The Essential Vice is alive and well and thriving on government programs

From Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. 

I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

Whether Christianity is different from others in this regard is not the argument I focus on here.  However, that Pride is an abhorrent sin that is central in Christianity is hardly in dispute.

Acknowledging this leads to a different thought.

It is reasonably widely recognized that government (Leviathan) has to constantly justify its intrusions into the lives of citizens and that one of the chief mechanisms for this justification is essentially propaganda, and more specifically catastrophe propaganda.  Eric Hoffer treats this with insight in True Believers.  There is always a crisis which requires government to solve.

Mere Christianity was published in 1944, 79 years ago.  But the issue on which Lewis is commenting is with us today at an even greater magnitude.

What are some of the panics created or fostered by government in the past five years?  I'm not talking about about failures to deliver expected services such as East Palestine, Ohio.  

I am thinking of the thirty and more year drumbeat of panic and fear around Anthropogenic Global Warming, a fear-mongering intended to justify massive governmental intervention in the economy and the abridgment of freedoms and civil rights.  Then there was the related panic dubbed Peak Oil, part of a larger effort to restrict access to energy which powers increased prosperity.  Of course there was the three-year Covid debacle.  The fifty-year War on Drugs.  The sixty-year War on Poverty.  The ten-year war on Systemic Racism.  The fifty-year search for Social Justice.  The thirty-year obsession with Income Inequality.

This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the litany of propaganda to justify otherwise unjustifiable actions.

But strip away all the noise and shouting and what are we dealing with in all these instances?  Global warming, drugs, poverty, inequality - they are all inordinately complex and always evolving chaotic systems with unclear origins, unclear causal mechanisms, weird tipping points, obscure feedback mechanisms, and unclear dynamics.  We understand some small aspects of those systems but never in totality and certainly not enough to warrant interventions with any confidence that the interventions will work.  

Indeed, the long history of government response to all these issues is almost uniform failure.  Certainly actions are taken.  Something is being done.  But solving the problems?  No.

What does this sound like?  

Government trying to solve problems which it does not understand is perhaps possibly forgivable.  But government insisting that it knows what needs to be done and then mandating its solution against the wishes of citizenry, that is the apotheosis of Pride.  

It is the very definition of Pride, Lewis's Essential Vice.