The Paganism of Hasan Piker 

Earlier this year, far-left political commentator and internet personality Hasan Piker said what many on the progressive left now feel but rarely state so plainly. The Twitch streamer, currently on something of a mainstream intellectual tour, declared that “the fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century” and that he would choose Hamas over Israel every time.  

But in a recent sit-down interview with Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino for The New York Times, Piker went a step further. During the discussion, Piker said that the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was justified, that theft from corporations is virtuous and that “microstealing” from places like Whole Foods is not merely permissible but righteous. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations,” he said, “because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” On Thompson’s murder, he invoked German  philosopher Friedrich Engels: “The UnitedHealthcare CEO was guilty of ‘social murder,’ the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty … because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.”  

The predictable response has been to note Piker’s hypocrisy (as he is quite wealthy himself) or the precariousness of his political position. But a more serious problem lies not in the practical, but the philosophical: by rejecting an objective standard of law, Piker, and those who follow his logic, are not pioneering something new, but instead regressing to something very old—a pagan worldview that Western civilization was built, at great cost, to overcome. 

What is Western civilization? While many answers to this question have to do with political philosophy or culture, a different school of thought sees the Western conception of divinity as the foundation. Any understanding of God is not only crucial for religious practice but for shaping the individual, family, community, state, and civilization as well. In a 1968 essay entitled “Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom,” Frank Meyer wrote that “the significance of any civilizational order derives from the way in which it organizes the life and outlook of the individual persons who compose it in their relations to the universe in which they live—that is, in the way it relates the person to moral values, spiritual forces, the material environment, the other persons who make up the society.” Thus, the dawn of Western civilization, and what distinguished it from the ancient world into which it was born, hinged on a unique understanding of our cosmic order.  

Invoking the political philosopher Eric Voeglin, Meyer noted that the ancient world saw state and subject as part of a cosmological civilization. The ancient pagan empires “conceived of existence so tightly unified and compactly fashioned that there was no room for distinction and contrast between the individual person and the social order, between the cosmos and human order, between heaven and earth, between what is and what ought to be.” Today, we take for granted a divide between the natural and the divine, but the ancient world did not see things that way. The idea of the individual as separate from the state or as existing outside the divine order embodied by the ruler simply did not exist.   

The reason for this cosmological and totalizing worldview had to do with a particular understanding of transcendence, or with the absence of it. In the pagan imagination, the divine was not beyond nature; it was within it. The gods did not exist above nature; they were the personification of it.  

As a result, divinity was not defined by a moral perfection that existed outside our material existence but rather by power. The gods were gods not because they were more just, perfect or virtuous but because they could control the forces that men could not. They were often jealous, petty, and destructive, magnified versions of human beings rather than beings wholly unlike them. What made them worthy of worship was not absolute goodness but strength and domination.  

In a world without external transcendence and a worship of power, morality was readily determined by the concept that “might makes right.” Absent an external source of perfect goodness, there was no objective measure by which human behavior could be judged as “wrong.” Thus, the ancient world was brutal not by accident but by logic.  

All of this changed with the rise of Athens and Jerusalem. According to Meyer, out of “the contradiction between the inherent Hellenic awakening to the possibilities of a new state of being and the trammels of the inherited old with which the Greek philosophers wrestled … they created out of their struggles [the] first systematic intellectual projection of an independent relationship between free men and transcendent value.” That emergent perspective allowed for the idea of natural law to develop—the recognition that certain things are objectively good or bad for human beings by virtue of what we are (logos). At the same time, for the ancient Israelites, it was the revelation at Sinai that gave natural law its decisive form: a single, eternal, and benevolent God, external to the chaos of the cosmos, whose objective moral vision could not be bent by force of will. “Thou shalt not murder”—not because murder is socially inefficient or politically inconvenient, but because murder is wrong, always, without exception and without negotiation. Despite their distinctions, and even distinct views of God, the common denominator between the Greeks and Hebrews was an objective, teleological morality.  

As Robert R. Reilly writes in America on Trial, “the prephilosophical ancient world of tribes and cosmological empires was unsuitable for the development of constitutional rule … if man lives in a world of which he can make no sense, an irrational, magical world, he can choose only to surrender to fate or to despair.” For Aristotle and Aquinas, man’s end “is not located in man’s will or desires, but in a preexisting reality—in what is,” and so “while man can know what is good or evil, he does not have the prerogative to determine what is good or evil.” The equality of persons—including the right to life—flows from this view. In other words, the objective moral order is not a mere ornament of Western civilization; it is its very foundation. 

What makes Piker’s remarks so alarming is not just their immorality in practice but their epistemological brazenness: the open and proud rejection of the idea that morality exists at all as an objective category. According to Piker and other neo-pagans, if a corporation accumulates wealth at the expense of workers, the answer is no longer an appeal to justice but war, conducted by whatever means of resistance one can muster. Subjective grievance, backed by power, replaces moral argument entirely.  

It is telling that when asked whether society could withstand a proliferation of such logic, Piker welcomed the conclusion: “Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go.” Chaos is precisely the return of the ancient pagan worldview. Order, objectivity, natural law—these are the values neo-paganism rejects. And that is what makes this moment worth taking seriously.  

Piker is not an anomaly but part of an increasingly emerging worldview. The ideas he voices—that justice is whatever the aggrieved declare it to be, that violence against the “guilty” requires no objective standard of guilt—are increasingly common, and increasingly respectable. What looks like progressive politics is, at its root, a reversion to a pre-Western moral universe.  

The West was built on the belief that there is a truth about the good that no act of will can overturn. That belief is now openly contested. The question is whether we still have the vocabulary—and the conviction—to defend it. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.