So said CS Lewis, author of such works as The Chronicles of Narnia. In his A Reply to Professor Haldane Lewis he said
" Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
I must, of course, admit that the actual state of affairs may sometimes be so bad that a man is tempted to risk change even by revolutionary methods; to say that desperate diseases require desperate remedies and that necessity knows no law. But to yield to this temptation is, I think, fatal. It is under that pretext that every abomination enters. Hitler, the Machiavellian Prince, the Inquisition, the Witch Doctor, all claimed to be necessary. "
I have been thinking about these words a great deal in 2020 as we have seen elected Government leaders and officials telling us that being locked down and deprived of our rights is for our own good. That they are telling us that “rule by experts” is for our public safety. It smacks of a religious replacement whereby we are being instructed to do their will - not our own. God is being replaced by demi gods who are imposing their will on us and we, through fear, are forced to accept their " divine rule. "
I am not talking about America here - where the Police are being abandoned by their Governments. I am talking about Victoria, Australia, where some kind of social experiment is underway to see just how much divine rule the populace will take.
My personal belief in God is my own. I do not need a Government to tell me that my God has been put on the back bench in the interests of public safety and that THEIR WILL BE DONE.
When he wrote
"I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously."
He went on to say :
"The modern state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers.' We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business."
I don't know about you, but I am getting sick and tired of being treated like a criminal by these people, all in the interests of public safety. And I agree with CS Lewis in his view that we are being ground down in to a deeply troubling Communist state of subjucation.
He said
" What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about "Man taking charge of his own destiny." All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?
oligarchy rule by an economic elite, but oligarchy often has the additional connotation of corruption
The higher the pretensions of our rulers are, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be defiled. . . . Let our masters . . . leave us some region where the spontaneous, the unmarketable, the utterly private, can still exist. "
Comrade Dan Andrews, Leader in Victoria, Australia has certainly shown us what can happen when we allow our appointed leaders to develop God like authority over our lives. It is dangerous. It is wrong.
How did it happen?
Under the guise of Public Safety.
When our rights are stripped away like layers of an onion, one day there will be nothing left. We are being turned into
"Willing Slaves of the Welfare State"
CS Lewis suggested that it was every person's right
" To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death—these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilized man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow."
Yet, under the rules of public safety, this simple right has been destroyed. The disastrous results both moral and psychological are indeed frightening.
He wrote
" I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has "the freeborn mind." But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?"
Our schools are under attack.
" Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses."
But time is running out. We must regain control over our lives and get back to work, get back to REAL Mothers, REAL Nurses and above all REAL children who can preserve the human race with some semblance of sanity.
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