Tuesday Obedience Training Cliff Notes – Open Commentaries

Who needs Hell when you have Davos?

Eighty years on from both the completion of C.S. Lewis’ classic science-fiction parable That Hideous Strength, and the Dumbarton Oaks Conference which led to the creation of the UN, have the worst totalitarian nightmares of Lewis’ imagination finally come to pass for real?  

Try to imagine a world in which democracy is wholly dead, having been replaced by its own deliberate inverted simulacrum, a surface-deep regime—an atheistic, science-worshipping, globalist technocracy—in which hideous non-human creatures tempt a fallen elitist ruling class into entering irrevocably into the satanic realm of post-humanity, facilitated by hubristic feats of industrial and mechanical engineering.

If this all sounds like something stolen from a science-fiction novel, then that’s because it is—the novel in question being 1945’s That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, which (publication schedules being what they are) he had actually finished writing some time prior to the end of WWII. It is a horrific and satirical prediction of what Lewis presciently perceived the post-war world most likely had in store for an unsuspecting humanity that naively thought democracy was about to triumph forever with the looming twin defeats of Germany and Japan: namely, a new form of ‘benign’ globalist dictatorship in disguise.

and this,

Thus, it could be said the wannabe post-humans of NICE in Lewis’ parable have already created a satanic, anti-Christian secular counterreligion of their own. This ‘religion’ comes in the shape of their progressive, Positivistic sociology and scientism. And it simply opens them up to subsequent even further temptation at the hands of the Macrobes, rather than the initial impulse for humanity’s new leaders to sin against creation coming from the demons as such. In his novel, Lewis puts it like this:

From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe … would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe of Tellus, would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen. 

RTWDT.