‘The Abolition of Man’: How C.S. Lewis’ Prophecy Is Being Fulfilled

 Jeff Minick - Intellectual Takeout

"For years now, our culture has waged war over the question of what it means to be a man. To that battlefield, some online pundits have brought the heavy artillery of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book, The Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.' ”

. . ."Fast-forward to our day, in which we are conditioned daily to accept new ideologies, sometimes twisting language to bring them to life. Phrases like toxic masculinity, reproductive choice, white privilege, gay marriage, and cisgender vs. transgender—all concepts that ignore objective truth and the anchor of tradition—now abound. Conditioners in our culture, for example, have taken a phenomenon like transgenderism (once rare and, until recently, regarded as a mental illness), reworked it into an ideology, and encouraged more and more people to accept it as the norm, with deniers often suffering severe consequences.

"Other Conditioners are intent on convincing us to eat bugs rather than beef and to eradicate fossil fuels, all to save the planet from climate change, a measure which could leave countless people impoverished or dead of starvation. As Lewis told us, our Conditioners know how to produce and influence conscience, and they busy themselves day and night to that end." . . .

Quoting C.S. Lewis: "Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut into some fresh shape. … The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere … specimens … begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate unsocial elements."