That Hideous Strength and the Epic Boondoggle

That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, is the creative companion to the more utilitarian

non-fiction work Abolition of Man, which originated from a series of lectures Lewis gave during

World War II at the University of Durham as part of the Riddell lecture series, concerning the

relationship between religion and the contemporary development of thought.1 Both literary

works, in this regard, address the relationship between objective morality and the collapse of

man. This threat persists today in the prevailing form of post-modernism, which denies objective

morality and relies on the strength of emotion and personal conviction to determine what is good,

beautiful, and true. Ergo, when moral duty is denied, Lewis cautions, tyranny will flourish at the

behest of science, and science will be pursued as a mechanism for control rather than

understanding. Lewis’ character, John Withers, Director of the N.I.C.E who possesses unjust

consolidation of power and authority in a post-modern society uses his position to leverage

propaganda and violate the value of human life in an industrialized state which becomes, as

Lewis warns: the abolition of man. This allegory is markedly similar to former U.S. Presidential

Advisor and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony

Fauci, who, over the course of his fifty-year career in public service, engineered acts of tyranny

against the American public and the world. Dr. Fauci assembled and leveraged propaganda by

manipulating scientific studies that violated civil liberties, and destroyed lives in the interest of

controlling human nature to his personal benefit, much like John Withers and the N.I.C.E in That