They are known by different names like the Gnostics, the Cognoscenti, the Illuminati, the Enlightened, the Inner Circle, or the Elite, but these names all designate a small group of thinkers who imagine themselves in possession of a higher knowledge and superior wisdom. The great light of their mind surpasses the common sense or average intelligence of the ordinary person. Advanced thinkers privy to hidden matters or secret knowledge that normal human intelligence cannot fathom, they comprise a privileged group determined to advance their agenda for the improvement of mankind. In the ancient world they dabbled in astrology, alchemy and magic and belonged to a select circle of intelligentsia who comprehended the inscrutable mysteries that eluded the common man. The Weird Sisters in Macbeth claimed prophetic knowledge of Macbeth’s future (“King thou shalt be”) and reassured him of invincibility: no man born of woman shall harm Macbeth—so called buried secrets that never before entered Macbeth’s mind. This forbidden knowledge led to Macbeth’s tragedy as he listened to the strange riddles of the witches speaking in equivocations like “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The higher knowledge that promises illumination offers nothing more than darkness or ignorance.
St. Augustine belonged to the sect of the Manichaean heretics whose renowned leader Faustus acquired the reputation of great philosopher privy to divine knowledge. The Manicheans reassured Augustine that Faustus’s logical explanations would address all of his questions which “would be very easily dealt with and very lucidly explained.” But Augustine’s honest questions received elusive answers, and the eminent philosopher never satisfied Augustine’s mind with the truth he was seeking: “However, my thirst could not be relieved by expensive drinking vessels and a well-dressed waiter.” Like Macbeth, Augustine consulted an oracle whose words proved to be lies. By theorizing that two gods competed for the rule of the universe, the God of light and the God of darkness, Faustus failed to explain the origin of evil to an intelligent mind. Once again one of the Elite put out the light.
In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother governs with the select few of “The Inner Party” who rule like an oligarchy that perpetuates not “father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world view,” a line of succession in which “The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.” The views of this privileged minority impose the propaganda that men and women do not possess a human nature but amount only to indeterminate raw material. O’Brien explains, “We control life, Winston, at all levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” The Elite determine the nature of reality by reinventing it to conform to their narrow minds, petty self-interest, lowest desires, and private agenda. Truth has no objectivity, universality, or unchangeable laws but adapts to men’s wishes. If the Illuminati decide that 2+2=5 or War is Peace, then they create reality: “The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense,” O’Brien explains, because “‘I could float off this floor like a bubble . . . . If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then it happens.” Subjectivity shapes and reshapes reality into any new design. Again the enlightened knowledge of the Illuminati—with its assertion of power and the repetition of propaganda (if he thinks and I think)–obfuscates self-evident truths with magical sleights of hand in the form of verbal engineering.
In C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, the elite form an inner circle of progressive thinkers determined to remake the human race and produce the “New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature.” This artificial bodiless New Man will purge the world and humanity of all impurities because “The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.” The scientific control of human life will manage a more efficient world governed by social engineers who will eliminate the natural process of birth and death associated with organic life and vegetation that produce decay, disease, and death. The Enlightened, then, all possess a higher consciousness and more far-seeing vision of the future than the understanding of the normal person limited by natural laws.
Their towering intellects plumb the utmost horizons of science or glimpse visions of utopian societies never imagined by mere human reason. In Lewis’s novel the scientists and social engineers at Belbury propose to invent a human being without a body and trees made of metal to eliminate all natural processes of growth and decomposition to create a pure world devoid of waste and filth. The hubris of these elite thinkers always knows no limits. Man’s progressive ideas surpass all old truths and proverbial wisdom and transcend God and Nature. Democracies, the voice of the people, the consensus of the faithful, the Perennial Philosophy, and the accumulated experience of the human race will never discover the impenetrable truths of the Illuminati who soar beyond the normal range of thought.
This ancient coterie of the Illuminati prevails in the modern age as an ideological class of thinkers and progressive groups of rulers propagate deadly ideas as pernicious, radical, and inhuman as the lies of witches, the superstitions of gods of darkness, the ruthlessness of tyrants, and the inventions of bodiless men. If the Supreme Court says the child in the womb is not human and the abortionist says it is mere tissue and the woman thinks it is not a baby, then it is not a human being. If The Supreme Court determines that marriage does not mean the union of one man and one woman and the media call the decision a landmark decision of “equality under the law” and a political party in power thinks the idea liberating and progressive, then it must be true. If Big Government decrees that all taxpayers must provide funds for eliminating unwanted human beings and allocate $500 million for the dismembering of their parts for trafficking in human organs and if medical science proposes to cure Parkinson’s disease with human organs and if Planned Parenthood proclaims that it always acts according to the highest ethical standards, and if college professors think all these procedures normative and natural, then it must be humane and charitable. This new thinking is the new magic.
Government based on the consent of the governed, the voice of the people, representative government, and tradition and precedent has devolved into a government imposed by the Elite who use magical incantations to hypnotize and brainwash all who imagine that the higher consciousness and sophisticated education of the Illuminati qualify them to be demigods in charge of the future of nations, the development of the human race, the formation of advanced laws, the decisions of life and death, and the direction of human civilization. The hubris of protagonists in Greek tragedy, the deadly sin of Lucifer’s enormous pride, and the brashness of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods has no equal like the Illuminati. Tragedy, sin, anarchy, and lawlessness now enter the world not by a war in heaven or by defiance of the gods but by all the educational institutions of civilization that turn to magic rather than right reason to govern the world.