C.S.Lewis had the number of the LEGALISTS, who take the joy out of living for everyone whose lives they have a chance to impact. They were called, "busy-bodies" in my grandmother's day. They are called the "politically correct" today.
This is WHO they ARE (in or out of a "church" organization). They are the "good" people:
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under live robber barons than under omnipotent moral busibodies. 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." ~ C.S. Lewis
That is such a good way of putting it.
"It may be better to live under live robber barons than under omnipotent moral busibodies. 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." I shall remember that.
But they didn’t argue with me, because they have rejected the law of noncontradiction.
I can believe one thing, and they can believe something absolutely antithetical, and we can both be right! Utterly preposterous!
But that is what deconstruction does. And it has affected literature, it has affected education, the law, and every area of life.
But Lewis saw where all of this would lead us. In “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” he said it would give rise to the great utopian pretensions.
Deconstructionism opens the door to the great myth of the twentieth century: the goodness of man, that good people, freed of prudish Victorian restraints, can live in perfect bliss.
But since it is the “controllers” who deliver us from such restraints, it in fact leads to the smoldering ashes of Auschwitz and the flowing rivers of blood in the Cambodian killing fields. The disaster of the twentieth century was the belief that man is good and can create his own utopia.
Lewis saw this ever so clearly, as he wrote in the Abolition of Man:
“Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that, not from any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such; having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”
Subjectivism leads to tyranny. “The very idea of freedom,” Lewis wrote in “The Poison of Subjectivism,” “presupposes some objective moral order which overarches both ruler and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible with democracy. We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law, but if there is no law of nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators, and conditioners, and every creator stands outside his own creation.”
That expresses precisely the dilemma of the postmodern age. And remember who the barbarians are. The barbarians come, Lewis told us, not over the parapet, not carrying their clubs and wielding their weapons, but they come with polished fingernails and blue pin-striped suits, gathering in well-lighted conference rooms. They are the good people who say that they know how to make life better for all of us. ... "
Source: The Wilberforce Forum