The Chains We Choose: C.S. Lewis’s Warning for America

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In this episode, we delve into C.S. Lewis’s allegory from The Great Divorce, where a ghost clings to a puppet symbolizing performative victimhood. Drawing parallels to contemporary society, we explore how modern culture often elevates grievance over healing, turning pain into identity and empathy into moral coercion. We discuss the dangers of allowing resentment to define us and the importance of choosing joy and forgiveness over perpetual outrage. Join us as we reflect on Lewis’s insights and their relevance to today’s cultural and political climate.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Conservative Opinion Podcast
brought to you byConservativeOpinioncom.
Now here's your host, jordanRickards.
Hi everybody, and welcome againto the Conservative Opinion
Podcast.
This is your host, jordanRickards, and today I want to
talk to you about a message,really a warning, that the great

(00:22):
theologian CS Lewis had formodern America, inspired from
something he wrote 80 years agoin his masterpiece the Great
Divorce.
There is a specific scene inthat book wherein a ghost of a
man, a pitiful, hunched dwarf,visits the outskirts of heaven.
He drags behind him a toweringpuppet on a leash, a
melodramatic figure who speaksin polished tones and flourishes

(00:59):
, cannot speak without it, andwhen his wife greets him, not
with blame but with joy, herecoils, for joy would unmask
him.
Joy demands the death of thepuppet and so, choosing
bitterness over healing, heshrinks into nothing.
I can think of no better imagefor the age in which we live.
Our politics has become atheater of puppets on chains,

(01:21):
each group dragging along itsown carefully constructed
grievance, shouting not so muchto be heard as to be seen.
Victimhood has become currencyand outrage a form of capital.
We are not content to beinjured, we must be perpetually
injurable.
We must brandish our wounds,real or imagined, like flags,
and we must never allow them toclose lest we be expected to act

(01:43):
whole again.
There was a time when theproper response to hardship was
fortitude.
Now it is spectacle.
We reward not those who enduresilently, but those who amplify
their pain to the highest pitch.
Political parties trade inthese grievances like brokers in
resentment.
Each insists that its sufferingis unique, irreparable and,

(02:07):
above all, unrecognized.
Lewis understood that pity, likeso many virtues, could be
twisted into a vice.
In its truest form, pity is thedesire to share another's
burden and lift them up into joy.
It is a movement outward, fromfullness toward need.
Sarah, the glorified woman inthe scene, offers that kind of
pity, pure and radiant.

(02:28):
But her husband, the dwarf,demands a counterfeit, a pity
that serves not the sufferer butthe sufferer's pride.
It is no longer I suffer andyou comfort, but I suffer and so
you must suffer too.
Such pity is a kind of moralblackmail.
It makes the other's lovecontingent on their misery.

(02:48):
It corrupts mercy intosubmission.
This is the trap we fall intowhen pain becomes identity.
If I am defined by my wounds,then healing becomes a threat.
If you love me truly, you mustnever be happy if I am miserable
, and if you are happy withoutme, then clearly you never cared
at all.
That logic now governs wholemovements.

(03:09):
We no longer say rejoice withthose who rejoice and weep with
those who weep.
But weep always, or you arecomplicit.
The result is not solidaritybut stasis.
Nothing can be resolved becauseresolution would mean releasing
the chain.
America may be especiallyvulnerable to this temptation.
In a land so materiallyprosperous, pity comes cheaply.

(03:31):
We have been trained, rightly,to look upon the suffering with
compassion.
But where it is easy to feelpity, it is also easy to exploit
pity.
And that is precisely what hashappened.
What began as a plea forcompassion has become a demand
for recompense and then anaccusation of guilt.
Feel sorry for me hastransformed into I am owed and

(03:51):
finally into you are the causeof my suffering.
It is the ultimate form ofplaying pitiful, not merely
inviting help, but indicting joyitself.
This is how compassiondegenerates into entitlement,
and entitlement, when resisted,becomes wrath.
We should always be anempathetic people.
Love does demand a listeningear, but love also demands

(04:12):
discernment.
When compassion becomescompulsion, when empathy demands
agreement with lies, then lovemust take the harder road, the
road that says I hear you, Icare for you, but I will not be
manipulated by you.
To do otherwise is not kindness,it is cowardice, it is moral
suicide.
That is why Christ told hisdisciples to be as innocent as

(04:34):
doves and as wise as serpents.
Innocence is not ignorance, itis moral purity, not mental
blindness.
We are called to betender-hearted but clear-eyed,
to love without losing our heads.
To weep with the suffering, yes, but not to worship the puppet
they carry.
But here, perhaps, is thedeepest tragedy and the most

(04:56):
sobering truth of Lewis'sparable.
The dwarf could have let go.
The chain was not welded, thepuppet was not fused to his arm,
he was not imprisoned, he wasclutching his prison.
The joy Sarah offered was notbehind a locked gate, it was in
front of him, arms open.
He needed only to drop thechain and walk into glory.
But he could not imagine a selfapart from his suffering, and

(05:19):
so he chose it over heaven.
That, as Lewis wrote in theProblem of Pain, is the great
horror of hell.
That, as he put it, the gatesof hell are locked from the
inside.
No one is forced to stay.
They simply cannot imagineleaving.
They would rather reign inmisery than kneel in joy.
That is what we risk, as anation and as individuals, to so

(05:42):
entwine ourselves with ourbitterness, our resentment, our
sense of being owed that wewould rather keep it than be
free.
True joy costs less than wethink.
It is victimhood that demandseverything.
What the great divorce shows usis that this path leads not to
salvation but to shrinking.
The soul that cannot forgive,cannot let go, cannot laugh,

(06:04):
cannot yield.
Such a soul must collapse in onitself, not because it was
wrong to suffer, but because itchose to become its suffering.
The dwarf might have walkedupright, he might have laughed,
embraced, been transformed, butthat would have required
surrender, and surrender,especially of our grievances, is
the one sacrifice modern manrefuses.

(06:25):
We may yet be saved, but notuntil we let the puppet fall
silent.
Thanks for listening.