Will we lose what we don’t have?
For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. (1 Corinthians 14:33)
In 1965, the TV sitcom, Get Smart, starring Don Adams, Barbara Feldon, and Edward Platt, became a huge hit. Families loved it until was finally cancelled in 1970 after 138 episodes. In 1999, TV Guide ranked Maxwell Smart number 19 on its 50 Greatest TV Characters of All Time list.
Maxwell Smart was a secret agent for CONTROL, and his bumbling antics didn’t prevent him from defeating his arch nemesis, Ludwig Von Siegfried, (Bernie Kopell) who was a recurring villain, and the vice president in charge of public relations and terror at KAOS.
Get Smart’s creators, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, may have been on to something when they named their spy organizations CONTROL and KAOS. They didn’t exist as acronyms, so we are left to assume they represent a sort of metonymy for the good and orderliness of control, and for the evil opposite which is chaos. It makes you wonder if they knew something about the shape of things to come 58 years later.
Chaos is the perfect description of the social, political, and cultural construct we are living in today. Our national conversations are about—in random order—the disappearing border that separates us from Mexico; the normalization of transgender—a term that has become an endlessly relentless controversy for everyone, everyday; the threat of the US dollar losing its world reserve currency status; a seriously weakened US military and the concomitant rise of communist China; the loss of private property ownership and the concomitant disappearing middle class; and the stunning decline in church and faith affiliation and attendance. Our list could go on and on, because it’s far from complete.
Among the most insidious of tactics in this social warfare, however, is the cult of woke. In fact, just from the standpoint of bad ideology, going woke is the very definition of chaos.
There is a reason why this is so: it’s a case of cause and effect. It’s all going according to plan.
The term, according to Phil Boas writing for Arizona Republic, attributes it’s first usage by Black American blues musician Huddie (Lead Belly) Ledbetter in his 1930s recording of “The Scottsboro Boys,” a song about nine Black men falsely accused of raping two White women. “Best stay woke!” He tells his listeners. Tiffany Markham, writing in Medium, picks up the story describing its appropriation by activists to become the war cry of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the 2012 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Being woke is definitely not cool. Ironically, “…Like many phrases that capture a zeitgeist, [the spirit of the times] woke has a meaning that is ever evolving. It has now spread beyond its African-American roots, undergoing a process [that’s like] “semantic bleaching”: just as the word ‘terrible’ conveys hardly any terror today, the modern use of woke conveys less wokeness than it used to.”
Woke owes its intellectual roots to Marxism.
“Marxism is an ideology made fundamentally in opposition to liberalism,” explains Ryan Chapman (pictured) in The Intellectual Roots of “Wokeness.” Chapman is quick to explain that by liberalism, he means the liberalism that describes the principals of western civilization. To understand true, or classic liberalism, we must understand it to be the principals that essentially champion the freedom of the individual, while placing as few restrictions as possible on the freedom to think for ourselves, to speak for ourselves, to own property, or the right to a fair and speedy trial, among many other ideals. Liberalism used to advocate for liberty before the term was appropriated by the Leftists. This appropriation was by no means an accident.
The quintessential liberal text—the magnum opus of liberal texts—is the Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States of America. These rights need safeguarding. To see why Marxism was created, we must understand that liberalism can create the freedom to achieve as much as we desire, while others may be left to fall into the cracks. Says Chapman, “Marxists basically say that liberalism is a protection mechanism for oppressive behavior and the alternative that they put forward goes something like them saying freedom ends where oppression begins. The freedom that Karl Marx was concerned with was the freedom to own private property, and the oppression that Karl Marx was concerned with was class oppression.”
In a nutshell, the premise of liberalism was based on opportunity and freedom to pursue all the possibilities given to anyone. We would call this equality given to all of us by our creator. Marx believed that only those with class-consciousness could understand property owners were the oppressors and those without property were the oppressed. Western civilization however, found its most fulsome realization in the creation of the American republic. We were, and are, so radical a departure from all other forms of governance, that even 237 years after our Constitution’s ratification, it is still referred to as an experiment.
Throughout the twentieth century, Marxism created nothing but chaos, horrific wars, disruption, and loss of life—by the tens upon tens of millions. With Marxism, there can never be any conclusive realization for anything resembling equitable, sustainable governance. Because America holds the undeniable record for creating a mobilizing path to economic self-sufficiency and success, the vast majority of Americans have historically been blessed with a robust, decent, and honest middle-class. Yet, Marx hated the middle-class. Even so, when his disciples confronted the challenge a satisfied, prospering, American people posed, they knew they could not win the argument of class warfare. They needed another plan. Oppressed and oppressors had to be culled from the immutable conditions of race, sex, or religion. Marxist adherents set about creating divisions among an already satisfied populace. It’s mute testimony to the resilience of American economic and cultural supremacy that it required 90-years for them to achieve the chaos we now have.
From a Christian biblical worldview perspective, we should that know Marxism is a death-dealing belief system that will never prevail. But what, many will ask, do we do now? Many are suffering, most are deluded, confused, or worse, programmed to think, “It’s all okay,” or, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Regardless, the “woke” social permutation it must be said, is the most debased of them all. In a nutshell, the premise of liberalism was based on opportunity and freedom to pursue the desire to achieve the possible given to anyone. Woke confusion is, arguably, the most chaotic because it is designed to be. Historically, when the social construct of any civilization becomes as volatile as ours has clearly become, the power brokers—the elite who hold power—will move in to bring order and control. Historically, there is no other time or place that compares to this place and this time. America is not too big to fall, and if she falls, the fall will be very great indeed.
Who needs a Putin-style military invasion if our comfortable reality is replaced by a takeover of the very things we find so useful and essential like online banking, social media, or even air travel? Yes, this is another list that can go on and on. To better understand the danger we are facing, I recommend the new book, Dark Future by Glenn Beck and Justin Haskins, now available from Amazon.
As we become increasingly informed with new understanding of our situation, what should this passage from Isaiah mean to us now?
- How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” (Isaiah 52:7 NIV)
