A voice from the past, describing the present

I came late to the writings of C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was already a major motion picture before I got around to reading the Narnia books. Somewhere along the way, I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, but I'd never even heard that Lewis had dabbled in science fiction until recently, when I found his science fiction trilogy at Costco.

I'm on the third volume now, pictured here, but I had to interrupt my reading to make this post.

Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength in or about 1944. But the words he puts in the mouth of a very bad character, in the course of trying to recruit a naive professor into her evil organization, with just minor adjustments for topics and technology, could easily have been written in the last few months:

Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us---to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is."

"I don't believe you can do that," said Mark. "Not with the papers that are read by educated people."

"That shows you're still in the nursery, lovey," said Miss Hardcastle. "Haven't you yet realised that it's the other way around?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything."

"As one of the class you mention," said Mark with a smile, "I just don't believe it."

"Good Lord!" said the Fairy, "where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a threat to the purity of our language. And wasn't the Monarchy an expensive abusurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn't the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don't you see that the educated reader can't stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."

(That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, ch. 5, pp. 97-98, Scribner Ed. 2024.)