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Willing Slaves

“I do not like the pretensions of Government – the grounds on which it demands my obedience – to be pitched too high. I don’t like the medicine-man’s magical pretensions nor the Bourbon’s Divine Right. On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants’ ‘science’ – they didn’t think much of Hitler’s racial theories or Stalin’s biology. But they can be muzzled.”
~ C. S. Lewis: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State, first published in The Observer on July 20, 1958.

 

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