When I read this quote by C.S.Lewis today I couldnt help but feel that it applied not only to the major and obvious examples but also to the many subtle and noxious tyrannies that we are all at some point subject to or perhaps even unconciously participating in.

Some tyrannies I have in mind (and there are many others):

Militant Secularism/Atheism (that would push all religion to the private sphere)

Religious Fundamentalism (the type that seeks social conformity in belief)

Scientism (the belief that the natural sciences has authority over all other interpretations of life and fields of enquiry)

Ratio-Fascism (the assertion that only rationalism is valuable as en explanation or a field of enquiry into the world)

Political Correctness

Total Rights Assertion (the imposition of one perceieved “right” at the expense of other “rights”)

Objective Relativism (the absurd notion that all the varieties of traditions must be equal to everyone)

50% + 1 (the tyranny of the majority – the good of the many etc.)

Ethnocentrism (the viewpoint that “one’s own group is the center of everything,” against which all other groups are judged.)

countless other “isms” (I welcome contributions to this threadbare list)…

anyway here is the quote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”   C.S.Lewis