The following quote comes from the brilliant work of C. S. Lewis entitled
Screwtape Proposes a Toast. This is a timely message given that we live in an age where the "progressive" message is the dominant view among the mediums that shape culture in our day. This thinking is furthered by the media, the arts, the educational system as well as the government. All of the aforementioned mediums sing in concert their praise of this ideology. Virtually all news reporting comes from this ideological bent. Furthermore, this thinking is leading the modern university into intellectual bankruptcy because it seeks to create activists rather than thinkers. Progressive thinking takes as its mantra equality, but in reality, brings about something very destructive.
Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there
was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man
Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember,
only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the
individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it)
whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via
Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side) we easily
contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state….
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the
nose…. [T]hey should never be allowed to give this word a clear and
definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that
democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of
voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection
with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be
allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour”
means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will
preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to
them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely
for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is
connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated.
You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political
ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal…. As a result you can
use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most
degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get
him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of
self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be
universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you….
No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not
say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the
scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty
woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly
political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some
way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting,
writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to
accept.
And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of
superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently
he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority….
“They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”
Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by no means new. Under the
name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years. But
hitherto they always regarded it as the most odious, and also the most
comical, of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with
shame; those who were not gave it no quarter in others. The delightful
novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it
respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic.
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every
way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever
before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not
all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a
full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic….
They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals….
Meanwhile, as a delightful by-product, the few (fewer every day) who
will not be made Normal or Regular and Like Folks and Integrated
increasingly become in reality the prigs and cranks which the rabble
would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates
what it expects…. As a result we now have an intelligentsia which,
though very small, is very useful to the cause of Hell.
But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on
is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the
elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural,
social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy”
(in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once
done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?…
Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future
developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the
developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that
dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and
industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences
between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual
differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At
universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the
students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that
all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have
any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools,
the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and
mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that
children used to do in their spare time…. Whatever nonsense they are
engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase –
“parity of esteem”…. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class
may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma…by
being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered
to his own age group throughout his school career….
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you
has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for
not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows?
And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too
busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any
time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to
spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The
little vermin themselves will do it for us.
Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state
education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes,
designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class
who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have
their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides
linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an
inevitable effect of the spirit that says I’m as good as you.
This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the
overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers,
theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and
administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their
tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked
not long ago, “A democracy does not want great men.”
We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the
strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all
forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole
less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that
“democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like
Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have
for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.
For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads
to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of
the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl
or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes
every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a
nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is
placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at
all in public affairs, only one result is possible….
It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole
attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because
these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy.
You would almost wonder that even humans don’t see it themselves. Even
if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have
thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour
aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves
aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all
forms of government….
The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave states
are for us a means (besides, of course, being fun); but the real end is
the destruction of individuals. For only individuals can be saved or
damned, can become sons of the Enemy or food for us. The ultimate value,
for us, of any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual
anguish, treachery, hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I’m
as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic
societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state
of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment,
and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being
away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.
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