Author Topic: For their own good  (Read 1120 times)

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Offline Anne Bonney

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For their own good
« on: November 28, 2007, 03:01:36 PM »
I found this while wandering around http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-gulags.html  in the Children's Gulags section.  Its the full quote from Lewis and I thought it quite appropriate.


"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience...

Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult...

To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better', is to be treated as a human person made in God's image...

And when they are wicked the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before...

The new Nero will approach us with the silky manners of a doctor, and though all will be in fact as compulsory as the tunica molesta or Smithfield or Tyburn, all will go on within the unemotional therapeutic sphere where words like 'right' and 'wrong' or 'freedom' and 'slavery' are never heard...

Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic...

But because they are 'treatment, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow-experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice...

But we ought long ago to have learned our lesson. We should be too old now to be deceived by those humane pretensions which have served to usher in every cruelty of the revolutionary period in which we live. These are the 'precious balms' which will 'break our heads'."

C. S. Lewis, "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment"
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
traight, St. Pete, early 80s
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The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents-- because they have a tame child-creature in their house.  ~~  Frank Zappa