I haven't put this up for quite some time. It is more true than ever.
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.” CS Lewis That Hideous Strength 1945
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He worked among them, and knew who he was talking about.
On the other hand, when Mark stops at a pub on his way back to Edgestow, now in the process of being emptied of all ordinary people:
Something like a terror appeared to have been established in the town. "They tell me there were two hundred arrests yesterday," said the landlord. "Ah," said the young man. "They're hard cases, those N.I.C.E. police, every one of them. They put the wind up my old Dad proper, I tell 'ee." He ended with a laugh. "'Taint the police so much as the workmen by what I hear," said another. "They never ought to have brought those Welsh and Irish." But that was about as far as the criticism went. What struck Mark deeply was the almost complete absence of indignation among the speakers, or even of any distinct sympathy with the refugees. Everyone present knew of at least one outrage in Edgestow; but all agreed that these refugees must be greatly exaggerating. "It says in this morning's paper that things are pretty well settling down," said the landlord. "That's right," agreed the others. "There'll always be some who get awkward," said the potatofaced man. "What's the good of getting awkward?" asked another, "it's got to go on. You can't stop it." "That's what I say," said the Landlord. Fragments of articles which Mark himself had written drifted to and fro. Apparently he and his kind had done their work well; Miss Hardcastle had rated too high the resistance of the working classes to propaganda.
Not being in the elite is no safeguard.
I had forgotten that section. An excellent corrective.
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