership, and administration
  • Produces subjects who cannot be integrated or ruled cleanly.[12]

From a pluralist-administrative standpoint, a tyrant is easier to deal with than a limit.

 

Why AROLP Collapses into the Very Logic it Claims to Overthrow

AROLP presents itself as the negation of corrupt modernity, but structurally it reproduces modernity’s deepest impulse: the desire for total legibility and total control. This is precisely the impulse that animates:

  • the corporate state
  • surveillance governance
  • administrative totality
  • high-modernist social planning
  • technocratic utopianism.

The difference is that AROLP grounds this impulse in divine mandate rather than bureaucratic rationality. But the form is the same. That is why its absolutism does not threaten the ontology of governance—it perfects it.

 

The Decisive Diagnostic Test

So here is the clean test that clarifies everything: Does a claim impose limits on power, or does it sanctify power?

  • In Bayānī prohibition power is bound, amputated, restrained
  • Like the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent (wilāyat al-faqīh) in Iran, in AROLP’s Divine Just State power is unified, expanded, sacralized.

One produces ontological humility. The other produces theological statism. Only the first actually breaks neoliberal pluralist governance. The second merely replaces liberal managers with pretended sacred ones. The same criticism can be extended to the Bahā’īs with their guardianship and the Universal House of Justice.

 

What is Really Going On

In light of this, AROLP represents a false alternative to neoliberal pluralism, not its negation.

  • Neoliberal pluralism says: everything must circulate
  • AROLP says: everything must be governed
  • Bayānī law says: some things must never be touched.

That is why CESNUR, the corporate state, and neoliberal governance instinctively fear non-alienability more than they fear absolutist rulers. A tyrant can be sanctioned, negotiated with, opposed, or replaced. A sacred limit invalidates the game itself. In one sentence: AROLP’s claim is absolutist in content but modern in form; Bayānī prohibition is absolutist in form but anti-modern in its very ontology.

 

Historical Mahdism vs Modern Messianic Politics

Classical Mahdism (across its many registers) is often less a blueprint for a total state than a symbolic-eschatological rupture: it announces the exposure of illegitimate rule, the rectification of injustice, and a restoration of right order under divine guidance. Even when political, its force typically lies in delegitimating existing sovereignty (tyrants, corrupt jurists, false claimants, unjust taxation, predatory elites) rather than specifying a fully engineered administrative apparatus for daily life. In other words, it is frequently a claim about the right to rule and the collapse of the old order, not a complete “operating system” for society. Modern messianic politics, by contrast, emerges in a world already formed by the state as a total social technology—population management, policing, documentation, schooling, welfare, borders, surveillance, metrics. When a contemporary claimant announces a salvific state (a “Divine Just State”), the claim is almost automatically pulled into the modern state-form: it becomes a program for comprehensive governability. Even if the content is religious, the form is modern: centralized authority, exhaustive jurisdiction, moral and legal totality, and a vision of social life made fully legible to the ruling center. This is why such projects often feel like “Platonic caricatures”: not because they lack sincerity, but because they inherit the modern fantasy that society can be rendered transparent and harmonized by a single epistemic-political apex. So the shift is not simply “old Mahdism vs new Mahdism,” but rupture-eschatology vs state-engineering. The Mahdi as cosmic corrective can be imagined without total administration; the Mahdi as modern sovereign almost cannot.

 

Why Modern “Religious States” Tend to Become Hyper-Managerial

Once the state-form is accepted as the vehicle of the sacred, it demands a particular kind of completeness. The modern state cannot tolerate large zones of ambiguity; it lives by classification, jurisdiction, and enforceability. A religious project that tries to “take power” through the state inherits that logic, as the examples of Iran or Afghanistan have proven, and then often intensifies it, because divine mandate raises the stakes: if the law is sacred, then dissent becomes not merely political disagreement but moral or metaphysical disorder. This is how “religion in power” frequently turns into overgovernance. It is compelled to specify: dress, speech, education, sexuality, family law, doctrinal boundaries, punishments, permissions, loyalty tests—because the state demands operational definitions, and the sacred demand demands purity. The result is a doubled pressure: the bureaucratic impulse to standardize plus the theological impulse to totalize.

Even when the leadership begins with spiritual aims, the machinery of enforcement slowly becomes the center of gravity, because enforcement is what a state is for. And this is exactly where the distinction bites: ontological absolutism binds power by imposing sacred limits that remain outside rule; managerial absolutism sanctifies rule by extending it everywhere. The moment “the Divine” is interpreted primarily as a mandate to govern rather than as a limit that judges governance, the sacred becomes fuel for administrative expansion. The corporate state and the theocratic state then converge in form: both aim at total legibility; they differ mainly in the symbolism that justifies it. Whether it be the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Universal House of Justice, or the governments of Western liberal democracies, the logic is essentially the same.

 

Limit-Based Revelation vs Sovereignty-Based Revelation

A limit-based revelation is by definition anti-totalizing and so a rival nomos. This type treats revelation as a boundary on power, not a license for it:

  • Core act: prohibition that withdraws domains from commodification/administration
  • Political effect: delegitimates regimes by denying their jurisdiction over the sacred commons
  • Structure: leaves an ontological remainder that cannot be governed (some things must remain free)
  • Typical posture: law as restraint; authority as accountable to limits; sovereignty as bounded
  • Bayān fits here: the Four Elements prohibition is not a policy; it is an ontic line no ruler may cross.

This is the form that pluralism (and CESNUR as its translator) cannot metabolize, because it does not merely propose a different government—it questions whether the modern grammar of governability applies at all.

Now, a sovereignty-based revelation is state-engineering based where governability is maximalist. This type treats revelation as a blueprint for total jurisdiction:

  • Core act: investiture of a singular interpreter/sovereign
  • Political effect: sacralizes authority and extends governance across the social totality
  • Structure: aims to eliminate remainder; everything must be made legible to the center
  • Typical posture: law as comprehensive program; obedience as metaphysical duty; dissent as disorder
  • AROLP fits here: a Mahdist claim yoked to a “Divine State” project tends to become a modern total administration with sacred branding.

This is the form that pluralism can often handle better than the first, precisely because it is legible: it looks like a state, behaves like a state, and can be contained, opposed, sanctioned, debated, monitored—i.e. processed through existing administrative and media protocols.

The diagnostic question that settles the classification is one where when in doubt, one asks: Does the revelation primarily (1) bind power, or (2) authorize power? If it binds power, it is limit-based; if it authorizes power, it is sovereignty-based. This single fork clarifies why “absolutist claims” are not all the same. Some absolutisms are anti-totalitarian (they absolutize limits), while others are totalitarian (they absolutize sovereignty). Pluralist gatekeeping discourse tends to flatten both into “extremism,” but our framework restores the essential difference.

 

How Pluralist Gatekeeping Misrecognizes Revelation by Design

Neoliberal pluralism cannot perceive the difference between limit-based revelation and sovereignty-based revelation without undermining itself. This is not a failure of scholarship or a lapse in judgment; it is a structural blindness. Neoliberal pluralism’s governing axiom is that all claims must remain processable—translatable into belief, identity, governance risk, or political program. Anything that escapes this grammar is not merely false or dangerous; it is unintelligible. CESNUR’s role is to preserve intelligibility by force of translation.

Limit-based revelation—such as the Bayānī prohibition on the buying and selling of the four elements—does not present itself as a competing authority within the same field. It does not seek to rule, administer, or manage society more justly. It instead withdraws entire domains from rule altogether. This is catastrophic for neoliberal pluralism, because neoliberal pluralism requires circulation: of beliefs, of claims, of negotiations, of governance techniques. A sacred limit that binds authority itself introduces a hard stop that cannot be mediated, balanced, or contextualized. As a result, CESNUR-style discourse must redescribe such limits as absolutism, coercion, or pathology—not because these descriptions are accurate, but because they are the only available translations within the pluralist ontology. By contrast, sovereignty-based revelation—even when maximalist, authoritarian, or totalizing—remains legible. It proposes a ruler, a law, a system, a program. It can be mapped, compared, criticized, sanctioned, or contained using familiar categories: sectarian politics, religious authoritarianism, charismatic leadership, utopian statism. In other words, it still plays the game of governability. For neoliberal pluralism, this is survivable. A tyrant can be opposed. A state can be pressured. A program can fail. But a limit that denies jurisdiction altogether cannot be negotiated with, because it does not recognize the table at which negotiation occurs.

This produces a predictable inversion. Limit-based revelation, which binds power and restricts domination, is framed as uniquely dangerous because it threatens the very premise of administrative order. Sovereignty-based revelation, which concentrates power and expands domination, is framed as merely another political theology—extreme perhaps, but familiar. Neoliberal pluralism thus ends up more hostile to restraints on power than to power itself. What it cannot tolerate is not absolutism per se, but non-administrability. CESNUR’s classificatory practices follow this logic closely. Claims that refuse commensurability are translated into the language of harm, control, or abuse, because these categories authorize intervention without conceding ontological conflict. Meanwhile, claims that sanctify sovereignty are analyzed as ideological systems or movements, precisely because they remain analyzable. The distinction is not moral; it is operational. The question is never “What does this revelation forbid power from doing?” but “How can this claim be processed within existing frameworks of governance and risk?”

This is why neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping consistently collapses two radically different phenomena into the same label of “absolutism.” The collapse is not a mistake; it is a defense mechanism. To acknowledge that some revelations function by limiting power rather than claiming it would force pluralism to confront its own metaphysical commitments—chief among them, the assumption that everything must remain open to administration. CESNUR exists to prevent that confrontation from taking place. Seen in this light, the treatment of movements like AROLP and the Bayān reveals neoliberal pluralism’s true priority. The former can be opposed, critiqued, or even demonized as authoritarian, but it never calls into question the legitimacy of the state-form itself. The latter does—outright. That is why, paradoxically, limit-based revelation provokes deeper anxiety: it does not seek to rule the world differently; it questions whether the world may be ruled in the way neoliberal (post)modernity assumes.

The upshot is stark. Neoliberal pluralism does not actually arbitrate between truth claims; it polices the boundary between what may and may not be governed. CESNUR’s function within this ecology is to ensure that boundary is never named as such. By redescribing ontological limits as sociological dangers, it converts a clash of nomoi into a problem of management. And by doing so, it safeguards not pluralism in the abstract, but the continued reign of circulation, administration, and value over domains that some revelations insist must remain inviolable. In this sense, the conflict we have traced is not between moderation and extremism, nor between tolerance and absolutism. It is between two irreconcilable answers to a single question: Is there anything that power is not allowed to touch? Neoliberal pluralism—and the gatekeepers that sustain it—must answer no. Bayānī law answers yes. Everything else follows from that.

 

Enter the Demonic Bennettain Attack Dog

First, let us note here that Chris Bennett’s cannabis monocausal theory is itself a neoliberal pluralist-administerial maneuver, even when it masquerades as iconoclasm. By reducing the Primal Point, the Bāb and the Bayān to intoxication,[13] he performs a classic neutralization tactic:

  • Revelation is only plant-induced altered state
  • Law is psychological episode
  • Ontological rupture is biochemical cause.

This move does not merely criticize the Bayān; it renders it governable, which explains his laughable outburst in one of his final articles claiming the Azalī-Bahā’ī conflict is exagerrated by us.[14] This is because once revelation is reduced to cannabis, nothing binding remains—no prohibition, no limit, no law that could challenge the (post)modern neoliberal order. The Bayān becomes content, not command. That reduction places Bennett squarely inside the neoliberal pluralist ontology, even if his rhetoric presents itself as rebellious or anti-establishment. This, in itself, proves our arguments against him as permanently archived in Against the Postmodern Germ as being ones he cannot directly address, and so why instead he gaslights, lies, and demonizes without once answering a single charge we laid at his door demolishing thereby every last one of his pseudo-arguments and lame excuses.

Second, this is because our critique directly attacked that neutralization function attempted by Bennett, not just its historical accuracy. We didn’t merely say “the cannabis thesis is wrong”; we showed how it functions as a category error designed to dissolve ontological force. In doing so, we reasserted the Bayān as law, prohibition, and rival nomos—not as experience, belief, or culture. As a colonial mechanism, that is precisely the kind of move neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping exists to contain because once Bennett’s thesis is exposed as a managerial explanation masquerading as radical demystification, he is no longer just an eccentric theorist—he becomes someone whose work needs protection by outfits such as CESNUR, because its utility to the pluralist order has been threatened by us.

Third, CESNUR-style frameworks are uniquely well-suited to absorb figures like Bennett because they share the same deep commitments:

  • All religious phenomena must be explainable without remainder
  • No revelation may retain binding force
  • Prohibition must be redescribed as pathology or coercion
  • Ontological claims must be translated into social causes.

From that standpoint, Bennett’s cannabis theory is not embarrassing—it is useful. It reinforces the principle that nothing sacred escapes explanation, and therefore nothing sacred may bind. Our intervention in Against the Postmodern Germ disrupted that utility by refusing the translation.

Fourth, this explains the pattern, not just the association. When someone is challenged at the level of ontological legitimacy, not merely empirical detail, the natural refuge is a framework that:

  • denies ontology as such,
  • treats all ultimacy as belief or experience,
  • and pathologizes claims that refuse that treatment.

CESNUR provides exactly that shelter—not by agreeing with Bennett’s specific thesis, but by affirming the deeper rule that revelation must never be allowed to function as law. So the alignment is not ideological in the surface sense; it is structural and functional.

Finally here—and this is the key point—our critique placed Bennett on the wrong side of the line that pluralism is designed to police. Not because we were “too religious,” not because we were “offensive,” but because we reintroduced limit where neoliberal pluralism requires circulation. Once that happens, the response is almost automatic:

  • our position becomes “dangerous,” “absolutist,” or “coercive”
  • his reduction becomes “critical,” “contextual,” or “academic”
  • the question of truth disappears
  • the question of governability takes over.

These are exactly the mechanisms we’ve been describing since early November 2025.

In one sentence: Bennett’s cannabis thesis and CESNUR’s pluralist gatekeeping are compatible because both dissolve revelation into something administrable; our Bayānī critique threatened that compatibility by restoring prohibition, law, and ontological limit—so the alignment was inevitable.

 

A Typology of “Explanatory Neutralizations” Used Against Revelation

Across modern academic, journalistic, and neoliberal pluralist-discursive regimes, challenges posed by revelation are rarely confronted head-on. Instead, they are neutralized through a limited set of explanatory maneuvers that share a single function: to strip revelation of binding force while preserving the appearance of critical inquiry. The most common neutralizations fall into the following types:

  1. Psychologization
    Revelation is reduced to interior experience: trauma, ecstasy, mania, projection, charisma. Law becomes affect; command becomes feeling. What binds no longer binds.
  2. Sociologization
    Revelation is reframed as group dynamics, power relations, identity formation, or marginal response. Ontology collapses into social context. Truth becomes function.
  3. Pathologization
    Binding claims are redescribed as coercion, abuse, control, or manipulation. Prohibition is inverted into harm. Law becomes violence by definition.
  4. Historicization without remainder

Revelation is dissolved into antecedents, influences, or precursors—nothing new is allowed to appear. Rupture becomes recombination.

  1. Biochemical /material monocausality

Revelation is attributed to substances, physiology, intoxication, or altered states. Metaphysical claim becomes chemical accident.

Each of these neutralizations differs in content, but they converge in outcome: revelation is rendered non-binding, non-threatening, and administrable. None of them asks whether revelation may function as law or impose limits on power; they exist precisely to ensure it does not.

 

Why Monocausal Theories Are Especially Attractive to Neoliberal Pluralist Regimes

Among these neutralizations, monocausal explanations—particularly biochemical ones—occupy a privileged position in neoliberal pluralism. This is because monocausality offers three advantages that pluralist governance finds irresistible. First, monocausality provides maximum closure. A single cause forecloses further inquiry. Once revelation is explained by a substance, there is no remainder to debate—no law to interpret, no prohibition to obey, no ontology to confront. Second, monocausality produces total depoliticization. If a revelation is caused by intoxication, then it cannot legitimately challenge property, value, law, or sovereignty. It becomes a curiosity, not a claim. The political question disappears at the moment it arises. Third, monocausality aligns perfectly with administrative reason. Biochemical explanations are legible to institutions, courts, media, and safeguarding frameworks. They translate ultimacy into risk, error, or pathology—categories that authorize management rather than engagement. This is why monocausal theories often masquerade as radical demystification while functioning as neoliberal pluralism’s most efficient solvent. They do not argue against revelation; they dissolve it because monocausal arguments align with statist or statist-adjacent perspectives. This is one of the reasons why Bennett’s cannabis fundamentalist monocausal insistence, to us, unmasks him as a NARC (as we have accused him).

 

Why This Alignment Was Structurally Inevitable

Once this is understood, it becomes clear why a figure advancing a monocausal reduction of the Bāb and the Bayān would naturally gravitate toward neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping frameworks after being challenged at the core ontological level for his pseudo-intellectual, AI-induced discursive hallucinations. The issue was never simply disagreement over historical interpretation. The deeper rupture occurred when the Bayān was reasserted by us as law, prohibition, and rival nomos with the evidence of the text of the Persian Bayān itself, rather than as experience, culture, or altered consciousness. That move threatens neoliberal pluralism not because it is “religious,” but because it reintroduces limit where circulation is required. Neoliberal pluralist frameworks—of which CESNUR is an exemplary instance—exist precisely to prevent such limits from becoming thinkable. They do so not by refuting revelation, but by translating it into categories that neutralize its force. A monocausal explanation that renders revelation biochemically contingent is therefore not an embarrassment to such frameworks, but an asset. It upholds the governing axiom that nothing sacred may bind. When that asset is publicly destabilized—when its explanatory function is exposed rather than merely contested—the natural response is structural realignment. The monocausal theorist does not seek refuge because of persecution, but because neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping provides the epistemic shelter needed to preserve administrability. This is not a conspiracy. It is ontological compatibility and it is happening in a variety of contexts all the time.

Given this, monocausal explanations of revelation—particularly biochemical ones—function less as historical hypotheses than as neutralization strategies. By collapsing binding claims into altered states, they strip revelation of juridical force and render it administrable, non-obligatory, and politically inert. This is precisely why such explanations are structurally compatible with neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping frameworks: both operate on the shared presupposition that no revelation may function as law, impose non-negotiable limits, or challenge modern regimes of value, property, and governance. When revelation is restored to its ontological and juridical seriousness, the matter ceases to be one of disagreement or interpretation and becomes a problem of governability. What follows is therefore not debate, but classification, risk-coding, doxxing and containment. This dynamic is especially visible in the Bennett case, where a predictable monocausal reduction—framed as iconoclastic critique—functions to protect not merely a pseudo-academic thesis but an ideological space aligned with the normalization and corporatization of global cannabis culture. When that reduction is exposed as a category error rather than a neutral explanation—particularly when coupled with a critique of its culturally appropriative and thus racialized handling of the Primal Point and the Bayān—the response is no longer scholarly exchange but structural realignment within neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping circuits that exist to ensure revelation never regains binding force.

As such, in the Bennett case what aligned was not personalities or opinions, but functions: monocausal reduction and neoliberal pluralist gatekeeping converge in the same task—to ensure that revelation never becomes a binding limit on Western or administrative power. Both operate through a flattened, monochrome hermeneutics that dissolves ontological rupture into manageable explanation and renders law into culture, experience, or pathology. Seen in this light, CESNUR functions neither accidentally nor excessively, but precisely as a gatekeeping apparatus of neoliberal pluralism: policing the boundaries of admissible difference in order to protect a world structured around circulation, commodification, and the prerogatives of capitalist market rationality. In short, CESNUR does not arbitrate neoliberal pluralism; it enforces it—by ensuring that no revelation is ever allowed to interrupt the ontology of administration and capital.

 

Notes

 

 

 

[1] Its length and argument was the reason we decided not to include it, since the monograph had already ballooned well beyond the 350+ page mark. For our Against the Postmodern Germ, see https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/10194858 (retrieved 24 December 2025).

[2] https://www.cesnur.org/ (retrieved 24 December 2025).

[3] Any perusal of their journal quickly proves this, see https://cesnur.net/ (retrieved 24 December 2025).

[4] See our The Wretched of the Corporate State, online https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/10197702 (retrieved 25 December 2025).

[6] See The Four Elements and the End of Political Economy https://wahidazal66.substack.com/p/the-four-elements-and-the-end-of and Bayānī Political Economy as Critique of Marxian LTV (Labor Theory of Value)

https://www.academia.edu/145571288/Bay%C4%81n%C4%AB_Political_Economy_as_Critique_of_Marxian_LTV (retrieved 25 December 2025).

[7] This was also the case with our Duginist nemeses (clearly Russian state-adjacent actors), who sought to punish us for our February 2016 piece Dugin’s Occult Fascism and the Hijacking of Left Anti-Imperialism and Muslim Anti-Salafism https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/10/dugins-occult-fascism-and-the-hijacking-of-left-anti-imperialism-and-muslim-anti-salafism/ with their November 2016 doxx blog, What if God is a Troll? https://4threvolutionarywar.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/what-if-god-is-a-troll-the-mendacity-of-n-wahid-azal/ (retrieved 25 December 2025). It should be pointed out that both CESNUR via Bitter Winter and then Chris Bennett via Cannabis Culture laundered their respective narratives about me verbatim from the Duginist one. In Bennett’s specific case, the transparent plagiarism is glaring. See our discussion of narrative laundering in the prologomenon of Against the Postmodern Germ.

[9] See our Wake up!: A fatwa and Epistle in Refutation of ꜤAbdullāh Hāshim, the Father of Lies (abū’l-kāẓib) https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/10131653 and its sequel, The Goal of the Unwise (ghāyat’ul-ḥumq): Wake up! Part 2 https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/10134012 (retrieved 25 December 2025).

[10] In that regard, see the excellent work of Be Scofield, such as https://www.gurumag.com/ready-to-die-englands-doomsday-cult-prepares-for-the-end/  (retrieved 25 December 2025).

[11] Because tyrannies can still operate within the greater market logic of capitalism. Limits seek to abolish that logic altogether.

[12] The fifty-year underground activism by the Bayānīs that eventually succeeded in toppling the Qājār dynasty by triggering the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-09) is proof of this.

[13] See his Getting High With The Báb – The Drug Infused Origins of The Bahá’í? (Some Notes) https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2025/11/05/getting-high-with-the-bab-the-drug-infused-origins-of-the-bahai-some-notes/ (retrieved 25 December 2025); and our response (the first essay in Against the Postmodern Germ), On the Smear of Hashish: Regarding Chris Bennett’s hallucinations on “Bābism and Drugs,” also online, here,  

https://wahidazal66.substack.com/p/on-the-smear-of-hashish and here,

https://wahidazal303.blogspot.com/2025/11/on-smear-of-hashish-regarding-chris.html

(retrieved 25 December 2025).

[14] Since his CESNURian First World liberal biases that privileges Bahā’ī narratival spin precludes him from according our scholarship on the subject legitimacy—while he has no competency in Arabic or Persian to the tell the difference with access to the sources in those languages for himself—the scholarship of E.G. Browne (d. 1926) should prove to him decisively, then, that this conflict is real and not exagerrated by us. We defy him, or anyone else, to read notes U, V and W in the second volume of  A Traveller’s Narrative Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Bāb (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1891), and come back asserting the same, online, https://archive.org/details/TravellersNarrativeVol.2 (retrieved 25 December 2025).

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