Cast in modern terms, the problem Gnosticism addresses is best conceived in terms of the concept of “alienation.”
Start with the idea of “social pressure.” Social pressure has a great deal of power to affect a person’s sense of self-worth and meaning in life. People feel good about themselves and their lives when they are conforming to what society expects of them, and possess what society regards as standards of success. They have a harder time feeling good about themselves when they do not live up to such social standards.
Alienation happens when individuals feel that social pressure does not deserve this power that it has. Alienation in this sense is quite widespread in the US today. This shows in our admiration of people who flaunt their non-conformity, and in the use of “what society teaches” as something negative.
Gnosticism appealed to alienated individuals. But they analyzed the problem more in terms of a person’s own psychology and self-image. The power that society and social pressure has to affect my self-esteem depends on me letting my self-image be determined by whether I meet what counts as standards of success in my society. But of course this is the normal condition of most of mankind. It is immensely difficult to resist the power that social pressure has to determine one’s own sense of self and self-worth. This is exactly the difficult problem that Gnosticism addresses, and what makes Gnosticism a “salvation religion. Gnostic “salvation” would consist in freeing oneself from this power that social pressure has to determine your sense of self-worth. Unlike modern alienated individuals who typically express their alienation negatively by non-conformity and criticism of “society,” Gnostics offered a more positive alternative: developing a “higher” possibility inherent in one’s being, a possibility not recognized by most people, and identifying oneself with this higher self. The Gnostic message is a call to “wake up” to this higher possibility. This would not mean only changing one’s intellectual beliefs, something able to be done rather easily. It is quite difficult to actually free oneself from the power of social pressure, and live in the world in accord with a different self-image, as someone responsible to something “higher”. This requires an internal transformation difficult to achieve. But this is what Gnostic “salvation” would consist in.
This interpretation of Gnosticism in terms of “social pressure” is different from the more usual interpretation among scholars, which tends to understand the problem that Gnosticism addresses in terms of literal belief in a “good” “spiritual soul” (made of spiritual stuff) caught in a “bad” “material” world (made of material stuff). This is then associated with asceticism, refraining as much as possible from “material” pleasures such as sex, fine food, material comforts, and so on.
