The One Percent Rule

Lewis’ warning is not simply that a scientific, techno elite will govern us, but that we will let them. The creeping bureaucratization and commodification of life, the slow erosion of faith, the elevation of efficiency above meaning, these are not external forces imposed upon an unwilling populace, but rather the logical result of our own acquiescence.

If Orwell’s 1984 was a warning against totalitarianism and Huxley’s Brave New World a warning against hedonistic dystopia, then That Hideous Strength is a warning against the slow, bureaucratic suffocation of the human spirit. It is a novel that deserves to be read not simply as a piece of fiction, but as a reflection of our present age, revealing both its perils and its possibilities.

Lewis does not leave us in despair, he offers us a question that leaves us thinking beyond the final pages: In the face of an all-consuming bureaucracy, where do we take our stand?

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