Like many people, I read the Chronicles of Narnia when I was younger. C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy is not so well known, but I read that too. It's been about thirty years since I last looked at it, and I always found the third part "That Hideous Strength" a bit dry after the visits to Mars and Venus. By happenchance I came across the books again this summer in a free library. I was too young for That Hideous Strength back in the day... and it may not be Lewis' best novel, but some of the material in it is a little too prophetic for comfort.
The main villains in "That Hideous Strength" are "The N.I.C.E.", whose name stands for "the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments". They sell themselves as "“the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many people base their hopes of a better world” Anyone who opposes them is called an "obstructionist". The NICE pretends to use science to fix society, much like the World Economic Forum and WHO do nowadays:
As the Italian professor says in the book:"The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more"
This may sound bizarre, but it is exactly what some billionaires are attempting right now. To cheat death by having their minds uploaded to computers. It is debatable whether what is uploaded will really be them..."This Institute... it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing."
One of the scientists becomes a literal head of the Institute, all head and no heart, as part of their sick experiments. He had wished to become immortal, but instead had been taken over by the things Lewis calls Macrobes. The N.I.C.E. think the Macrobes are superior beings, but are in fact invisible demons who are using the scientists for their own ends. The N.I.C.E. says it wants a "new man... free from Nature" and that "Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away." In fact, what they want is a humanity removed from nature and God, because humans are made in God's image, and their aim is to deface that image. The N.I.C.E. hate old buildings and villages calling them "abuses and anachronisms". They dam rivers, flood villages, and flatten history. They cut down trees and replace them with aluminium ones, because they're "cleaner."
What I find interesting is that the N.I.C.E. think the "educated" are less of a threat than the uneducated. (Romans 1.22). All too true in my experience. Universities can condition people as much as developing them. As the N.I.C.E. say:
The N.I.C.E. also want population reduction: "The day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man." And when one of the N.I.C.E. breaks rank and says they are not practicing true science, he is accused of being "the wrong sort of scientist."“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 the 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.”
It is very reminiscent of the Great Reset idea that the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab are pushing for. Right down to the fact that they do things behind the public's back.
The N.I.C.E. also play one of the exact same trick as the World Economic Forum does. Major new media is deliberately polarised into "right" and "left" news, even though it is often owned by the same people, and is notable in playing up some issues and ignoring others. So much so that some people will immediately discount something if it comes out of the "wrong" news source:“Science must be given a free hand to take over the human race… if not.. we’re done... Man has got to take charge of man… which means some men have got to take charge of the rest”
While "That Hideous Strength" is dated in some senses, and the characters speak in that kind of posh English one never hears anymore... it seems to have been right on the money in some regards. Science in itself is not opposition to God. Nor are machines. But they can bear the inheritance of the evil people who use them and create them. We can do amazing and great things with science, but often end up doing the opposite due to our lack of wisdom. (1 Cor 1.20)"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."
