That Hideous Truth: C.S. Lewis Predicted Technocratic Globalism and Scientific Dictatorship
23rd March 2024
Eighty years on from both the completion of C.S. Lewis’ classic science-fiction parable That Hideous Strength, and the Dumbarton Oaks Conference which led to the creation of the UN, have the worst totalitarian nightmares of Lewis’ imagination finally come to pass for real?
Try to imagine a world in which democracy is wholly dead, having been replaced by its own deliberate inverted simulacrum, a surface-deep regime—an atheistic, science-worshipping, globalist technocracy—in which hideous non-human creatures tempt a fallen elitist ruling class into entering irrevocably into the satanic realm of post-humanity, facilitated by hubristic feats of industrial and mechanical engineering.
If this all sounds like something stolen from a science-fiction novel, then that’s because it is—the novel in question being 1945’s That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, which (publication schedules being what they are) he had actually finished writing some time prior to the end of WWII. It is a horrific and satirical prediction of what Lewis presciently perceived the post-war world most likely had in store for an unsuspecting humanity that naively thought democracy was about to triumph forever with the looming twin defeats of Germany and Japan: namely, a new form of ‘benign’ globalist dictatorship in disguise.