Totalitarian Novels: Science and Bureaucracy in That Hideous Strength
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss how easy it is for nefarious forces to influence the "educated" before introducing Hillsdale College president Dr. Larry P. Arnn.
Totalitarian novels depict regimes that exert complete and pervasive control over the lives of their subjects. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and C.S. Lewis imagine the terrible possibilities of unchecked modern tyranny. Join Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale College students in this exploration of 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, and That Hideous Strength.
The course includes four lectures and four conversations, each about 30 minutes long. It is structured with one lecture about each book followed by a conversation between Dr. Arnn and the students about themes from that book.
Lewis exposes the dangers of substituting scientific expertise for wisdom and bureaucracy for politics as the ruling impulses of a nation. Mark and Jane Studdock discover the importance of marriage, family, friendship, and faith.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan, and I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with totalitarian novels. Lecture 8. That hideous strength. Science and bureaucracy. |
| 0:22.9 | In lecture 8, we turn back to Dr. Arn having a discussion with his students, and one of his |
| 0:27.4 | students highlights a passage that's very interesting and has a great question about it. |
| 0:32.6 | We find two of our characters who are in the NICE and are trying to deceive the people of England |
| 0:38.9 | by writing two op-eds in preparation for a riot that they are about to perpetrate. These |
| 0:45.0 | op-eds describe the riot. Of course, they're being written in advance. One is for the popular |
| 0:50.3 | newspaper, which has kind of plain language and plain expressions and common sense in it. |
| 0:57.5 | And the other op-ed is for the sophisticated newspaper. It features jargon and high-flutin |
| 1:04.6 | language and abstract concepts and is really much less weighty than the popular sentiment. |
| 1:11.6 | These opinion pieces are written by Mark Studic, who's a junior writer in the NICE, and Ferry Hardcastle, who's the head of the secret police. |
| 1:20.6 | And Mark says, it's really hard to convince these intelligent, well-educated people of the regime's priorities, the institute's |
| 1:28.8 | priorities, and Ferry Hardcastle says, oh, no, it's much harder to deceive the common people. |
| 1:34.2 | These educated folks will believe anything we put in front of them as long as we make them feel |
| 1:38.2 | smarter. |
| 1:39.3 | And you can see that this question actually hits closer to home. |
| 1:48.0 | We've seen this in the universities across the United States today where they've become sort of centers of propaganda and it makes you |
| 1:55.6 | question, are the quote-unquote educated people more susceptible to believing propaganda. And I think as long as that |
| 2:03.8 | education is devoid from nature and from reality, I think that that is true because you start |
| 2:12.3 | building these ideologies that are separate from nature that don't listen to common sense and therefore you are |
| 2:20.2 | capable of believing crazy things. Yeah, if you go onto our website and look at the study guide for |
| 2:26.3 | this lecture, you'll see in this question we have educated in scare quotes. That's because we're |
| 2:31.7 | trying to point out what Lewis is pointing out in that |
... |
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