In chapter thirteen of That Hideous Strength, the organization of N.I.C.E awakens Merlin from his sleep and begins to the director. Merlin, however, does not believe the director is the Pendragon whom Merlin should follow until he answers a series of questions. After the director correctly answers these questions, Merlin is convinced to answer to the director, and begins to look at the modern state of the work. Merlin immediately notices multiple changes, but one which most shocks Merlin is the fact that “There is no emperor”(290) in control anymore. This causes Merlin to question if he has awakened in a “cold age” where there are little to no rules. Since there is no higher force, Merlin suggests that the land may “not be lawful” for two reasons. The first is that there are no “heathen who are not wholly corrupt” to guide moral values, and that there are also no regards to the “Laws of nature”(290). With these observations, Lewis uses Merlin as a tool to bring up two of his major concerns in society; the descent from communism into a totalitarian state, and the attempts of man to overcome nature and move away from the Tao. In these communist states, it does not take long for the “brutal indictment”, as Jordan Peterson describes, of all citizens as they are slowly corrupted by the evils around them. By creating this communist like state, Lewis illustrates his concerns of an evil power rising within the community, in this case represented by the organization of N.I.C.E. The second concern of Lewis is that people will no longer abide the laws of nature, a concept that refers to Lewis’s Abolition of Man. By disregarding nature, Lewis believes this will lead to a path without true men and one where a ““tyranny or an obedience”(73) could form, very similarly to that of a totalitarian state.