Skip to main content

Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

In 1961 C. S. Lewis wrote a new preface to the paperback edition of The Screwtape Letters, first published in 1942.

'We must picture Hell as 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 envy, self-importance, and resentment. This, to begin with. For the rest, my own choice of symbols depended, I suppose, on temperament and on the age.

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

Milton has told us that “devil with devil damned Firm concord holds.” But how? Certainly not by friendship. A being which can still love is not yet a devil. Here again my symbol seemed to me useful. It enabled me, by earthly parallels, to picture an official society held together entirely by fear and greed. On the surface, manners are normally suave. Rudeness to one’s superiors would obviously be suicidal; rudeness to one’s equals might put them on their guard before you were ready to spring your mine. For of course “Dog eat dog” is the principle of the whole organization. Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion, and ruin; everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended alliance, the stab in the back. Over all this their good manners, their expressions of grave respect, their “tributes” to one another’s invaluable services form a thin crust. Every now and then it gets punctured, and the scalding lava of their hatred spurts out.'

Public servants serve the public. In a democracy there are rules about the conduct of public servants, but no demands for allegiance to a political movement within the incumbent administration. Therefore the purges taking place in America are demonstrably undemocratic and do not reflect the will of the large number of people who choose not to follow the MAGA creed. America appears to have devolved into an autocracy/plutocracy.

The pleas to Elon Musk from Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) to show some compassion in his aggressive approach to trimming a bloated bureaucracy — does he not understand that to the Trumps and Musks of the world compassion is considered a weakness? When a person's sole focus in life is what they can get for themselves regardless of others, they lose access to higher human emotions. The will of the people to rein in government spending is being wielded as a bludgeon upon democracy and all that sustains it. 

'The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.'—Luther

 

Popular posts from this blog

The New Boy

The New Boy, a film written and directed by Warwick Thornton, 2023. We want to talk about film. We want to know who performed in it. We want to discuss everything; we want to praise it, or point out its weaknesses, as if that is the reason the film was made. And sometimes it is. Or sometimes a film can be made because it wants to show us something, or help us to feel something that the maker thinks we need to feel. It isn't what happens in a story that matters. It is the meaning that matters. Stories don't give us meaning. We have meaning. But we are always forgetting because we are trying to live such meaningless lives in which acquiring things and upholding delusions is everything.  The film depicts the beauty of contrast and extreme simplicity. That we are so out of place here. That we are always engaged in a struggle of pretence, of becoming what we are not. That we are tortured and cannot be at peace even as we yearn for peace. And along comes the new boy. He is at peace. ...
Read more

WIFEDOM

        Barnhill, Jura — John Perivolaris, Flickr creative commons   Anna Funder dug around and into the past lives of Eric Blair and Eileen O'Shaughnessy (Mr and Mrs George Orwell) and found what she was looking for to support her working thesis: that patriarchy shamelessly erases women. (Is that a revelation?) It is not a compassionate book, in that it does not seem to grasp the reality of people's lives. The author seems to suffer a delusional complacency in not understanding that all human beings are flawed.  But somehow we manage to love each other and work together and sometimes out of that something of value comes into the world. Both Eric and Eileen seriously neglected their own health and consequently both died young. Eileen was not a victim. She had agency. She went to Spain against Eric's wishes.  She wrote a poem titled '1984' but there is a huge gap between that and writing a book. She inspired and worked with Eric on 'Anima...
Read more

Gender Roles and Modern Love

    enough? It is hard to know when to stop picking. Melissa, Flickr creative commons Molly Roden Winter wrote a memoir about her exploration of non-monogamy titled 'More'. She feels the oppressiveness of motherhood; then the feeling that she is burying who she really is under the weight of domestic demands explodes and she walks out into the night when her partner yet again works late and misses the children's bedtime. She meets someone at a bar. Her partner says she should meet up with him again, and that he wants to be able to do the same. So begins their 'open marriage'. But underneath her seeming agreement to this arrangement is a silenced voice wondering why her partner does not see that this is not what she wants. It reminds me of the film Le Bonheur directed by Agnès Varda, France, 1965, currently available on MUBI. A couple with two very young children appear happy together. He works as a carpenter and she does dressmaking at home. They don't have much...
Read more