This is better than the other Screwtape quote, but—given the example of Ayn Rand—I think Lewis still gets causality backwards where smart Marxists were concerned. I think they started by being right about God and “materialism” when most people were insistently wrong (or didn’t care about object-level truth.) This gave them an inflated view of their own intelligence and the explanatory power of Marxism.
This is better than the other Screwtape quote, but—given the example of Ayn Rand—I think Lewis still gets causality backwards where smart Marxists were concerned. I think they started by being right about God and “materialism” when most people were insistently wrong (or didn’t care about object-level truth.) This gave them an inflated view of their own intelligence and the explanatory power of Marxism.