A Tyranny Exercised for Our Good by C.S. Lewis

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Abeard

Puritan Board Freshman
Very relevant to today’s age....

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
 
R. L. Dabney has a quote of the same nature which I found a few weeks ago:

"The greatest organized wrongs which the civilized world has seen perpetrated in modern times, upon the well-being of mankind, have been committed under the amiable name of humanity. No despotic government now avows the ruthless purpose of self-aggrandizement and of the gratification of hatred and the lust of power; but its pretense is always the good of society, and the welfare of the governed. ... No demagogue confesses, in popular governments, the greedy ambition or avarice which proves to be his secret motive: but he seeks only the good of the 'dear people,' while he betrays them into mischievous anarchy or legislative atrocities."​
—Robert Lewis Dabney, “The Crimes of Philanthropy,” in Discussions by Robert L. Dabney, vol. 4 (Mexico, MO: Crescent Book House, 1897), 53–70.​

And this is the paragraph with which he opens the essay. This is the very definition of "coming out swinging."
 
Very relevant to today’s age....

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

This is from his essay on the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. The elders in Canada who were charged with holding services quoted this in their letter to the govt.


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