Philosophy of Hell

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For my 14th birthday and at my request, my parents gave me the complete works of CS Lewis, which I read with great relish. They transformed my life in ways I didn't fully comprehend at the time, but many of the ideas, attitudes, and opinions I hold link back in some way to the works of that great man. Of course like most kids, I first loved him for his fiction, but as I grew I understood those books to be allegorical, allusions to the tenants of faith and his Faith, and I longed to know more. Inside the front cover of one of those books, I wrote the following note: "Nothing convinced me more that liberalism was the philosophy of hell than reading this book [The Screwtape Letters]." When I went back to read it last month in preparation for a Sunday School lesson, I sat there stunned briefly as I read those words and then perused the volume. Although during intervening years I reread the book many times, I know some of the notes are from the original reading when I, at the tender age of 14, turned the pages and studied the adversary of truth. As election day draws near, read "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" and decide for yourself which political philosophy promises poverty, misery, and death. The conversation points out how the devil, and hell and every evil force on earth works its very best to obscure, obfuscate, and obliviate truth. Screwtape's advice is calculated to "take the man's soul and give him nothing in return" promising him pleasure without the happiness that makes it sweet. Ultimately all of this discourse, deception, and diversion aims to make men fit for nothing more than consumption, binding them in darkness by using their mortal foibles against them.

Adversary of Truth

Liberals deal mostly in half truths and whole lies. They do not bother to worry about whether it is true as most of them in politics are lawyers, and in law you are taught rhetoric which says that the best argument wins regardless of its veracity. For that reason, in court, a person is found "not guilty" which is significantly different from "innocent. Mostly, they deal in character assassination, but when they can, they will try pseudo-philosophy based on jargon and rhetoric, for "Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church" and from its virtues. You notice that liberals claim to be charitable but only to people they have never met while barking at, firing, and assaulting people they know and ostensibly love. Wrote Lewis on the subject: "direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice then becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary". On the auspices that they care about other people more than you do, they equate everything they do with "for the children" when it is actually done TO the children. They forget what Lewis calls the law of undulation: they will instead insist that the way things are either defy ideal (gay marriage) or constitute it (global warming) ignoring the fact that what appears to be chaos is often simply the search for equilibrium. Frequently, they get away with this because they are able to redefine words, to rename things, and to create new special constituencies based on the notion that "the whole philosophy of hell rests on recognition of the axium that one thing is not another thing..." In doing this, they bully men of virtue, principle, and faith, doing things in the name of virtuous and noble causes without actually meaning it. In these crusades they "make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably of course, as a means to their own advancement, but failing that as a means to social justice...". Liberals routinely appeal to Christianity, not because they really believe but because they think you do. Everything they advocate is simply a smokescreen for their true aim which is power. Everything they advocate is temporary, emotional, and vacuous, although they will pretend that it's monumental and that their decisions are based entirely in rational and logical thought. Like Screwtape, "we direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger" Yes, because the biggest problems we have are gay marriage, transgender bathrooms, and gays in the military. Young people have this morbid fascination with rebellion which constitutes essentially nothing more than adopting some outlandishly fashionable ideal to horrify their parents. The great paradox of this all is that eventually they come to feel about it as they grow older essentially the same way their parents did, making their rebellion at best insignificant and at worst a setback to their own prospects and happiness in maturity. All too often liberals talk about utopia, make promises, and offer the usual pablum because they know what you want to hear, and then they flip you the bird after the election, even if you are one of their constituencies. Their activities and plans are always shrouded in mystery in the least transparent administrations ever, and they hope that it can be said of the voter: "the one question he never asks is whether it is true".

Adversary of Freedom

One of the greatest tools in the adversary's arsenal is the notion that the commandments make life harder when in fact they make it easier. Lewis opines how "Mephistopheles helped strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating" because it encourages men to do things that propriety, respect, and dignity otherwise restrain men from doing. Liberals are obsessed with race and sex, and it shows in their pet projects, their political policies, and their fundraising. Most of their money comes from groups that engage openly in things that used to be done behind closed doors if people dared do them at all. Liberals chiefly fall into one of two groups regarding how they feel about human interactions: "the first sort joke about sex because it gives rise to many incongruities; the second cultivate incongruities because they afford a pretext for talking about sex" What is actually the purpose of sex? To draw two people together and then to bind them to the offspring that result from such liasons. If that were not so, then oxytocin would have neither presence nor significance in the intimacy of any two people, and we would like no friend or woman more than the next. Later, Lewis writes that relationships "obediently entered into too often will produce affection and the family" (emphasis in original) which is odd since liberals are also trying to redefine what family really means as well as its purpose and benefits to civil society. With the promise of peace and prosperity, they chip away at your freedoms and opportunities. For years, I have maintained that liberals will always think you have too much freedom and too much money until you have none at all of either. Apparently, they listen to Screwtape who suggests that "our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to Earth is to make them believe that Earth can be turned into heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology". Thus it binds them to earth and convinces them to attempt to make earth, which is fallen, the utopia that heaven alone can sustain. It attempts to build a quality product with degraded ingredients, to create something better than the sum of its parts, which in every realm they decry is a fallacy but is gospel when it comes to their sacred cows. There is no such thing as a free lunch unless liberals promise that they will feed everyone, give everyone a well-paid job, and provide health care at no or low cost regardless of your choices. They do this because they do not like people. I am not even convinced that they like their own families. I don't believe they like themselves. Lewis writes that the quest for equality is usually perpetrated by those who feel in some way slighted, and yet the liberals are often old, white, rich people who aren't slighted in any way compared to the average voter. They do not trust or like the electorate, which is one reason they cannot abide anything the citizens believe or desire. Unlike liberals, conservativism truly practiced is the plan of the Almighty. Said Screwtape "He really loves the hairy bipeds (emphasis in original)...He cannot tempt to virtue as we can to vice. Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never more in jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” Good men do right things for the right reasons. Liberals do them because it's advantageous to them personally and immediately. As Screwtape reminds us: "the justice of hell is purely realistic and concerned only with results. Bring us back food or be food yourself"

Adversary of Happiness

Particularly in the modern era, the hedonist, the narcissist, the nihilist, and the Nehor all reign because everyone has what Dieter Uchtdorf once called Center of the Universe Syndrome. Indeed, "Hell is a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of ency, self-importance, and resentment". Liberals use whatever they can to gain ground, claiming to be offended, to be owed, to be hurt, and to be important when in reality most people, however relevant, are actually redundant. I spend enough time in academia to know that there is nothing unique about the students by and large. They are essentially a great recycling of ideas, attitudes, and abilities amalgamated by centuries of successful genetic exchange manifest in the modern era. Many modern manifestations and attitudes are the ones of yesteryear, in which people engage in wickedness expecting to be happy and then are greatly disappointed that their time and effort are spent in pursuit of things with no real worth that cannot satisfy. It's an older code, suggested by Screwtape that "all we can do is to encourage the humans to take pleasures which our Enemy has produced at times, or in ways, or in degrees , which He has forbidden". Liberal programs have the semblance and speech of heaven, but because of the philosophies of men, which are fallen, they cannot attain any utopia. Between sexual liberation and the so-called "women's movement", liberals have destroyed the value of many women, reducing them to nothing more than playthings. I forget which James Bond or spy movie said it, but one character opines that American women are only good for spending their husband's money. I see it on campus, men led around like lapdogs on the promise of intimacy which ultimately doesn't lead to true connection, because it is half truth or whole lie, and leaves them emptier than if they abstain. Women are encouraged to throw away the things of eternity and consequence and become selfish. Then the men are led about by Screwtape's minions out there "encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women". You can see them all around, like I do on campus, where they fight tooth and nail to gain and keep the attention of those who mistreat them and mistreat those worthy of their attention. If we refuse to view them as equals after they wallow in their sop, we are being judgmental. Isn't it arrogant and judgmental to say that I am arrogant and judgmental? Far too many young people "fall out of love" because they were never IN love. A student worker in the computer lab suggested I take dates to things that create an adrenaline rush which would bind them to me, but I'm smart enough to know that they will actually be addicted to the adrenaline rush and get bored when time comes to settle down and make a life. These girls flit from man to man, continuing to seek one-upmanship in their quest for entertainment, becoming more arrogant and prodigal, prodigious even. One girl I took out twice told me that her ex boyfriend paid for everything. This leads to vanity and greed because "the pleasure of novelty is by very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns, and continued novelty costs money, so the desire for it spells avarice, unhappiness or both". Closely related to the notion of picking arrogant and prodigal women, we find far too many people who are interested in associations clearly for the chance to be entertained. Most of the aversion to things that bring happiness and drive towards Pleasure Island is driven by a desire not to do what is right but to be cool. "He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them". Well, the trouble with Pleasure Island is that like PInocchio eventually you become an ass. In order to move people to action to change their plight, they pit people against one another. Screwtape reminds us that liberals believe "To be means to be in competition". Ronald Reagan famously opined the liberal paradox that a fat man cannot get fat unless he took from the thin man beside him. The philosophy of hell in "The Great Divorce" preaches that you expand by thrusting others aside, which is odd since liberal scientists admit that the universe is expanding. There truly is going to be more for everyone, even if you don't get everything you like. Finally, they attack your ideals of society and faith on the auspices that unless you get EVERYTHING you demand then you must be wrong, nevermind that liberalism rarely delivers on its promises to anyone. In the words of Screwtape: "don't forget to use the heads I win, tails you lose argument. if the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is proof that petitionary prayers do not work; if it does happen, he will of course be able to see ...it would have happened anyway". Unless Conservativism creates utopia it's worthless; unless religion creates utopia it's worthless; if something good happens, it's coincidence, unless of course with liberalism, to which they unjustly ascribe virtuous outcomes and at which they never lay blame for its consistently reliable and inevitable failure.

Special notes on the term "democracy"

The demagogues in politics frequently bandy about the word Democracy without bothering to explain what it is that they actually mean by it. Like so many other words, they use them knowing that you attach a meaning to it while they attach a different, frequently tangential, and often deleterious denotation, all the while letting you believe that it means what you think it means. As previously written, I inquired after two politicians once who, claiming they would fix things would not address whether they meant fix as in "to make permanent or rig" or as in "to repair", the former meaning which only after 1905 came to be attached to the word according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1965, CS Lewis wrote about democracy and put these words in Screwtape's mouth. "In his perfect democracy, you remember (Rousseau), 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". That is precisely what liberals mean when they talk about Democracy- where the will of the people is dictated by the elites among them, where rights, responsibilities, and conditions are dictated by Government rather than by God, where we worship government as our benefactor. Lewis continues: "Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose". You see this in the nationalist-populist-agrarian movement personified in the Trump candidacy (hat tip to Mark Levin for the hyphenated nomenclature) being careful to never give this word a clear and definable meaning because "it is a name they venerate and of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated". We all think we desire equality, but they mean equality as in death, as in the gutter, that we're all side by side, equally poor and miserable picking rice in the fields like in the socialist utopias like Cuba and North Korea over which they fawn and to which they point as panacea. Ultimately, that is their aim with liberal democracy where they "Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus tyrants could practice in a sense "democracy"". Listen to their rhetoric, what they promise. You won't have to think or work or worry or compare yourself to others. Everyone will get a "liveable wage" and have "universal health care" and get trophies for participation. Later on, they will promise free college: "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". When everyone has a college education, nobody will. "All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish". This is a diabolical philosophy that actually promises to fill the world with ciphers, 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 hint of criticism". Do you recognize this as the call for "safe zones", "free speech zones", and the like? This is the spectre of human blindness that cannot lead to utopia because it lakes all of the states of mind that ultimately lead to paradise. That's what the Great Deceiver does, and his mortal minions preach it from every pulpit to which they can gain access.

When I reread these passages last month, I shook my head knowing that many political leaders, regardless of alleged party affiliation, tout the principles endorsed by Screwtape. I don't know if they do this by design or because they are kept from the truth because they know not where to find it. In my Faith, we preach that many of the elect will be blinded by the subtle craftiness of men, preach for doctrines the commandments of men, and attempt to exalt themselves, and nowhere is that better illustrated than in modern liberalism. Whether unwilling to delineate what "the definition of 'is' is" or calling something democratic when it is anything but, liberalism survives, grows, and thrives on lies. Whether creating safe spaces where people won't feel threatened by ideas they find contrarian or attempting to claim power to take away rights given us by our Creator, liberalism views people as chattel, fit only for consumption. Whether touting things that are of no worth and cannot satisfy or encouraging us to take advantage of them in ways or to degrees that cause decadence and degradation, liberalism is only interested in power. For all of the fancy rhetoric, the populist pageantry, and the nationalistic hegemony, the liberal actually preaches the whole philosophy of hell where one gains only by thrusting another aside, where each is concerned only with his own all the while claiming to do it for "the children" or "the poor" or "world peace" while they envy and hate their own children, ignore the beggar that puts up his petition and sow discord among brethren. Beware when politicians prattle the principles of Christian charity, because they do that, not because they really mean it, but because they hope you do and they hope to manipulate you into doing right things for the wrong reasons.