Knight Pawn
A Disturbance in the Force
One of the major projects of the 20th century was undertaken by elite-friendly social programmers such as Bernays and Lippmann, masters of propaganda and believers in the management of society and its opinions. They worked to remake the great unwashed of the West into mere consumers. Consumers of pre-packaged products: everything from food, entertainment, health, and political opinion. Consumers blissfully unaware of the slave populations of the third world and of the inhuman vision of their leaders. Consumers with little or no independent thought. Such visions brought forth literary responses like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.
The Abolition of Man by C.S.Lewis was published in between these two more celebrated dystopian master works of the mid twentieth century. Lewis, in three essays, calmly and logically demonstrate the utter moral degeneracy of these elite projects and reveals their goal to be one of dehumanisation in which the bulk of mankind will be reduced to some more primitive, less conscious state. Like Huxley and Orwell, Lewis also used fiction to tackle the same issues in his Space Trilogy (some discussion of this here,
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,5782.0.html)
The Abolition of Man can be found here as a PDF:
https://archive.org/stream/TheAbolitionOfMan_229/C.s.Lewis-TheAbolitionOfMan#page/n0/mode/2up
It is short at only 42 pages including appendix. It consists of the three essays: Men Without Chests, The Tao, and The Abolition of Man. In these, Lewis reduces to absurdity the notions that all higher ideas are merely subjective feelings; that moral relativity is a meaningless concept; and that any attempt to remake man into some improved, postmodern human will instead create a more primitive, coarser creature. Not an easy read, but its calmly scathing tone and prophetic clarity are remarkable.
The Abolition of Man by C.S.Lewis was published in between these two more celebrated dystopian master works of the mid twentieth century. Lewis, in three essays, calmly and logically demonstrate the utter moral degeneracy of these elite projects and reveals their goal to be one of dehumanisation in which the bulk of mankind will be reduced to some more primitive, less conscious state. Like Huxley and Orwell, Lewis also used fiction to tackle the same issues in his Space Trilogy (some discussion of this here,
http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,5782.0.html)
The Abolition of Man can be found here as a PDF:
https://archive.org/stream/TheAbolitionOfMan_229/C.s.Lewis-TheAbolitionOfMan#page/n0/mode/2up
It is short at only 42 pages including appendix. It consists of the three essays: Men Without Chests, The Tao, and The Abolition of Man. In these, Lewis reduces to absurdity the notions that all higher ideas are merely subjective feelings; that moral relativity is a meaningless concept; and that any attempt to remake man into some improved, postmodern human will instead create a more primitive, coarser creature. Not an easy read, but its calmly scathing tone and prophetic clarity are remarkable.
. My iPad downloaded from the original link but I didn't check it from Windows.
