November 22nd, 1963 marks the day that three influential men of the twentieth century died: C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and President John F. Kennedy.

Lewis and Huxley were both men of Great Britain who wrote, across genres, on a host of issues. Lewis was an Oxford don who converted to Christianity after a conversation with his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, and went on to become a bestselling author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Huxley, a contemporary of Lewis, might be best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World, a tale about a society divvied up into genetic groups and constantly pacified by the use of a powerful drug called soma. The book came out in 1932, nearly 100 years ago now, and commentators ever since have been measuring the real world up against the fiction, noting how eerily prescient Huxley’s cautionary tale remains. For Huxley, authorities in power would not need to use force and surveillance to control the population. They would simply administer pleasure to the masses and subtly inject propaganda into their daily lives. In this cheery but lifeless world, citizens have no privacy, free choice, or individuality, but they’ve reached the point where they no longer care. If it feels good, don’t fix it.

The “hero” in Brave New World is John, an outsider brought back to the dystopia who retains the old complexities of what it means to be human. He’s unruly. He’s “wild.” Nicknamed as the “Savage,” he wants to hold onto the risk and beauty inherent in the real world.

“But I don’t want comfort,” says John to the leader of this smiling but miserable new world. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

I wish the danger presented in Brave New World didn’t sound so familiar to today’s cultural landscape, but the temptation to trade privacy for safety, free choice for comfort, and personal integrity for social conformity endures.

Watch Out for the Technocrats

C.S. Lewis was no less prophetic in his own writings on the tendencies of Western culture. He noted the rise of a kind of “benevolent” government that wasn’t overtly oppressive, but fashioned its control over society by assuring people it was always working for their good. Lewis writes in his book of essays, God in the Dock,

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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.

Watch out, says Lewis, for the social engineers who think government is the answer to all of the world’s ills. Their “we can fix it” mentality is often a coverup for a quest for power.

For Lewis, and many other voices advocating for liberty and virtue, we the citizens have to make choices on our own to improve our lives. The government can’t do it for us! Its job is to make sure we have the freedom and the opportunity to make choices in the first place.

John F. Kennedy’s tragic death probably obscured the obituary columns of these two spry minds across the pond. And yet looking back in time, we see that the presidents and powers of the world aren’t the only ones moving the needles of history. Many men and women make deep and long-lasting cultural impact by closing the door to their studies, taking up a time-tested pen, and writing with conviction and prophetic vision.