I have not written much in the line of “inverse” advice, but I was asked to address the Logos secondary in a “Screwtape” vein, and so here is my effort, such as it is.
My dear Globguttle,
Your letter reveals a confused state of mind, but I acknowledge that the confusion is perhaps understandable. You have not been out of the Tempter’s College for all that long, only a decade or two, and the shifts in the grand strategy that come from our Low Command Headquarters can sometimes be hard for the inexperienced temptors to decipher.
You complain that you are now being instructed to degrade and undermine all the family connections of your patient, when up to this point you thought that the object of our work was to make people complacent and self-satisfied in and with their families. You understood that our purpose was to make people complacent idolaters of the family. This was in fact the case at one point in time, and so this is admittedly a change of direction, but it is not at all a change of goal or purpose. That was the strategy, but only in the sense that the opening three moves in a chess game are “the strategy.” What can follow after those opening moves may be strikingly different . . . but they were the point all along.
Whatever separates the patient from the Enemy will serve its turn—and so our Father below does not mind whether we push someone into the mire, or pull him into it. What matters is the mire, and not the direction from which we work. Pushing or pulling, it is all one to us. What matters is the mire. You are a devil, which means that your loyalty is to the mire, and not to a particular set of tricks. You must never let yourself get attached to a specific technique, whether pulling or pushing, as though that were the thing.
So the previous strategy, suited to those times of course, was to make people idolize their families. This was done by means of a toxic combination of flattery, pride, sentimentalism, covetousness, and envy. What these pitiful little creatures did not realize is that any material thing that is placed in the position of such an idol will inevitably collapse at some point. It must let them down. It cannot satisfy the demands that are placed on it. The legs on that table are far too rickety to bear much weight at all, and so naturally it was our desire that they put as much weight on it as we could get them to do. But what we were aiming for all along was the collapse . . . not to make them stronger. And so that means when it does let them down, and the rickety table collapses, we will be there immediately, right at their elbow, ready and waiting to urge them to despair and disillusionment.
The collapsed idol falls apart under its own weight. But when it has done so, we use the corrosive elements of despair as an acid to further degrade the integrity of any of the remaining pieces. This is where we are now.
When the whole thing collapses, of course, it can do this in two different arenas. One of them is in the life of the individual, and the other is in the transition between generations. Not only can individuals become disillusioned, but so can generations. When we have been successful with a large number of people in the same generation, and at the same time, the sin we are inculcating take on a generational characteristic. What began as a young person’s impatience with a peevish grandfather can by degrees become a generation’s impatience with an older generation, lumped all together. That is where we are now, and that is part of the rationale why there has been a shift in our strategic maneuvers.
Our current assignment is to lure these little pests into believing that they are strong and independent monads. They don’t need anyone else. They stand alone. They are the true and autonomous individuals. What we are insinuating into their hearts and minds is that fatal word individualism.
Those with common sense can see through our efforts at once. The doctrine of individuals is plain enough, like looking at the distinct leaves on a tree. Individuals have genuine reality, just as the leaves on the tree really are distinct from each other. This leaf is not that one. This kind of individual distinction is the work of the Enemy, and we just have to put up with it. The thing that makes them leaves on a tree, however, is that they are all united in the root. That is the kind that we are—literally—hellbent on getting them to ignore or forget.
And so the doctrine of individualism dispenses with the trunk, the limbs, and the branches. It wants to pretend that each leaf is autonomous and self-sustaining, a private world unto itself. Your task is to help them along in that pretense. The silly little creatures will help you with that task, as it is always most pleasant for them to believe that they are self-sufficient. You will take great delight when you take them out for a walk on the invisible leash that you can see and they cannot. I have known some tempters who amused themselves by having “free will” and “self-governing” inscribed on the leash.
It is important that you not confuse yourself with the tales that you are feeding him. They are social creatures, connected to all the others. There is nothing we can do about that, as much as we would like to. We cannot erase the social bonds that the Enemy established. We can get them to forget the root, while we cannot get rid of the root. But what we can do, and what we have done (with a great deal of success) is bend and twist those bonds.
We have certain basic tricks— We have taught you all the routine holds, and it is up to you to make the most of them.
I trust you remember the most entertaining one, usually highlighted sophomore year. It is always a student favorite.
It remains one of the standard moves—and it amazes me that this one still works—and it is to have two people pulling away from each other, with each one fully convinced that the other person is the one who is pulling away. This is accomplished by persuading your man that he is simply “responding” to the other person’s rejection of him. Make sure to coordinate with your colleague on the other side of the equation. Make sure you are both running the same play at the same time. If you are successful, you and your co-worker on the other end of the rope will have quite the entertaining time. Your man will take offense at the other fellow taking offense. If you time it right, you can get each of them to pull away because the other person is pulling away . . . and they will both be right.
Once the estrangement is complete, each of them can construct a narrative in their own mind that explains everything in terms of the other person’s antisocial moves and insults.
But there is a caution, which leads to my second suggestion. While the entertainment value of this first maneuver is high, young devils must regularly be reminded that the game is to capture the prey, and not to enjoy the chase. That being the case, when it is necessary to forego the entertainment for the sake of a ploy that seems more certain—as it frequently is—I would recommend the fomenting of resentments and bitterness. This has the downside of being more obvious to the patient, but it also must be said that it has been a true workhorse for us, steady and reliable over the course of centuries. In a world full of wrongs, it is not that hard to get to a world full of seething resentments.
What you must do is keep a keen lookout for any kind of slight that affects your patient, or even brushes by him slightly. The monstrous wrongs, of course, are easy to identify, and so you need not concern yourself about them so much. Everyone will be able to see those. But the little daily rubs are the ones you might miss, and if you might miss them, so might your patient. This is why you must notice, and why you must make a point of reminding your man about what just happened.
The great wrongs have an additional disadvantage as well. Since they are so obviously sins, the texts of the Enemy’s Book that require forgiveness for sins will naturally present themselves to your patient’s mind, if only as impossibilities. But when that happens, they are thinking about the topic of forgiveness, which is always dangerous.
But the little rubs and irritations and annoyances, if they are not recognized as “sins,” can be relegated to a place in the patient’s mind where forgiveness is not actually required. You get all of the destructive impact of sin without anybody ever calling it that. And if you don’t call it that, then you don’t have to do what the Bible says about that.
Don’t forget how bitterness maintains an extraordinarily sharp memory. It remembers everything because it has good study habits—review, review, review.
One more suggestion, and I am done for this letter. In recent years we have enjoyed great success with this approach. One of the best ways to shatter the kind of organic family unity that our Enemy intends for families to have is by inculcating a spirit of egalitarianism. There is a kind of equality that we detest, of course, like equality before the law. This leads to all sorts of pernicious problems, like justice and fair play. That kind of equality is our mortal enemy. But our propaganda wing has invested enormous resources in promoting an equality of “interchangeable sameness.” When people begin to believe that husbands and wives and interchangeable, or even parents and children, the end result is that nobody knows exactly where they go, or what they are supposed to do. And because of the arbitrary nature of egalitarianism, they will frequently find themselves holding “an office” that they cannot handle at all. The simplest mechanical device, such as a mousetrap, will entirely break down if you try to move the parts around. The spring cannot be the platform, and the platform cannot be the lever. Because we have convinced a multitude of these simpletons that a shuffling of all the family roles—sex roles, parental roles, and so on—we have them in the delightful position of being frustrated and angry all the time while at the same time demanding that they be allowed to continue with the behavior that is frustrating them so much.
When I think about the bewildered looks on their faces in the middle of this confusion, it almost makes me yearn for the role of a tempter again. Almost, but not quite.
Your affectionate great uncle,
Twistcrank