Reason and Its Revolt
This 18th-century movement elevated human reason over faith, seeking to explain everything without God.
What is the Enlightenment?
Collective ownership run by the state; equality pursued through bureaucracy and control.
What is Socialism?
The pseudo‑science of improving humanity through selective breeding, central to the N.I.C.E.’s agenda.
What is Eugenics?
This vision of inevitable human improvement often becomes moral decay when God is removed.
What is Progressivism?
The moral order rooted in creation itself; the foundation for all true ethics, according to Lewis.
What is Natural Law?
This era’s obsession with logic alone rejected revelation, prefiguring the arrogance of the N.I.C.E.
What is the Age of Reason?
The ideology combining nationalism, corporatism, and state power—glorifying order over conscience.
What is Fascism?
The fusion of scientific arrogance with human self‑worship—the true religion of the N.I.C.E.
What is Scientific Humanism?
The faith in man-made perfection that inevitably collapses into disappointment—or dystopia
What is Utopianism?
Greek term meaning “Word” or “divine order”; destroyed when reason separates from God.
What is the Logos?
The explosion of discovery that birthed modern science—but later devolved into scientism, treating science as the only truth.
What is the Scientific Revolution?
The belief that the state should control nearly everything—the idol worshiped by the N.I.C.E.
What is Statism?
The idea that only physical matter exists—denying spirit and reducing man to chemistry and code.
What is Materialism?
The nightmare version of utopia—hell disguised as human progress.
Answer: What is a Dystopian society?
Lewis’s philosophical work calling moral relativism humanity’s suicide note—a direct prequel to That Hideous Strength.
What is The Abolition of Man?
The Enlightenment creed that all knowledge comes from the senses—later becoming blind faith in data without wisdom.
What is Empiricism?
A system where the state governs every thought and action—power total and absolute.
What is Totalitarianism?
The denial of free will, excusing evil as inevitability—“man as mechanism.”
What is Determinism?
The belief that humanity should transcend biology and morality—Lewis’s serpent’s promise retold in silicon.
What is Posthumanism?
Rule by scientists and experts instead of constitutional representative government or moral leaders—the N.I.C.E. incarnate.
What is Technocracy?
Auguste Comte’s creed that only scientific facts are real—the intellectual root of technocratic tyranny.
What is Positivism?
This belief in personal liberty and limited government turns to moral drift when severed from virtue.
What is Liberalism?
Turning living things into mere machines—optimizing nature and people alike until the soul is “inefficient.”
What is Mechanization?
The hypothetical moment when AI surpasses man’s intellect—a modern Tower of Babel.
What is the Singularity?
The process of humans “upgrading” humanity through tech while ignoring the soul.
What is Transhumanism?