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QOTD: C.S. Lewis on Picturing Hell
“We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” – C.S. Lewis
I guess this means we must picture Hell as Twitter.
Published in General
SPOT ON.
I was thinking of Washington DC…
Sartre, probably.
I was thinking of Hollywood…
Well, Jack Dorsey is what I always pictured Beelzebub to look like…
I am a complete tourist wrt Twitter. I visit the train wreck every so often to look at the victims.
Washington D.C. as twitter in real life. I think that is among the most polemical and imaginative argument for libertarianism ever.
Oh, I thought you were talking about Congress for a moment.
Crimenutely. During my long and distinguished career (LOL), I worked in three distinct and very different fields: those of academia, law, and healthcare.
But when it comes to Lewis’s definition of Hell, and in terms of lots of people being concerned about “[their] own dignity and advancement,” with a “grievance,” and living the “deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment,” it can be hard to tell them apart.
Yes to Twitter, though. And lots of social media and networking.
My god, he is good. Envy, self-importance, resentment. Could there be any three things better designed to trap you in place, keep you where you are. You’re kind of finished, and done in by your own decision. That’s you. Trapped, spitting, twisting in rage.
In kindness, humility, forgiveness, your whole world opens up again. There is no weakness there, only a letting go. An ability to think straight again. You can look at the world and laugh again, happily not cynically. These other people have no power over you.
I know Twitter only from the references made to it, so I can’t judge from experience. But man, it sounds awful. You gotta just walk away from that stuff, man. There is nothing good that is going to come of it.
Except possibly a post-mortem after it’s dead. Take the experience apart, analyse it. Try to learn from it, why it was attractive, why it was ultimately so destructive. There might be some good insights in that discussion.
You may think it’s hackneyed or lame, but I try to think of this poem every day:
Anyway
People are often unreasonable, illogical,
and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, People may accuse you
of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone
could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today,
people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway
Author unknown
I have very much enjoyed Twitter, as I found early on two or three groups of kindred spirits and we simply follow each others’ sensible discussion points. Occasionally there is a troll or two, so we all do our best to ignore them. (Ignoring a troll will dissolve them as quickly as Dorothy’s bucket of water poured on the witch dissolved her.)
Alas and alack, I have been banned recently. My crime was not any of the factual and semi factual stuff I have said about vaccines, but the one post I made regarding having been injured by the swine flu vax back in 1976.
Apparently before a person posts on Twitter, one must make sure if one’s personal history jibes with Jack Dorsey’s approved discussion points.
My dad was found of reciting poems he’d learned in school, to fit the occasion. I don’t remember this one in particular but it reminds me of several others he learned as a grammar school kid.
He also had a treasure trove of nonsense poems on the order of “I saw a man who wasn’t there…” Which were very healing to a daughter with a scraped knee, or a fourth grade boyfriend who picked on her, or not at all.
Darling, there has got to be a better way for you to connect with your friends, just as satisfying. This Twitter crap has got to go. Your last message should be “meet me over at _____. I’m outsies.”
F*** Jack Dorsey, and his ilk. The best thing you can do for him is to let him come to realize the folly of his presumption about free-thinking people. Get out now. Maybe there’s a chance he will come back to humanity after he sees what he has done.
Sorry, Darling may have been too intimate – it might be the gin. I meant “Dear friend, who’s writing I enjoy very much . . . “
I heavy object to you implying that humanity is good.
Twitter is what you make of it in many ways. There are some fantastic, interesting people on it along with the really awful ones.
I follow specific people for news of the day, humor, etc. and block/mute what I don’t like. If I find myself too drawn into some stressed out nonsense, I know it’s time for a social media break. Staying connected with family and a few friends — and my faith — helps keep me grounded.
Twitter?
From this description, it sounds like Hell is feminism, and critical race theory, and the whole strange Wokeist/Social Justice Warrior thing.
In Perelandra C.S. Lewis described the Devil as the angel assigned to rule Terra, thereby implying that the Earth is the Hell of his fictional universe. Maybe he thought the Earth is the Hell of our Universe as well.
I thought this was by Mother Teresa.
Marshall McLuhan famously asserted that technology in turning the world into a Global Village. But if this is true, wouldn’t it also follow that the same technology is re-creating some of the worst aspects of the real, traditional village?
I developed this thought in my post Freedom, Social Media, and the Village.
It is widely believed that was the intent of McLuhan’s maxim. There was no privacy in a medieval village, and individuals enjoyed precious few rights. The most feared person in the village was the local gossip who could ruin a person’s reputation with a simple accusation, and even get them burned at the stake. Urbanization freed people from that paradigm as it helped to bring the line between public and private more into focus, and McLuhan saw that electronic communications technology was again blurring that line.
At least, so goes the argument. I don’t have any citations to back up the claim that this was McLuhan’s intention.
This is where I usually mention that I agree with Hillary Clinton’s book title, that it takes a village to raise a child. The problem is that her idea of a village is a totalitarian police state.
However, I didn’t notice this until now, but a totalitarian police state is almost the same thing as a global village. I wonder if you can have the latter without the former, given what villages are like.
With a traditional village, if things get too out of hand you can run away and start a new life in the city. But in the global village there is no other place to go. We see this in the way the denizens of Big Tech went on a seek and destroy mission to root out any places where conversations were taking place away from their watchful eye. And already there are some people complaining that January 6 people can still have private conversations that aren’t being monitored. (They probably haven’t heard of Siri and Alexa. Watch for them to promote mandatory use of those devices.)
That’s a very good post, by the way, and the comments are good, too. I’ve added Peter Drucker’s book to my Kindle queue. The Chesterton quote is one I had not encountered before.
My own effort today to escape the global village was in the choice of a blood pressure instrument. I have an older Panasonic instrument that is pretty accurate, but is no longer available. It bugged me that it didn’t timestamp my records, and had no way to export the data to a file. I had told my sister (who doesn’t want those features) that I’d give the Panasonic unit to her if I could find a replacement that was just as accurate and which would let me export my data. To my horror I found that all the bluetooth units want to send your data to the cloud, and at least one popular brand insists that you enter complete health information in order for the app to work. And there is no sign that any of them will let you export your data from the app to a spreadsheet. I could have kept looking, but I’ve already spent too much time at this. So I gave up and ordered a unit that timestamps my data, but doesn’t have any connectivity. I’ll continue to transfer my data to a spreadsheet manually, but now in batches instead of every time I use the instrument, and I’ll give up on the idea of electronic connectivity.
C.S. Lewis is watching and commenting on 2021.
There is nothing new under the sun.
In a weird way, that gives me more hope than I had 2.5 minutes ago.
Both.