That Hideous Strength Predicted Everything

C.S. Lewis finished That Hideous Strength in 1945. He called it a modern fairy tale for grown-ups, yet it's one of the most accurate descriptions of where the modern West was heading that anyone has ever written.

If you want to understand our current political predicament, this is a good place to start. The bureaucratic double-speak, the progressive organisation that can't tell you what it actually does, the propaganda machine, the inner ring of people too eager to please to ever ask what they're complicit in—it's all in this book.

In this essay, I unpack this third novel in Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, including the NICE (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments), the Head, the Objective Room, and the novel's central argument—that when you strip out God, beauty, and objective morality, you don't get freedom, you get a nightmare.

Also: why the crucifix scene is one of the most important passages Lewis ever wrote, what The Abolition of Man has to do with it, and why Lewis's warning about posthumanism feels more urgent now than at any point since 1945.

Watch below.