Thursday, November 14, 2024

Tyranny for Our Own Good

One of the things that voters rejected in the recent election was the tyranny of elites on the left who believe that their intrusions into our lives is for our own good.

These elites believe that they're smarter than the rest of us and that we should defer to their superior knowledge and judgment. For our own good we should acquiesce to their wish to dictate what we can say, which cars we can drive, what sorts of appliances we can have in our homes.

For our own good we should've acquiesced to their demand during the covid outbreak that we all wear masks, forego socializing with family and friends, and close down churches and schools.

These elites are often moral pragmatists who believe that lies in the service of a righteous cause are righteous.

The great Christian apologist and literary scholar C.S. Lewis had something to say about such folks in his book of essays titled God in the Dock. He wrote:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)