{"id":19526,"date":"2026-02-28T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T02:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/?p=19526"},"modified":"2026-02-28T22:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T05:20:08","slug":"compound-interest-of-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/compound-interest-of-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Compound Interest of Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

C. S. Lewis, Natural Law, and Immigration Non\u2011Enforcement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Mere Christianity<\/em> C. S. Lewis writes: \u201cGood and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.\u201d Lewis assumes an objective moral law (the Tao) that orders personal life, social life, and life under civil law. When that law is ignored, the result is not only discrete and individual harms, but a progressive deformation and distortion of persons and societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One way to describe this objective moral law is natural<\/strong> law\u2014a law imprinted on the hearts of all people and made known through the faculties of reason and revelation. For many Christian conservatives, this conception dovetails with the thinking of our Founding Fathers, who drew on both Biblical and natural-law standards in framing the Declaration of Independence. The authority claimed in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution comes from \u201cWe the People,\u201d but the Founders understood from whence the authority of \u201cWe the People\u201d itself is derived: we are \u201cendowed by our Creator with certain rights,\u201d rights given not by man but by our Creator. This is the crucial connection between the moral\u2013spiritual predicate and the temporal grounding of our legal system and of the rules that govern all our social environs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us use immigration law as an example, bringing together Lewis\u2019s idea of a cascading progression of evil and sin with the idea of a legal standard rooted in a universally accepted moral predicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis insists that moral language presupposes a real standard; if there is no \u201cReal Morality,\u201d then calling Nazi ethics \u201cworse\u201d than others becomes meaningless. In the same way, calling our President and his supporters \u201cracist\u201d or \u201cfascist\u201d is meaningless if it is not anchored in genuine moral pillars. When a polity systematically refuses to obey its own laws, it begins to lose the ability to use its legal and moral predicates coherently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The initial decision to decline enforcement of existing immigration law\u2014often in the name of humanitarianism or economic convenience\u2014sets off cascading economic distortions: the creation of a shadow labor market; systematic underpayment; tolerance of employer violations \u201cin order to compete\u201d; and an artificially cheap sub\u2011economy (in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and beyond) that then \u201cjustifies\u201d depressed wages more broadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response, legal artifices and ad hoc measures (such as granting licenses, local voting rights, and other accommodations) are crafted to regularize what the system refused to confront at the outset, rather than to vindicate the original law\u2019s substantive justice. Alongside these moves comes semantic erosion: terms like \u201cworker,\u201d \u201cimmigrant,\u201d \u201ccitizen,\u201d \u201cexploitation,\u201d and even \u201crights\u201d are stretched to cover mutually incompatible realities. Policy debate degenerates into a contest of slogans and political narratives, rather than a rational exchange of reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is Lewis\u2019s \u201ccompound interest\u201d of evil in institutional form. A bridgehead is established when a clear law (immigration statutes) is not enforced for reasons of expediency or sentiment. Once that bridgehead is surrendered, subsequent \u201cnecessary\u201d adjustments and exceptions are not neutral; they follow the internal logic of the first surrender and multiply its effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historically, slave systems, indentured servitude, and caste labor arrangements have shrouded themselves in the language of economic indispensability: \u201cWithout this class, who will harvest, clean, build? How will the debt be paid?\u201d That cry is not a neutral question; it is, in Lewisian terms, evidence of self\u2011chosen blindness\u2014a refusal to see that the economic order is now resting on institutionalized disregard of persons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It then becomes easier to see how, once the moral law is discarded in favor of humanistic, atomistic, progressive precepts, our predicates themselves become instruments of power and emotion. Subjectivism \u201ceats\u201d the language from within; we continue to speak of \u201cjustice,\u201d but no longer mean anything determinate by it. Lewis would say that once the shared moral law is discarded, our intuitive predicates cease to be truth\u2011tracking descriptions and instead become tools of will and sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Lewis\u2019s terms, the cascade can be sketched as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n