Gullible?

Peter’s an interesting guy. At one time he was a member of Bermuda’s America’s Cup sailing team. He also was a friend of Teddy Tucker, the legendary treasure hunter who discovered over 100 shipwrecks in the waters surrounding that beautiful isle, including his most famous find, the “Tucker Cross,” an emerald studded 22-karat gold religious artifact recovered from the San Pedro, a Spanish galleon lost on Bermuda’s reefs in 1594.

Peter is also our favorite taxi driver. Whenever we visit the island (a place that holds special meaning to me given that my parents met there in 1946 and also because Linda and I honeymooned there), we make every effort to arrange his services.

Peter is a veritable encyclopedia when it comes to Bermuda. And a real raconteur. He knows every inch of the island and is highly conversant in politics, the economy, and local scuttlebutt. He’s also a lot of fun. Plus, he takes us where we want to go!

Back in October 2022, as we were traveling along South Road, which hugs the blue-green waters of the Sargasso Sea, he asked me about the political situation in the U.S. After a somewhat less than optimistic assessment of our current circumstance, I commented on how, in my opinion, Americans tend to be too trusting.

“Gullible, you mean,” he rejoined.

“Well,” I began, a bit defensively, “Americans in general are very goodhearted people who find it difficult to believe that politicians and other cultural leaders would behave the way they do. They wouldn’t behave that way and so find it hard to fathom that anyone else would either.”

“Like I said, gullible,” he quipped. I had to laugh, conceding just how closely my description would fit any textbook definition. So, gullible it is.

As a case in point, I recently spoke with a relative who argued that the “woke” social phenomenon is really nothing more than an attempt to show respect for others. Good manners if you will.

I countered by saying that, despite its seemingly benign outward appearance, there’s a hidden agenda, and not a particularly attractive one at that.

One has to go back to the 1930s and the birth of Neo-Marxism via the Frankfurt School. As I’ve written before, these radical refugees from Hitler’s Germany concluded that the “pure” communism advocated by Marx and Engels simply would not work in the advanced capitalist West. So, rather than hoping to overturn the system through economic means, these Neo-Marxists would attempt revolutionary change through politics and culture. Same goal, different strategy.

The idea was to attack the beast not by means of an all-out frontal assault, which was doomed to fail, but stealthily, circuitously. The culture had to be systematically weakened, undermined gradually from within.

Thus “Critical Theory” was born, a strategy of relentlessly attacking the host culture’s weak points. This was to be accomplished, in part, by a Machiavellian scheme to “divide and conquer,” to set one group against the other – the exact opposite, I might add, of my relative’s presupposition.

The Frankfurt School was the first to advocate creating social division based on “race, class, and gender” (tropes at the core of current woke ideology).

First one had to identify those deemed “victims.” Then, by stitching together a wholly new coalition of disparate, self-identifying victim groups (a phenomenon we today call “intersectionality”), they would rise up in opposition to their common enemy, the “oppressor,” i.e., a fascistic, unjust America.

Of course, what they hoped to replace our admittedly imperfect society with has never been fully explained. Just tear down the “power” structures of society completely so we can rebuild it from scratch. But into what? Utopia, one can only assume.

Despite the Frankfurt School’s limited success at the time (outside of universities and among the intelligentsia), a revival of “cultural Marxism” bloomed in the mid-to-late 60s, earnestly embraced by young radical revolutionaries collectively known as the “New Left.” They made, it must be said, significant inroads.

As a case in point, I remember as a student at Yale Divinity School some years later, in the early 80s, being inundated with critical theory and its ancillary construct, the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an interpretative stance based on skepticism and mistrust not just of American society but Western Civilization as a whole, as well as historic Christianity.

Though I had no idea at the time of its intellectual origins (the Frankfurt School), much less its wider implications, I did have a visceral distrust of its distrust. It wasn’t so much the actual social issues we were supposed to care about that troubled me, or even the exaggerated importance ascribed to each, but a certain sweeping, amorphous, unspoken, underlying agenda – one that assumed revolutionary change as the key to the future. Cultural Marxism/Neo-Marxism/Critical Theory, that is, straight up.

In the ensuing years, however, this movement has taken a surprising, ironic turn. As my experience in divinity school attests, the New Left had moved from the streets into the elite establishment. What began, in other words, as a movement to take down the system, to defeat “the Man,” had become an integral part of that very same hated system!

The movement morphed as if on steroids following the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and, far more significantly, after the Global Financial Crisis in 2007-8, which ultimately resulted in the Occupy Wall St. protests of 2011.

At this point the governmental and corporate worlds realized that rather than repeatedly facing such hostile, coordinated, and effective opposition, cooptation might prove the better part of valor. It was, as it turned out, just the ticket!

Thus ESG, DEI, BLM, CRT, LGBTQ+, etc., was born (though borrowed, naturally enough, from the hothouse precincts of academia). The idea was to pretend to care about these issues by virtue signaling, developing a cynical rebranding of corporate and governmental identity, and throwing tens of millions of dollars to buy off the various groups. Then everybody would be happy. Problem solved.

Needless to say, the strategy proved wildly successful. With society’s elites having lulled its critics into complacent obedience, the man behind the curtain continues to pull all the levers. Worst of all, within this confused state of arranged distraction, we are continuously urged to fight each other over race, class, and gender while the ruling class is free to do whatever advances its interests.

On a related note, as I’ve written before, the mainline church continues to relentlessly grandstand about injustice and the need to “speak truth to power,” without any apparent recognition that they are part of the very power structure they claim to be fighting against (or are at least wannabes). Of course, the even greater irony is that this same power structure wants absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with them, God, or the church.

So, in general, while the old New Left sought to combat “the Man,” both Caesar and Mammon, today it habitually bends the knee to both, its blinkered adherents unwittingly functioning as “useful idiots,” a term Mirriam-Webster’s dictionary defines as “a naive or credulous person who can be manipulated or exploited to advance a cause or political agenda.”

Thus, ironically, what began as a bottom-up phenomenon to effect social change has become a seamless part of a mostly unchallenged, top-down Leviathan, of which they are but mere cogs in its wheel. Oddly, nobody much seems to notice.

That said, I still think it’s a good thing we Americans are such a goodhearted people. It says a lot about us, not least our Judeo-Christian heritage (whether we admit it or not). However, that same good heartedness can easily be exploited. If we’re not vigilent, “tolerance” becomes gullibility.

In the end, while we Christians are indeed called to be gentle as doves, we also are called to be wise as serpents.