Demonic Democracy??

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Over the years here on the program, we definitely delve into societal issues we talk about. It’s not just about money. It’s everything that kind of relates to money, the world around us. And I’m not going to change. You ever change from that? People said, you know, focus on Wall Street. No, no, there’s much more important things that we need to talk about and discuss. And I don’t know about you. See things that happen in the world.

around us over time. And for whatever reason, certain things will get me thinking or irk me to some degree. I remember first seeing, they see symbols or ridiculous bumper stickers on cars with the equality sign, like the equal sign. Some people have tattoos of the equal sign. And they want equality, right?

And another one that I’ve often talked about here on the program and I make fun of in we’re seeing it more and more today is democracy, democratic. We’re always told by these politicians, it’s an attack on democracy and we’re destroying our democracy and an attack on democratic values. And, you know, I’ve remind people here on the program that the word democracy doesn’t appear one time in our constitution.

And I’ve always thinking about how powers that be like to take words and twist them to meet their own means, needs, what their will may be. And it always bothers me whenever they do that with any word and redefining language. It’s another point of contention that we talk about here on the program. And I don’t know about you, but I have all these ideas are bouncing around.

in my head and I come up with thoughts and sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll have like kind of a eureka moment and I’ll be lazy. I don’t know if you ever could do this. Sometimes I’ll be lazy. I’ll remember tomorrow morning and you forget. I’m like, what did I think of last night? I had this great idea. Now I make a point. I send emails to myself from time to time. Well, anyway, where am I going with this and demonic democracy was a week or two ago.

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here on the show, I brought up the C .S. Lewis classic, the Screwtape Letters, which he wrote during World War II. And again, I highly recommend it. It’s a great read. It’s an easy read. And if you’re not familiar what it is, C .S. Lewis, basically, basically, it’s a series of letters between this, you know, kind of like advanced,

head demon in hell and his nephew, another demon who is out there as a tempter. And in the book, the demons call us, we the people, the people are trying to get to go to hell and tempt the patient, patient and they call God the enemy. And last night, last night I found out, and I didn’t know this, I didn’t know this. C .S. Lewis, he wrote this book during World War

too. And I was seeing in Great Britain at the time. And he, you know, he talked about, you know, what it was like to try to get into the mind of a demon. And he, you know, people wanted him to, you know, write sequels to it. He never did until 1959. 1959, he did a piece for the it was a Saturday evening post, if I’m not mistaken, 1959. And I never read it. I never read it.

until last night. And I’m going to go over some of it again. It’s called, it’s called screw tape proposes toast. And basically again, they’re in hell and they’re having a graduation ceremony for in essence, the tempters that are going to go out and he’s giving them advice. And again, this, this to me was absolutely genius and it actually put.

actually organized a lot of thoughts in my mind about what’s been transpiring over the years and how things have been moving in one direction. And I don’t like it, doesn’t seem right, doesn’t feel right. And I know many of you feel the same way. And again, I recommend it. You can go online, you can download the PDF. I’m gonna read to you and we’re gonna talk about some of the things that he wrote. And I wanna remind everybody, this was in 1959 he wrote this.

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And again, this is screw tape, screw tape. This is a high level, high level demon in hell as far as the bureaucracy is concerned. And screw tape and his toast, he says, democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work, which are for the logical 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 definable 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 this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them.

Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question whether democratic behavior means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to concur to them that these need not be the same. You are, you are to use the word purely as an incantation. Sound familiar? Sound used all the time 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. How often, how often do we talk about this here on the program?

How over the years have I talked to him? He’s the declaration of independence. All men are created equal. Equal under the law. We’re not all equal. How many times have I said here on the program that I don’t look like Brad Pitt? Okay, we’re not equal. It’s just not the way it is. There are much better athletes out there than myself. I would have loved to have played middle linebacker for the Giants. Sorry.

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I’m not six foot three, 240 pounds. I’m not equal to them. But anyway, especially the man you are working on. Again, he’s talking to young demons, tempters out there, they’re calling him. As a result, you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading and also the least enjoyable of all human feelings. You can get him to practice.

not only without shame, but with a positive glow of self -approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided. Think about that. People hiding behind, doing horrible things and breaking things and destroying things and all these things that are bad, all in the name of democracy. The feeling I mean is, of course, that which prompts a man to say, I’m as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the center of his life a good, solid, resounding lie, because it is a lie, right? I don’t mean merely 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. The Saint Bernard never says to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plane. The claim to equality outside the strictly political field is made only by those who they feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

I know that hurts, right? It hurts a lot, but it’s true. We see it all the time. I want to say that again. Okay. The claim to equality outside the strictly political field is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority, which the patient, again, patient is.

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the devils, the demons are trying to tempt, refuses to accept and therefore resents. And yes, therefore resents every kind of superiority in others, denigrates it, wishes its annihilation. Just thought about that. Remember that Chris Rock stand up skit, just talking about, you know, smart black people coming home to the hood, get with their master’s degree. you my master now?

master’s degree. Presently, he suspects every mere difference of being a claim of superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food. Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I. It must be a vile, upstage, la -di -da affection. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs.

thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox. Again, this is 1959. He must be one of those high brows and is doing it to show off. If they were the right sort of chaps, they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.

Now this useful phenomenon is in of itself by no means new. Under the name of envy, it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. Here though, they always regarded it as some odious and also the most comical of vices. Those who were aware of feeling it felt it with shame. Those who were not gave it no quarter and others.

the delightful novelty of the present situation that we have right now is that you can sanction it. You can make envy respectable, even laudable by the incantatory use of the word democratic. Again, this was written in 1959. Man, you talk about being applicable today.

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Under the influence of this incantation, those who are in any or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull everyone else down to their own level. Again, how often have we talked about this over the years? That’s not all. Under the same influence, those who come are

could come nearer to a full humanity actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic.

canceled culture, anyone? Fear of being canceled? Being different? You can’t be canceled. Can’t open up your mouth. Can’t say anything. Can’t mention it. Can’t have that happen. I’m incredibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress and incept a 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 what might make them different, might offend again, the way of life, how we should be living today, right? Got to accept it, can’t be different. Take them out of the togetherness, impair their integration with the group, the horror, no, guess what? You might become individuals.

and to the demons, they don’t like that. That’s the horror of horrors. All is summed up in the prayer, which a young female human is said to have uttered recently. God, make me a normal 20th century girl. Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly, make me a minx, a moron and a parasite. I’m reading the C .S. Lewis stuff and every single time, the more and more, I…

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honest to think that the, you know, screw tape, screw tape and the boys down below, they definitely put together social media. Anyway, meanwhile, as a delightful byproduct, the few fewer every day who will not be made normal and regular and like folks and integrated increasingly tend to become in reality the prigs and cranks, which the rabble would in any case have believed them to be. For suspicion often creates

what it suspects, since whatever I do, the neighbors are gonna think me a witch. I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and become one in reality. As a result, we now have an intelligentsia, which though very small, is very useful to the cause of hell. Again, the elites, the intelligentsia, the talking heads on TV. But that is merely a byproduct. What I wanna 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. Again, talked about, again, another short story, great author Kurt Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeon talked about here on the program, great piece on that. Anyway, it is 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 were called tyrants then, sent an envoy to another dictator to ask his advice about how the principles of government.

The second dictator led the envoy into a field of corn. 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.

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equals. Thus tyrants could practice in a sense, democracy. But now democracy can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one now need to go through a field with a cane. The little stalks, that would be us, will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to

Be like Stalks. I’ve said that to secure the damnation of these little souls. These creatures that have almost ceased to be individual is a laborious and tricky work. But if proper pains and skill are expended, you can be fairly confident of the result. The great sinners seem easier to catch, but then they are incalculable. After you have played them for 70 years, the enemy, that’s God, they…

demons call God the enemy. The enemy may snatch them from your claws in the 71st. They are capable, you see, of real repentance. They are conscious of real guilt. They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the enemy’s sake as they were to defy them for ours. It is in some way more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot at close range a wild elephant.

but the elephant is more troublesome if you miss. Love this writer, I really do. My own experience as I have was mainly on the English sector and I still get more news from it than from any other. And maybe that what I am now going to say will not apply so fully to the sectors in which some of you are operating. Again, he’s talking about great Britain, some of the tempters and devils working in other countries, but you can make the necessary adjustments when you get there.

Some application it will almost certainly have. If it has too little, you must labor to make the country you are dealing with more like what England already is. In that promising land, the spirit of I’m as good as you has already become something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. Again, I want to remind everybody this is 1959. C .S. Lewis wrote this.

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how far its operations there have gone at the present moment. I would not like to say with certainty, nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments, especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers, I know these are all trigger words nowadays, must not be made to feel inferior.

to intelligent and industrious pupils? Eh, no, no more valedictorians. Can’t have that, it’s not fair. Might hurt someone’s self -esteem. Anyway, that would be undemocratic. These differences between the pupils, for they are obviously nakedly individual differences, must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed.

so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that they 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 the things that children used to do in their spare time.

Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modeling. 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, parody of esteem. And even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back because the others would get

Trauma! 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 is capable of tackling Socrates and Aristotle and Dante sits listening to, hey, attempts to spell out a cat sat on the mat. In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you.

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has fully, fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. Didn’t I do a podcast this past week talking about education and mushrooms and, you know, keep them in the dark and feed them shit? I think I did. The few who might want to learn will be prevented. Who are they to overtop their fellows?

And anyway, the teachers, or should I say nurses, will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back and waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have a plan and toil to spread improtutable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin will do it for us. Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education, but it will.

This is part of the same movement. Taxes designed for that purpose are liquidating the middle class. The class who are prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is fortunately an inevitable effect of the spirit that says, I’m as good as you. This was, after all, the social group, the class, which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority,

of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there was a bunch of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. Yep. Yep, boy, we live in that world. As an English politician remarked not long ago, a democracy does not want great men. It would be idle to ask such a creature.

whether by want it means need or like. But you’d better be clear for here Aristotle’s question comes up again. We in hell, we in hell would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of the word. The political arrangement so -called like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole, less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that,

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democracy in the diabolical sense. I’m as good as you. Being like folks, togetherness is the finest instrument we could possibly have for exterpating political democracies from the face of the earth. For democracy, or the democratic spirit, diabolical sense, leads to a nation without great men.

a nation mainly of sub literates, morally flaccid from lack of discipline and youth, full of cocksureness, which flattery breeds on ignorance and soft from life long pampering. Again, you know, I’ve been trying to put this all together for, you know, what 25 years here on the show. And, I guess I see us Lewis kicked my ass with this,

back in 1959. And that is what hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in a conflict of a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible. Again, I think of a column that I wrote, your thank you for not.

voting, making this very point. Again, you know what? I’m going to, I know I spent a lot of time on this today. Look it up, read it yourself. yeah, it’s, it’s one of those, you know, those, those epiphanies from, from time to time. And again, I don’t know why I picked this up yesterday. I did. I did. And then, you know what I picked up this morning? Yeah. I pick up other articles that, you know, that I see, you know, here was.

One example, the New Statesman basically saying that pro -family rhetoric, pro -family rhetoric and nuclear families and praying at the dinner table is fascist. Fascist, we can’t have that. Lengthy article talking about how these conservative values throughout time, family values, they’re fascist now. Again, screw tape and the boys from Down Under, hey, they’re winning. Watchdog on wallstreet .com.