Death and destruction are what follows N.I.C.E. in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, from the death and brutality caused by Mr. Bultitude, a bear, and a tiger that mauled many of the guests in attendance at a dinner hosted by N.I.C.E.. Those lucky enough to survive and walk out with minor injuries, find each other and begin to search for the Head, the entity in charge of N.I.C.E., when they eventually find the Head, it is dead and the rest of N.I.C.E. begins to crumble. C.S. Lewis questions modern progress and roles of power and their grasp which leads to chaos, therefore his ideas are congruent with the modern failures of society due to technological advancements and totalitarianistic themes centered around power figures. Lewis centers around the idea by depicting how an organization, N.I.C.E., leads to its own demise as a result of their focus and strives for modern advancements. Zuboff also focuses on the idea that the large involvement of technology is leading to a lack of privacy and the ultimate control of humanity due to technology. In modern society, there is a large focus on technology and all its commodities for the apparent “better” society, however, little is known about what these modernizations cost the people in terms of privacy. 

The characters of the story, colleagues, turned against one another in the most severe of cases, where Straik and Wither murder Filistrato in a sacrifiical event to obey the Head, therefore, it is common in totalitarian societies for the people to blindly follow those with power as a means of survival. In That Hideous Strength, the character Filistrato becomes aware of his colleagues’ plans to kill him due to the Heads’ demands. Filistrato was hurt with his “right arm badly mauled” and due to his injury, he was seen as the perfect candidate to be sacrificed for the Head (Lewis 328.) In this case, the Head simply had to state it wanted “‘another head’” and then Straik and Wither blindly followed with no regard as to who Filistrato was as a person, in their minds he became just a body and something they needed to conquer in order for them to keep moving forward with their survival and their technological advances (Lewis 329.) This is a prime example of when people blindly follow those in power and in this case, to an extreme. Lewis feared what people would be capable of doing, in order to move forward in society and with technology which he conveys through this scene where there are no limits to what people are able to do, shown by Straik’s and Wither’s willingness to “slash repeatedly with his knife” until Filistrato’s head was on the floor. Similarly, Lewis’s concerns are illustrated in accounts from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and John Peterson’s Forward to the Gulag Archipelago where it is made apparent what Soviet citizens did in order to survive in the labor camps. Peterson argues that even those with a “holy desire” are susceptible to “be overtaken by those motivated primarily by envy, hate and the desire to destroy” despite their strongest efforts to not be overtaken. In the case of the Soviet citizens, some gave in to the demands of those in power and did what was necessary in order to survive, including stealing and losing one’s self. More often than not, people would enter the camps as one type of person and leave an entirely different person. People in this case were capable of things they hadn’t even thought of prior solidifying Lewis’s fear of the unknowns that people are willing to reach due to someone in power telling them to.