The conspiratorial belief that massive hidden systems need to be exposed is gripping left and right.

‘W okeness” of all varieties, as my friend James Lindsay has noted, is a form of religious gnosticism.

What is gnosticism? Simply put, it is the idea that the material, visible world is an illusion — often a terrible one, designed to distract humans from reality with temptations like sex and false religion. Gnostic enlightenment involves learning to unsee the physical world, and instead focus on some deeper level of existence that underlies it like a net of tentacles: The path to this is most often thought to be a specific, Christ-centered or Book of the Dead–like system for pursuit of the True Reality.

Now, think about the Matrix films, and what the words “woke/awake,” “red-pilled,” “based,” and so forth actually mean.

Almost every prominent left-wing critical theory — and, today, more than a few right-wing equivalents — rests on the idea that what seem to most “normies” to simply be the uncomplicated and necessary workings of civilized society are in fact part of massive hidden systems of “oppression” or “power and dominance.” To give two archetypal popular examples: The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander argues that the American justice system is not actually just an essential tool for locking up rapists and woman-beaters — but that it is instead designed primarily to lock up black and Latino males and prevent revolution.

A similar mindset holds that the purpose of standardized tests is not to facilitate admission of the best students into college, but rather to keep poor people out. The entire, neutral-looking structure of society is a monstrous illusion, you see — its real purpose is to serve as cover for the cold goals of a carnivorous elite.

There are several prominent contemporary varieties of gnostic thinking. The most notable is the tradition that is associated with Marxism but is in fact traceable at least back to the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which sees the rich as the creators and maintainers of the outer world of maya — of illusion. When we strip away the crackpot economic theory and multi-page rants about widgets, the primary novel idea presented by communism is that facially neutral society is intentionally designed by the wealthy — the bourgeoisie — to benefit themselves while oppressing all other classes and “extracting” and “alienating” their labor.

Members of other groups in society may believe that they can become wealthy via talent and hard work, but this is most often made impossible, the theory goes. Even education is a system designed primarily to churn out good, docile, patriotic workers. As noted, this intellectual paradigm stretches back to a whole clot of radical French writers who lived a century or more before Marx: Rousseau himself once argued that property law is a sort of grand scam, where those who already have homes and land pass laws making it impossible for other more needy citizens to use them in any way.

Virtually every other sort of left-wing critical theory is a lower-IQ variant on Marxism, with “the rich” simply replaced as Final Boss Villain by someone else. In critical race theory, for example, the rich man has been replaced by the white man: Society is secretly structured to benefit Caucasians (“systemic racism”), and everything from dress codes to criminal laws exists to disadvantage people of color.

In radical feminism, the rich man has been replaced simply by the man: Society is structured to benefit XY people and oppress our XX sisters. Marriage, for example, is a patriarchal tool designed to let men exploit the “unpaid domestic labor” of women, and obtain access to unlimited sex. It goes on and on from there: “Queer theorists” claim that society is designed to advantage good-looking and “vanilla” straight people, and so forth.

And now, cometh the dissident right. Recent years have witnessed the onset of a new wave of conspiratorial gnosticism — but from the hard right. The basic Truman Show model of an illusory normal world puppet-mastered from behind the scenes by cartoonishly evil people remains almost identical. However, the groups allegedly responsible for it have changed.

Some diss-right writers, hailing from the “man-o-sphere,” contend that the group actually running the world is feminist women. The now-famous concept of “The Longhouse” refers to the idea that women — who now make up 52 percent of those holding professional and managerial positions, and roughly 80 percent of teachers — have been consciously feminizing Western societies, to such a point that their functionality or even survival is threatened.

Even less defensibly, other dissidents blame Christendom’s favorite historical target: the Jews. One of many recent viral Twitter/X threads passionately argued that the “common denominator” behind a whole series of unrelated historical events is “Israel” and her shadowy cabal of influential Jews. The catastrophes blamed on these Saturday-loving saboteurs included the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy, the assassination of JFK himself, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. About the same distance away from the mainstream, another rightist pundit — Paul Kersey — frequently speaks of the USA as “Black-run America.” Kersey, to be fair, has done so for a while, but many more people seem to be listening right now.

The big problem with all of this is that the Great Villain that gnostic thinking requires simply does not exist, at least in any modern capitalist country. It is true that rich people are more likely than poor folks to become the leaders who manage businesses and pass new laws, and that racism exists among all human populations — and majority groups tend by definition to be larger and more powerful than minority groups. But these baseline realities often turn out to have surprisingly little to do with the actual shape of society.

This is largely because of human diversity at the most important level: that of the individual. Directly contra the claims of critical theory, giant groups like “whites” or “minorities” or “the rich” are essentially never in 100 percent agreement on anything. In practice, wealthy Americans split their votes almost 50/50 between the more liberal Democrats and the more conservative Republicans, often give more money to the Dems, and pay most of the taxes that support America’s gigantic welfare system. Similarly, white liberals tend to be among the most absurdly left-wing of all Americans, and the real-world United States boasts a formal system of institutionalized affirmative action.

In addition to internal disagreements, there is a deeper “Sowellian” problem with the idea that systems are secretly run by particular groups for their own exclusive benefit. As the conservative eminence loves to point out, the membership of many or most powerful groups (“the rich,” “the young,” “the elderly,” “the childless,” “the homeowners,” “the urban”) changes year over year. Most hard-working Americans from an upper-middle-class background will be more-than-technically poor as college men and at-least-technically rich as married adults.

Such citizens may vote differently during those two eras, or vote consistently and in a moderate fashion the whole time, due to internal political beliefs: it’s hard to predict. Further, people of every major group interact with most of the others on a daily or weekly basis. Few girl dads or mothers of boys, almost certainly, want to make the lives of their own kids hell so that their “sex team” can score a few points in the gender wars.

The actual driving force behind the structure of functional human societies tends to be mundane, core needs that are shared everywhere. While the prejudices of Great Men or prominent groups can shape how these needs are addressed, it would be hard to think of a single modern state that does not have a standing army, police forces, a system of hospitals, colleges and schools, some form of paper or coined money . . . etc. The Christian apologist C. S. Lewis once noted that this is a good argument for objective morality: Societies disagree about issues such as the legality of alcohol, but it would be difficult to find one culture with norms optimized to glorify running away during war, or being foolish instead of smart.

What all of this means is that most human systems, like the use of armed police to enforce written laws, basically make sense. Very often, what the gnostic radical wants to tear down is not “oppression” but civilization itself. We normal taxpayers should universally reject this as a goal. There is obviously nothing wrong with purging racism of all kinds, or folly more generally, out of, say, corporate hiring or college admissions. But it is generally good to have civil rights laws and formalized hiring processes and canons of great books every college assigns: These concepts were not designed by evil people to oppress you.

Something to remember: If we start smashing up the mundane pillars of society, and returning to the old model of all against all, there is no reason for any particular citizen to expect his group to climb up out of the ashes victorious.