https://dad29.blogspot.com/2024/04/c-s-lewis-on-meaning-of-democracy-for.html

https://dad29.blogspot.com/2024/04/c-s-lewis-on-meaning-of-democracy-for.html

C S Lewis on the Meaning of "Democracy"--for Satan

 Just below, we linked to a short essay by C S Lewis on corrupt officials.

Next, Lewis explains how Satan & Co. use the word "democracy."  This follows the horrible (to Screwtape & Co.) time period during which Christianity was gaining ground rapidly--roughly, the time period after the Civil War in America.  We pick up there:

...Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn't know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden....

That was at the "institutional" level.  But for individuals, Screwtape had a different plan.

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose.
The good work which our philological experts have already done in
the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you
that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and defin-
able meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy
is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting,
and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with
what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be al-
lowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether “democratic behaviour”
means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will
preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to
them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely
for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is
connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated.
You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political
ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you
are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction
in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of
human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame
but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if unde-
fended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you.

Yes.  Exactly as the Trannies, pedophiles, and polyamorous perverts proclaim these days.

...The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did....

Screwtape mentions that this is really Envy.  He goes on:

...The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it — make it respectable and even laudable — by the incantatory use of the word democratic. Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic. 

I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being Like Folks; that people who would really wish to be — and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be — honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: “O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!” Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly: “Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”...

(Screwtape refers to those now called AWFLs.)

"Well," you say.  "So what"?

What I want to fix your attention  on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods?

You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own...

Can you say "equity"?

Next chapter:  Can You Say "Grade school"?

...The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils — for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences — must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling.

 

But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have — I believe the English already use the phrase — “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! — by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Æschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. 

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way....

Indeed.

H/T for this goes to Ace & Co.