A warning from C.S. Lewis

Mark Studdock has become something of an archetype in our day, with many imitating his journey from darkness to light. Who, you ask, is Mark Studdock? He is a character invented by C.S. Lewis--a young professor at the United Kingdom’s Bracton College with ambitions of joining an elite cadre of culture-shapers promising a better world, an organization known as the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E). Studdock, of course, was born not in the United Kingdom, but in the literary imagination of Lewis. He is a protagonist of Lewis’s brilliant book entitled That Hideous Strength.

Why has the fictional character of Mark Studdock become an archetype of our age, even for those who have never heard of him? His story explains our age. His college is a microcosm of today’s Western world. There is the old guard, ever on “the wrong side of history,” clinging to their traditions to obstruct the noble plans of Bracton’s “Progressive Element.” (This Progressive Element is essentially what Jonathan Haidt has described as “Social Justice University” in which the telos of education is not truth, but social change.)

To gain entry into the progressive circle at N.I.C.E. Studdock must receive his re-education into their new orthodoxy. As his mentor Professor Frost explains, “That whole system of instinctive preferences, whatever ethical, aesthetic, or logical disguise they wear, is to be simply destroyed.” Studdock’s re-education included time served in “The Objective Room.” This room was deviously designed as “the first step [in] the process whereby all specifically human reactions were killed in a man.” Its ceiling showcased a logic-defying pattern of dots in asymmetric arrangements. The walls featured grotesque surrealist paintings alongside pictures of familiar religious themes, each with a profane or sacrilegious twist. The surroundings remind Studdock of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate.”

We in the West have been thrown into an “Objective Room.” The N.I.C.E. training of our day is administered in university classrooms, mainstream media outlets, corporate trainings, and propaganda from the entertainment industry. What “instinctive preferences” and “human reactions” must be eliminated by the N.I.C.E. powers of our day?

…The deep sense that there’s something beautifully complimentary, life-giving, wholesome about male-female monogamous marriage. The N.I.C.E. elites believe that such old-fashioned bigotry must be undermined with images of polyamory, celebrations of extreme promiscuity, and the notion that marriage can easily be redefined as a husband-optional or wife-optional institution without losing anything precious.

…The clear acknowledgement that a man is an adult human male and a woman is an adult human female. N.I.C.E. agents have crafted a new lexicon, including “birthing persons,” “menstruating individual,” “cissupremacy,” and more, while re-educating us that “offensive” and “othering” terms like “mom and dad,” “girlfriend,” and “boyfriend” must be avoided.

… The moral conviction that prejudging people based on their skin tone is wrong. N.I.C.E. has gone to great lengths to teach the dogmas of CRT and DEI that individuals should be seen and treated first and foremost on the basis of their intersectional identity group-status. The melanin (or lack thereof) in an individual’s skin cells becomes the basis for distinguishing between the corporate guilt-bearing oppressors and the morally authoritative oppressed.

C.S. Lewis’s striking literary brilliance so powerfully captures the journey many are now experiencing. Says Lewis,

“As the desert first teaches a man to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else—something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’—apparently existed.… There it was—solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with.”

For many, like Mark Studdock, the heavy-handed attempts to sear our basic sense of biological, moral, and religious reality have backfired. Against the backdrop of the absurd – the marketing of the false, the evil, and the ugly as if it were the True, the Good, and the Beautiful – and the assault on common sense many people are finding a fresh sense of the “Normal.”

May millions more experience Mark Studdock’s conversion to sanity and flee their ambitions to win the favor of the “N.I.C.E” elites of our age.