From C.S. Lewis, Membership:
I have wanted to try to expel that quite
un-christian worship of the human individual simply as such which is so rampant
in modern thought side by side with our collectivism; for one error begets the opposite error and, far from neutralizing, they aggravate each other. I mean
the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each of us starts
with a treasure called 'personality' locked up inside him, and that to expand
and express this, to guard it from interference, to be 'original', is the main
end of life. This is Pelagian, or worse, and it defeats even itself. No man who
values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see
it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can
be done for the work's sake,
and what men call originality will come unsought. Even on that level, the
submission of the individual to the function is already beginning to bring true
personality to birth.
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