We in the West have been thrown into an “Objective Room.” The N.I.C.E. training of our day is administered in university classrooms, mainstream media outlets, corporate trainings, and propaganda from the entertainment industry. What “instinctive preferences” and “human reactions” must be eliminated by the N.I.C.E. powers of our day?

Mark Studdock has become something of an archetype in our day, with many imitating his journey from darkness to light. Who, you ask, is Mark Studdock? He is a character invented by C.S. Lewis–a young professor at the United Kingdom’s Bracton College with ambitions of joining an elite cadre of culture-shapers promising a better world, an organization known as the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E). Studdock, of course, was born not in the United Kingdom, but in the literary imagination of Lewis. He is a protagonist of Lewis’s brilliant book entitled That Hideous Strength.

Why has the fictional character of Mark Studdock become an archetype of our age, even for those who have never heard of him? His story explains our age. His college is a microcosm of today’s Western world. There is the old guard, ever on “the wrong side of history,” clinging to their traditions to obstruct the noble plans of Bracton’s “Progressive Element.” (This Progressive Element is essentially what Jonathan Haidt has described as “Social Justice University” in which the telos of education is not truth, but social change.)

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