The Elites Are Easy to Gull

A quote from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis arrived in my inbox yesterday. If you haven’t read it or the rest of the trilogy, I highly recommend you get a hold of them. But back to the quote. One of the protagonists, Mark Studdock is being asked to write propaganda pieces for N.I.C.E (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments). He suggests that the people who read the educated newspapers will not fall for the deception. Here’s the reply he gets from the butch Miss Hardcastle.

Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.

Surely Hardcastle is correct. We have seen this play out throughout the Shamdemic. Ordinary folks who pay no heed to the ‘elite’ classes, who get on with life, enjoy their sport and have no interest in Beltway politics are largely unaffected by the endless propaganda that’s on the 6:00 news, the daily papers and social media applications like Twitter. They don’t see it; they aren’t interested.

In beautiful irony, those who sneer and mock these ordinary people as unsophisticated rubes, those who think themselves ‘the intelligentsia’ have proven themselves to be ridiculously naive and stupid. Hardcastle is correct. Most of them have believed anything and everything fed to them. Whatever our lying media have told them, like new entrant pupils overawed by their first teacher, they have believed.

First, they believed that Ardern’s plan to keep out a tricky virus would work. Two weeks would flatten the curve.

Then they believed that the actual plan was to keep Covid out until a vaccine was available.

They believed masks don’t work. Until they were told they did.

They believed that the vaccine would stop them from getting the virus. Then they believed it would prevent transmission.

They believed vaccine mandates would save us. They believed vaccine passes would prevent the spread.

When these measures failed, they believed they would be better off once they got Covid than the unvaccinated.

When they got really sick, they tweeted about how much worse it would have been had they been unvaccinated. And when the dust settles, most of these credulous dupes will believe that what we did was necessary and saved us from a horrible fate.

They will believe anything.