There is a scene in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce wherein a ghost of a man—a pitiful, hunched dwarf—visits the outskirts of Heaven. He drags behind him a towering puppet on a leash, a melodramatic figure who speaks in polished tones and flourishes. The puppet is not a companion, but a mask. The dwarf has long since learned that genuine sorrow gets little attention, but performative grievance—acted out, repeated, and rehearsed—can command a kind of power. He has so melded with his puppet that he cannot speak without it. And when his wife greets him—not with blame, but with joy—he recoils. For joy would unmask him. Joy demands the death of the puppet. And so, choosing bitterness over healing, he shrinks into nothing.
I can think of no better image for the age in which we live.
Our politics has become a theatre of puppets on chains—each group dragging along its own carefully constructed grievance, shouting not so much to be heard as to be seen. Victimhood has become currency, and outrage a form of capital. We are not content to be injured; we must be perpetually injurable. We must brandish our wounds—real or imagined—like flags. And we must never allow them to close, lest we be expected to act whole again.
There was a time when the proper response to hardship was fortitude. Now it is spectacle. We reward not those who endure silently, but those who amplify their pain to the highest pitch. Political parties trade in these grievances, like brokers in resentment. Each insists that its suffering is unique, irreparable, and—above all—unrecognized.
Lewis understood that pity, like so many virtues, could be twisted into a vice. In its truest form, pity is the desire to share another’s burden and lift them up into joy. It is a movement outward, from fullness toward need. Sarah, the glorified woman in the scene, offers that kind of pity—pure and radiant. But her husband, the dwarf, demands a counterfeit: a pity that serves not the sufferer, but the sufferer’s pride. It is no longer “I suffer, and you comfort,” but “I suffer, and so you must suffer too.” Such pity is a kind of moral blackmail. It makes the other’s love contingent on their misery. It corrupts mercy into submission.
This is the trap we fall into when pain becomes identity. If I am defined by my wounds, then healing becomes a threat. If you love me truly, you must never be happy unless I am miserable. And if you are happy without me, then clearly you never cared at all.
That logic now governs whole movements. We no longer say, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep,” but “Weep always, or you are complicit.” The result is not solidarity but stasis. Nothing can be resolved, because resolution would mean releasing the chain.
America may be especially vulnerable to this temptation. In a land so materially prosperous, pity comes cheaply. We have been trained—rightly—to look upon the suffering with compassion. But where it is easy to feel pity, it is also easy to exploit pity. And that is precisely what has happened. What began as a plea for compassion has become a demand for recompense, and then an accusation of guilt. “Feel sorry for me” has transformed into “I am owed,” and finally into “You are the cause of my suffering.” It is the ultimate form of playing pitiful: not merely inviting help, but indicting joy itself.
This is how compassion degenerates into entitlement. And entitlement, when resisted, becomes wrath.
We should always be an empathetic people. Love does demand a listening ear. But love also demands discernment. When compassion becomes compulsion, when empathy demands agreement with lies, then love must take the harder road: the road that says “I hear you, I care for you—but I will not be manipulated by you.” To do otherwise is not kindness. It is cowardice. It is moral suicide.
That is why Christ told His disciples to be “as innocent as doves, and as wise as serpents”. Innocence is not ignorance. It is moral purity, not mental blindness. We are called to be tender-hearted—but clear-eyed. To love without losing our heads. To weep with the suffering, yes, but not to worship the puppet they carry.
But here, perhaps, is the deepest tragedy—and the most sobering truth of Lewis’s parable: the dwarf could have let go. The chain was not welded. The puppet was not fused to his arm. He was not imprisoned—he was clutching his prison. The joy Sarah offered was not behind a locked gate. It was in front of him, arms open. He needed only to drop the chain, and walk into glory. But he could not imagine a self apart from his suffering, and so he chose it over Heaven.
That, as Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, is the great horror of Hell: “The gates of Hell are locked from the inside.” No one is forced to stay. They simply cannot imagine leaving. They would rather reign in misery than kneel in joy.
That is what we risk as a nation and as individuals: to so entwine ourselves with our bitterness, our resentment, our sense of being owed, that we would rather keep it than be free. True joy costs less than we think. It is victimhood that demands everything.
What The Great Divorce shows us is that this path leads not to salvation, but to shrinking. The soul that cannot forgive, cannot let go, cannot laugh, cannot yield—such a soul must collapse in on itself. Not because it was wrong to suffer, but because it chose to become its suffering.
The dwarf might have walked upright. He might have laughed, embraced, been transformed. But that would have required surrender. And surrender—especially of our grievances—is the one sacrifice modern man refuses.
We may yet be saved. But not until we let the puppet fall silent.
