RE: https://cyberpunk.lol/@mxchara/117152288816219820

(coughs) In connexion with this strange business, and lots of helpful advice and commentary from respondents to my thread about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I've been watching a YouTube video from Strange Æons all about it. It's definitely further persuasive evidence that there's scarcely any point in reading the thing.

https://youtu.be/TKMzmOYcEUE

She goes into some detail on explaining the cultural milieu around Yudkowsky, who seems to have been a rascal from the start, hoping he'd get money coming in.

(more)

There's fascinating details in there, but I'd like to make this overall remark: the extra-special weight which the #tech elites have given to that magic word #intelligence calls for the harshest of scrutiny and intellectual dismantling, in my opinion.

These folks are wrong and they must surely kinda know that, which has driven them towards a villain that #CSLewis feared: casting away the notion that anything has meaning.

(cont'd)

I must give Lewis a tiny bit of credit for depicting such things so convincingly, but I suspect that That Hideous Strength derives its verisimilitude from the rift in Lewis's own psyche.

I don't know how else to say this but I must give full vent to my fear: I'm worried about the stories I've heard of Lewis entertaining children at "The Kilns".

(cont'd)

I do not trust that man. Do you understand the degree to which I do not trust that Clive Staples Lewis would have behaved himself?

But I digress. Yudkowsky like Lewis also has some clear psychological issues but they're right on the surface of his writing, which seems largely to comprise Eliezer's / Harry Potter's snap-of-the-finger judgments about the 'intelligence' of everyone else in the tale.

(etc.)

It's further evidence for a hypothesis that I've been cogitating, a simple one: #intelligence and #IQ have become like a ritualized, formalized method for #tech geeklords to intellectualize their own emotions.

Do they dislike something at first glimpse, first taste, first tiniest bit of experience? It's "dumb". "Nobody" with "intelligence" could possibly like that thing.

(etc.)

So now, "intelligence" is their yardstick for all emotions. They rationalize their sexual attractions and detestations (equally emotionally satisfying to a true dark intellectual) in terms of liking smart vs. stupid people. And then there's the magical word meritocracy, one of the many linguistic hiding-places for whıte supremacy.

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RE: https://cyberpunk.lol/@mxchara/117154196443428838

Someone in our headspace felt the need to punctuate "I do not trust that man" with a spoken reiteration. Aha! Caught another one. I'd like to get attentive enough to measure the timing because that's evidence you see. It enables one to estimate distance because hey presto! the speed of light is the fastest any message can travel by known physics, so it's the obvious yardstick.

We must map out our headspace carefully, by degrees, fixing certain noödetic landmarks (if I might coin the term "noödetic" as a portmanteau of "noösphere" and "geodetic". hopefully the Greek usage lines up right on that one 😬)

Sagitta Luminis. Kaname Madoka is always around, somehow, just a whisper and then she's gone again. She has helped me through some very bad moments.

(cont'd)

(Sagitta Luminis came up on the YouTube shuffle, since we regard the inordinately timely jukebox or blast of radio from the movies as a legitimate phenomenon, although as with all such things one must dance a little minuet with Confirmation Bias, so full of tricks and traps.)

Anyway! uh, yeah, someone in our headspace is prodding us onward I suspect. Surely there's a thousand suspects for this one...why do I suspect there's a lot of quiet sub rosa muttering in the highest echelons of Academe about the Jack Lewis Problem?

(cont'd)

I say this because while searching for something else I accidentally turned up an article that I should have bookmarked, though probably there's a copy of it on one of my four smart phones (and I keep hoping a lost one will turn up) and I should finally sort through all those files and title them properly (or toss them.) There's so many PDFs of this and that on my smart phones.

(cont'd)

It breaks my heart, it really does, to render such a judgment. I respected Dr. Lindskoog greatly. She had a keen interest in academic fraud (as do I) and we exchanged correspondence about the Piltdown Hoax, and I learned quite a bit from her.

She treated me as a peer at a time when...nobody else did, almost.

(cont'd)

Anyway! The Dark Tower is clearly meant to follow up upon the themes which #CSLewis emphasized in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man. He feared that scientists would morally anaesthetize themselves and head off in the direction of the occult. I don't think this fear was entirely out of band, either; surely Lewis had certain real-life models for his villains.

(cont'd)

Another (much better) writer, H. G. Wells, wrote a memorable villain of such a type, in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Lewis was trying to write a sort of Christian commentary or panegyric in response to Wells's writing, which (as I understand) Lewis did not like because of the moral callousness on display. Did he think Wells wasn't condemning such things enough in his writing?

(etc.)

@mxchara you know, I still@have a kindle copy of that hideous strength. Should I bother to read it?

@KaylinEvergreen I will say very tentatively: yes, but only if you're specifically interested in picking up the vibes about Lewis himself that peep through, and I'd love your commentary on the writing, but...it'll be rough going I suspect. Lewis is misogynistic as fuck but he goes awry when he creates one of the most spectacularly commanding villains I've ever seen in Major "Fairy" Hardcastle, his idea of a butch lesbian police-captain type

@KaylinEvergreen Surely all of Lewis's satyr energy was throbbing when he wrote her because goddamn it, she actually works as a character. She ends up being an excellent foil for the villains. It's almost sad that she goes down in such a stupid way. (She just sort of loses it and starts shooting up the place for no particular reason)

Back to The Dark Tower. It's like I don't actually want to write about the thing itself. It looms up in my mind's eye because of course it's THAT Dark Tower, the archetypal one of which Tolkien's Dark Tower is the most popular fictive instance. (I've not read anything about Stephen King's Dark Tower, he's a bit too gory for me but I must be brave about these things if I am to learn from them.)

(cont'd)

King is capable of writing with great power, though, better than Lewis was able to summon.

The bad fiction of #CSLewis relies upon getting its verisimilitude from his physical surroundings. Lewis had a nasty habit of writing real-life persons into his fiction, like Aleister Crowley does in Moonchild (yeah I read all of that one and I know who made me) but in The Dark Tower he goes a little further.

(cont'd)

Lewis dares to have his fiction intersect with one of the most powerful places on Earth. Let me quote Wikipedia here:

After a while MacPhee, a character who appears in That Hideous Strength (though here he is a Scot, not an Irishman), points out that the "Dark Tower" is in fact a replica of the new Cambridge University Library. This suggests Othertime is the far future, with a replica of an ancient monument being constructed.

The Dark Tower, the Dark Tower of #CSLewis, IS the Cambridge University Library.

(cont'd)

That Hideous Strength comments upon academia through the medium of a fictional college called Bracton, for which Lewis writes an amusing false biography (rather like Lovecraft there.) But in The Dark Tower, Clive Staples Lewis is bold enough (at first) to go after a much bigger target.

I'm not surprised that the work never got finished. The nature of the fiction itself hints at the reason for this.

(cont'd)

Aha! I have found it. I remembered more than enough to recover the article about #CSLewis. Apparently he had life-long nightmares.

His Dark Materials: C. S. Lewis's Nightmares as Inspiration

Luke William Mills
Christianity & Literature
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 74, Number 2, June 2025
pp. 202-216
10.1353/chy.2025.a967575

(cont'd)

"His Dark Materials" indeed. I haven't read The Golden Compass all the way through yet. Perhaps I ought to start reading...oh, anything at all would be a change.

What was wrong with #CSLewis?

I suggest that the entire academic and intellectual community of #Britain needs to address this question. They need to explain themselves.

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Anyway I think that about does it, except for one more general question to sum up the whole bloody mess: why has anyone ever lived with the plain obvious truth that Clive Staples Lewis should NOT have been making himself into a Christian hero AND retain his academic standing? He tried to have it both ways.

A remix of the Terminator 2 opening is playing through YouTube shuffle right now...

(cont'd)

I suggest that's a crowning jewel among the hundreds of questions that could be asked about #CSLewis and the whole confounded cult of C. S. Lewis that's been sustained over many decades...and from such sordid beginnings that feel a lot more like a crime or a U.S. psy-op than a boon to the world. It was not good that Walter Hooper turned C. S. Lewis into a spectacle and the grist for a million Christian grifters.

(cont'd)

The U.S. evangelical Christian community had this coming. They tried to make Clive Staples Lewis into a lot of silly things: the Apostle to the Skeptics, the greatest children's writer who ever lived, the great lover and romantic star of the Shadowlands pas de deux, the man who saw Jesus and was saved by him because of a couple conversations with his literary buddies (one of them was even famous! Tollens...wait no that's a chemist.)

(cont'd)

Even Tolkien's star must come second to that of Clive Staples Lewis in the eyes of U.S. and U.K. Christendom. I suggest that without his example Jo Rowling would never have written Harry Potter as her attempt at a first book. She was copying the example of #Narnia, which openly talks of magic even though it's a Christian allegory.

(cont'd)

By the way the question of whether The Chronicles of Narnia is a Christian allegory (answer: yes) has been a sore point with U.S. "Christian intellectuals" and other admirers of C. S. Lewis. They'll deny it and argue from authority but they won't ever address the point of how transparent the allegory is, especially when Lewis decides to depict Islam.

(etc.)

Lewis has been puffed up this big, and I'm happy enough to supply the puncturing. I have personal reasons of course because, like Dr. Lindskoog I expect, I had my period of thinking the world of Lewis, crediting him for changing our lives. I can't deny that Jack Lewis has changed my life! Hoo yeah, that's...not really possible with us.

(cont'd)

The Division Bell now, the album that echoes with sadness about the blowup with Roger Waters.

Do you know what that word means? I had to look it up. It was a bell rung in British parliamentary procedures to signal, okay you can stop confabbing and split up again according to who's on what side, and vote.

(cont'd)

There'd be one mass of politicians all milling about and arguing, and then the division bell would ring and they'd all get about their business again. Order from chaos with the peal of a bell.

The bell tolls for the reputation of Clive Staples Lewis. I suggest that he's committed some very damaging crimes against literature and has many sins for which, in some fashion, he ought to face at last.

~Chara of Pnictogen