National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments

The **National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments** (**N.I.C.E.**), also known as the **National Institute** or just the **Institute**, was an organization of technocrats in *That Hideous Strength*. They were known as the **Foreigners** by the Sleeper. Although claiming to be working for the betterment of mankind, they are in fact directed by Macrobes, a group of beings with malign intentions. The N.I.C.E. takes a reductionist, anti-artistic and anti-spiritual view of mankind and the universe. They abuse rationalism as a means to try and produce a technocratic dictatorship. When one of the N.I.C.E., William Hingest breaks rank and says they are not practicing true science, he is accused of being "the wrong sort of scientist."

The N.I.C.E. have complete contempt for anything old. They call old buildings "abuses and anachronisms". They dam rivers, flood villages, and flatten history. They cut down trees and replace them with aluminium ones, because they're "cleaner."

They also have contempt for ordinary people, who they consider to be utterly beneath them:

"*The great majority of the human race can be educated only in the sense of being given knowledge: they cannot be trained into the total objectivity of mind which is now necessary. They will always remain animals, looking at the world through the haze of their subjective reactions. Even if they could, the day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man.*"
The N.I.C.E. also operate according to a transhumanist agenda. They say they want a "new man... free from Nature" and that "Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away."

They sell themselves as "*the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many people base their hopes of a better world*" Anyone who opposes them is called an "obstructionist". The N.I.C.E. pretend to use science to fix society:

"*The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.*"
As Professor Filostrato says:
"This Institute... it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing."

François Alcasan, an executed scientist, becomes a literal head of the Institute, all head and no heart, as part of their sick experiments. He had wished to become immortal, but instead had been taken over by the Macrobes. The N.I.C.E. think the Macrobes are superior beings, but are in fact invisible demons who are using the scientists for their own ends. In fact, what they want is a humanity removed from nature and God, because humans are made in God's image, and their aim is to deface that image.

The N.I.C.E. think the "educated" are less of a threat than the uneducated:

“*Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.*”
The N.I.C.E. also want population reduction: "The day for a large population has passed. It has served its function by acting as a kind of cocoon for Technocratic and Objective Man."

“Science must be given a free hand to take over the human race… if not.. we’re done... Man has got to take charge of man… which means some men have got to take charge of the rest”

The N.I.C.E. are also politically pragmatic:

"*Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us—to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is.*"

## Members and associated people

* François Alcasan
* Professor Augustus Frost
* Professor Filostrato
* Jane Tudor Studdock
* Horace Jules
* Mark Gainsby Studdock
* Reverend Straik
* Sleeper
* Major Hardcastle
* William Hingest
* John Wither

And also the non-human Macrobes and Mr. Bultitude.

## Cultural references

* Progressive rock group, "the Nice" took their name from here. They were a predecessor of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
* Christian horror punk band Blaster the Rocket Man, whose lyrics frequently subsist on monster themes, borrowed heavily from The Space Trilogy in their album *The Monster Who Ate Jesus*. Their song, entitled "March of the Macrobes," alludes to macrobes and the N.I.C.E.'s attempts to disembody the heads of those who wish to gain immortality with lines such as, "Leave flesh behind / There's only mind / Or set the brain apart / To elevate the heart / Whatever happened to the individual? (N.I.C.E.) / Where is his soul? (R.A.P.E.)."
* Metal band Becoming the Archetype's album *Dichotomy* features the songs "Artificial Immortality (The Beast)" and "St. Anne's Lullaby (The Sage)"

## Trivia

* Long after *That Hideous Strength* was published, a real life body called the N.I.C.E. was up in the UK - its name stands for the National Institute for health and Care Excellence. A link is provided below. In terms of behaviour, the UK's SAGE Committee, is a better comparison, and some have compared its attitude to the Covid pandemic response as similar to that of the N.I.C.E. in the books, for example one of its members, the multimillionaire Prof. Susan Michie said members of the public could simply retrain if they wanted to get back into work after lockdown-related bankruptcy.