Since I've seen this phenomenon in action today, it struck me how interesting it is that C. S. Lewis was writing about it in 1959. He describes it better than I can. (Italics are his. Screwtape is speaking from Satan's point of view and telling the new tempters how to succeed with mediocre sinners)
"Aristotle's question: whether 'democratic behavior' means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. You make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political idea to a factual belief that all men are equal. As a result you can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the "magic word" (Democracy), would be universally derided."
"The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you. He does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the human refuses to accept."
"And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others. He suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food. 'They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic.'"
Under the name of Envy it has been known to the humans for thousands of years. The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it - make it respectable and even laudable - by the incantatory use of the work Democratic."
"Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature, because it might prevent their Being like Folks; that people who would really wish to be - and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be - honest, chaste, or temperate, refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend again the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals."
"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel infreior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences must be disguised. Examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all citizens can go to universities whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. Let them, for example, make mud-pies and call it modelling." [no child left behind? NYS has lowered its requirements and passing grade for regents exams making it easier to get even the lowest grade]
"In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education, when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? The teachers will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching."
"All education becoming state education is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I'm as good as you. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. As an English politician remarked not long ago, 'A democracy does not want great men.' "
"One Democracy was surprised lately when it found that Russia has got ahead of it in science. What a delicious specimen of human blindness! If the whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort of excellence, why did they expect their scientists to excel?"
"I'm as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind, which necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven."
"Different types of Pharisees..... were most antagonistic to one another on earth. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and everything the Enemy really is or commands. How they hated each other up there where the sun shone! All said and done my friends, it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by 'religion' ever vanishes from the Earth. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the alter."
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