The first of these tendencies is the growing exaltation of the collective and the growing indifference to persons. . . . if one were inventing a language for "sinless beings who loved their neighbours as themselves" it would be appropriate to have no words for "my", "I", and "other personal pronouns and inflexions". In other words . . . no difference between two opposite solutions of the problem of selfishness: between love (which is a relation between persons) and the abolition of persons. Nothing but a Thou can love and a Thou can exist only for an I. A society in which no one was conscious of himself as a person over against other persons, where none could say "I love you", would, indeed, be free from selfishness, but not through love. It would be "unselfish" as a bucket of water is unselfish. . . . [In such a case] the individual does not matter. And therefore when we really get going . . . it will not matter what you do to an individual.
Secondly, we have the emergence of "the Party" in the modern sense -- the Fascists, Nazis, or Communists. What distinguishes this from the political parties of the nineteenth century is the belief of its members that they are not merely trying to carry out a programme, but are obeying an important force: that Nature, or Evolution, or the Dialectic, or the Race, is carrying them on. This tends to be accompanied by two beliefs . . . the belief that the process which the Party embodies is inevitable, and the belief that the forwarding of this process is the supreme duty and abrogates all ordinary moral laws. In this state of mind men can become devil-worshippers in the sense that they can now honour, as well as obey, their own vices. All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust of power appear as the commands of a great superpersonal force that they can be exercised with self-approval (On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, 78-79, bold italicized in original).
Lewis understood that without the necessary natural-law framing of social, legal, and political culture, mankind would no longer be recognized as worthy of rights or even common decency, but instead would be left defenseless to any and all forms of oppression:
Our courts, I agree, "have traditionally represented the common man and the common's view of morality." It is true that we must extend the term "common man" to cover Locke, Grotius, Hooker, Pynet, Aquinas, Justinian, the Stoics, and Aristotle, but I have no objection to that; in one most important, and to me glorious, sense they were all common men. But that whole tradition is tied up with ideas of free-will, responsibility, rights, and the rule of nature. Can it survive in Courts whose penal practice daily subordinates "desert" to therapy and the protection of society? . . . For if I am not deceived, we are all at this moment helping to decide whether humanity shall retain all that has hitherto made humanity worth preserving, or whether we must slide down into sub-humanity imagined by Mr. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and partially realized in Hitler's Germany ("The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," 299-300).
We hence have the basis for the scientistic "brave new world" in which the citizen and government become slave and master, exactly what Lewis critiqued in his essay "Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State." And, of course, what all of this means is the elimination of what makes mankind human in the first place. As Lewis explained the problem, "The question has become whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting? Let us make no mistake about the sting. . . . To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilized man" (p. 316).
This theme recurs throughout Lewis's work, including in both his fiction and his nonfiction. For example, in the third volume of his "Space Trilogy," That Hideous Strength, he describes a disturbing world in which a scientific elite creates a totalitarian system in order coercively to engineer a new mankind via the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (or N.I.C.E. for short). The bureaucrats and planners of N.I.C.E. are exactly what he earlier attacked in his masterly book, The Abolition of Man.
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