Like Prof. Lewis, I have no intention of explaining how this letter fell into my hands—other than to say it seems to have spontaneously generated on one of my computer’s AI applications, which apparently was left running in the background. We may safely assume, however, that the text is not the work of an artificial intelligence.

Readers are advised to remember that Screwtape remains, as much as ever, a liar. Close attention may also reveal potential inconsistencies in his reasoning.

MY DEAR HAMLOCK,

Given what has transpired in the last few weeks, it is quite natural for you to enquire as to the optimal psychological state of your patient. It is a basic point that I must always impress upon the younger tempters: external upheavals in human affairs are a two-edged sword. We, of course, always prefer the degradation of their little cosmos, all else being equal. But crises of this sort — your precious cousin Wormwood never understood this until it was far, far too late for him — are moments of “high leverage”: they can either jolt the patient toward the Enemy or toward Our Father Below. It all depends on how you make use of them.

As you rightly acknowledge in your letter, however, the externals of the humans’ environment do indeed have us on a more favorable footing, historically speaking. You may perhaps remember my remarks offered at the Tempters’ Training College not too long ago, at the time of your own graduation. I noted that, on the whole, the spread of consumables was rather poor. For most of the last several centuries, humanity has been democratizing (by Hell, what a delightful word!), which means we see fewer saints of the old awful variety but also fewer sinners of real culinary quality. At that banquet, I observed to the honored guests that humanity had was congealing into a kind of grey, insipid, lumpen mass; the main virtue of this state of affairs, from our view, is its corresponding uselessness to the Enemy.

But as the trends since my remarks have demonstrated abundantly, the humans excel at nothing quite like inconstancy, though I must also credit our own Technological Bureau partly for effecting the present turn. You see, that pesky writer of theirs, Plato, saw the fundamental dynamic too well: mankind can only democratize so far before it becomes a body of tyrants and slaves, “gods” (I use the term very loosely, as it is only appropriately applied to beings such as ourselves) on one side and beasts on the other. And, my dear Hamlock, tyrannical and servile souls are equally scrumptious to us as they are unbending to the aims of Heaven.

You report that your patient spends a good deal of time on her screens and particularly on what these pathetic creatures euphemistically call “social media,” a euphemism which we incepted, by the way. “Social” indeed! One cannot but savor the irony to recall what that etymology originally meant. A more fitting name would be something like “hostile” media, as it is far better at producing enemies than friends and organizing hatreds instead of loves.

With this and parallel technologies, even beyond the phenomenal waste of their already short biological time, the humans are almost never prodded toward anything like virtue, much less toward contemplation of the Enemy himself. Put otherwise, these social media are “safe” devices for us, far better suited to our ends than His. You write with some confusion that your patient already seems to recognize this truth for herself (in an academic sense), yet she justifies continued use on a variety of grounds: networking, career advancement, a vague sense of civic responsibility to “keep her finger on the pulse” of current events, or even as a means of recreation at the end of the day. Yes, Hamlock, imbibe the exquisite self-delusion here. Sometimes a patient really does damn himself; It’s not unlike the smoker of yesteryear who knows the carcinogenic quality of cigarettes but chugs through them at an expeditious rate all the same—only to express honest shock when the test results come back positive.

Obviously, your patient’s re-assignment to you came as a grave response to the series of setbacks that had her formally join the Enemy’s camp. Our Office commends your work since that time as fully satisfactory: pushing her along the existing grooves of how friends and family, always impressing on her the local Fashions and conventions (which I have written about many times in prior letters), and nudging her into a more fully realized despair whenever she turns her attention to that Macrocosm, readily proffered by her phone’s connection to the internet. Which brings me back to your original question: how best to employ the events of recent weeks?

Your patient is, as you note, intellectually active beyond average—or at least so she fancies herself—and this is useful to us in the current environment precisely because her mind inclines more naturally toward the realm of abstraction—though as I will say below, never the higher Abstractions, which are the Enemy’s home turf.

First, remind her of the recent events to distract her from more immediate moral concerns. Bonegash reports to me that your patient’s friend and co-worker was recently terminated by the political action organization that employs both, and that this was brought about under questionable circumstances. “Ideological differences” were invoked, when the real problem was the ill-tempered personality and poor communication of their manager. Your patient, it seems, will be in a real position to mention these concerns at her yearly review next week with the organization’s director, which might perhaps go some ways to rectifying the situation.

Here, I think her very occupation itself could prove useful. Coordinate your efforts with Bonegash; I recommend that you encourage her superiors to use the current news cycle as the launch point for a fresh messaging campaign, designed of course to lure in more donors. This will keep her attention, both in her interior and in her career, affixed and ruminating on these unsettling developments and the larger Cause to which she has devoted herself. In so doing, you will distract her from the plight of her flesh-and-blood (a loathsome compound) friend and make it less likely that she will “be a problem” in her workplace. In any case, always strive to substitute attention, energy, imagination, and a compressed sense of justice oriented to the abstract Cause for the counterparts oriented to the Imminent and Personal.

I myself once worked as the handler for a field tempter assigned to a frustrated writer who spent most of his time musing about articles and entire books when he should have been paying closer attention to his young children. These he found to be a vexing distraction from “his calling,” burdens that held him back from “meeting his full potential.” He rarely said these thoughts aloud, but they were suggested, implanted, and nurtured all through his soul just the same. We worked such delusions so thoroughly that his children not only suffered for lack of fatherly oversight, but he also fostered a lurking resentment about his wife’s alleged insufficiencies in shifting child-rearing responsibility over to him. Finally, this opened space for creeping infidelities from both spouses—culminating in a truly spectacular and monumentally brutal divorce, which, as a bonus, left all parties economically impoverished. Needless to say, the human spawn no longer speak to their father; one of them is, I am pleased to say, permanently stunted in the formation of healthy emotional attachments. Some of my very finest work! And for which I was recognized as Under-Secretary of the Month (the tempter in this case, if you must know, was assigned to other purposes by the Lowerarchy, after some bumbling incompetence managing the particulars of the infidelity.)

This kind of maneuver—moving their attention toward the abstract and subjunctive—has become increasingly common for the armies of Hell. When you were in training at the College, the “New School” was just beginning to make some headway among our Tactical Training Corps. But today, the younger devils are thoroughly saturated in this maneuver. At risk of pedantry, this tactic is worth stating in full detail.

As you know, the humans live their lives in concentric circles: self, family, workplace, school, clan, tribe, nation, creed, empire, etc. etc. In the twenty-first century, however, it is delightfully rare that they will actually recognize what is patent to us, namely, that these different circles of identity grow increasingly superficial the farther out they extend laterally. At that most infelicitous moment in history when the Enemy became a man Himself, the humans understood this principle much more intuitively. One of the writers around this time, a waffling Roman consul, composed a full and tiresome treatise on the subject. Modernity, with our help, has become utterly blind to these distinctions—especially the educated classes, who are by compulsive busybodies by sociological necessity.

In the human world, Hamlock, information now travels centripetally: toward the individual. Rumor volat. But the power, the sheer leverage that same individual can exert outward, and thus his concomitant duty in the eyes of the Enemy, utterly lacks equipollence. Their slimy little brains, adapted for small, face-to-face settings—the clan or village or at most the polis—are overwhelmed by the awful pounding inundation of information from the periphery beyond their real lives. And we have obviously strived to curate this information so that it will most effectively yield anxiety and anger while nurturing all kinds of other useful and delectable psychological states.

No doubt, you have seen this predilection in your own patient already, though it is remarkable how in so many cases they hardly require our help. Consider: were she to see a screen with pictures of some disgusting, well-fed, contentedly drooling canine whelps—a thought that fills me with the spiritual equivalent of violent nausea—then she might perhaps muster a small grin, a brief little warm glow of satisfaction from somewhere deep in her mammalian brain. She will quickly move past it; she will probably not remember it the next morning.

But slide beneath her eyes some rumor that those same puppies are being tortured in some distant land that she could not hope to find on a map, and you may unsettle her for days; you may even leave a little psychological scar leaving her unable to forget. Their feeble minds were never meant to process the magnitude of all the negative inputs from the Macrocosm. Over time, you must manipulate these labile mental states into spiritual commodities more valuable to us: a calloused self-righteousness, the aforementioned despair, or an irrational hatred of some largely fictional Other. The deeper irony is that some humans acquire a subconscious taste for these feelings, which add a bit of zest to their otherwise safe and humdrum lives. In any case, there is no human being that can continually absorb corrosive wave after wave of what they might call “bad news.” Even the Enemy Himself had his emotional limits when he walked the earth.

Insofar as we can tell, He seems to desire that humans cast their energy, attention, and identity in a relatively constricted band, at least on the earthly plane. Thus, He implores them to love their neighbor, not to love the idea of Humanity at large. Above this command, He hangs the even heavier, grossly self-serving, and frankly narcissistic prescription to love Himself. He knows too well that Man has natural limitations laterally; but vertically, he would set their sights further up and deeper in toward Himself. He makes no secret of this, Hamlock, openly boasting of his intent to work them into the architecture of his own House, “pillars in his Temple.”

We—to reframe His crude spatial analogy—typically prefer that the humans be flattened and overspread, like a besotted patch of marshland after precipitation has found its level. If we permit one of them the dangerous (for us) opportunity to look upward, we keep his gaze stuck on the ceiling of the very lowest of heavens: little more than the bit of sky just above his own head. Keep the mind locked, therefore, onto -isms, ideology, abstract dogmas, and of course Fashions. Better still, interweave a sense of ridiculous self-grandeur, like my unhappy writer above. If the Enemy would form humanity into tall, adamantine pillars in his Temple, we can play at the same game just as well, compressing these mud creatures into squat little brick ziggurats of our own design. Few outcomes please the Lowest Deeps better than one of these structures, ready to be spattered with blood in worship of the gods.

And that brings me finally to your musing on our larger strategy at the present moment, and more narrowly, the situation in that particular empire your patient inhabits. Were these occurrences, this “bad news,” our design? Does it all constitute some kind of “victory,” to quote your own words?

Really, Hamlock, this formulation reveals thinking on your part embarrassingly like that of the humans themselves: linear.

We encourage them to process events this way, but we ourselves cannot fall into that same mode. (It is true that some disloyal elements in our ranks have sometimes traitorously whispered that Our Father Below made just such a mistake in orchestrating the physical death of the Enemy—but I dare not venture into that dreadful subject further.) In any case, the Enemy Himself does not score matters in such one-dimensional terms, and neither should we. No mere occurrences of this sort—however bad the humans may find it in the moment—are ever a total victory or defeat for either side. Multiple souls, for whom we had other intentions, slipped beyond our grasp, while others moved themselves leaps and bounds hellward, and irretrievably so.

But to humor the spirit of your question and to briefly set aside the essential arithmetic of the souls most proximate to these proceedings—on net, I must say it was a smashing success in the short-to-midterm. Look no farther than your own patient, whose psyche now harbors all the more jealously that most delightful of garnishes, the root of bitterness, whose barbed outgrowths even now claw their way deeper throughout her heart. That same weed daily festers in the breast of untold myriads.

You know, it truly warms my innards to consider how much worse the real political situation there is than even the local Christians appreciate; to whatever extent they sniff the underlying rot, they usually misattribute its real origins. Consequently, they themselves routinely slip into (or else are browbeaten) into picking a camp. Have you ever noticed how their aporia, their involuntary disgust at the social Machine we have helped them construct—it is always and everywhere denounced by the shrillest voices as “Both-Sides-ism”? This was yet another term we developed, and with it and other slogans in hand, we are able to bully the more conscientious humans into playing our little game, and we help them justify this gambit with words stolen from actual political philosophers, especially that most useful of words, “prudence.”

Hell below! “both sides” are obviously responsible for the current state of things! One might even say “equally” albeit in completely asymmetrical ways that most humans cannot perceive, much less articulate. As far as political violence and upheaval are concerned, the more fitting image might be escalation, like two squabbling siblings gradually working themselves into an all-out brawl over some toy. The guardian finally restoring order will not especially care “who started it” when both end up with bloody noses; both are more or less “equally” guilty, though there may be notable asymmetries: birth order, relative strength, behavioral track record, and who threw the first punch after the initial stages of shouting and name-calling.

Afraid to be charged with “Both-Sides-ism,” most humans will lash themselves even closer to the Machine, like dumb animals to a Titanic grist mill with millions of cells. Round and round they go, turning the shaft in their individual subcompartments, while the Machine spits out ever smaller bits of grain to reward the beasts and to keep their legs churning. The asses are then surprised when the Machine is revealed to have a quite different source of Power, which more and more frequently sweeps some of them off their feet and pulverizes them into dush and ash, the ground flour for that most ancient of our breads. Sometimes it destroys minds and souls only; the best outcomes will destroy bodies as well.

And those whose bodies are not physically destroyed or brains wrecked—well, an increasing number are made into spiritual lunatics, not unlike the perpetrators of these recent successes of ours. Gastronomically, these make far better fare than what we typically consumed in the last century, at least in the English-speaking world, that is. And with the continuous professional toil of you and your many colleagues in the field, there promises to be many more of these turgid little sinners in the decades to come. You know the type: the lonely soul, pickled by years of eccentric chatrooms and evermore colorful, ludicrous species of pornography, shot through with a hint of what might have been nobility in another life, now distorted with self-regard and the desperate need to be something, to matter by some metric. We suggest the organizing principle of some Cause, and the wretch will all but slaughter itself on our table.

The harvest is plentiful, indeed.

I shall punctuate my overall enthusiasm with two words of caution. We have seen enough of their history to recognize that the current strategy will not yield these same happy returns indefinitely. Even now, there is a growing skepticism of these new devices and networks, which have proved so productive for us. Our Intelligence Bureau predicts that within the next twenty years, these smartphones and social media will be recoded as “untrustworthy,” “unhygienic,” “trashy” and “low class,” not unlike how the public now thinks of the tabloid rags that still stock the shelves of grocery checkout aisles—and whose continued existence the Intelligence Bureau has longed to look into for strategic insights but which apparently defies even our logic. Already, then, cultural antibodies are slowly forming to neutralize the novel infection.

Finally, we cannot say how the Enemy will try to turn the naked trauma of these recent events toward His own ends. We have learned this lesson the hard way, not least when the Jaws of Hell seemed most firmly clamped about Himself. Even now, there are some perplexing preliminary assessments—confusing to us and to some of the more observant humans themselves—marking increased prayer in some patients; others, apparently recognizing the brevity and cruelty of their animal existence, have been inspired to look afresh on Him: precisely the vertical response we wish to avoid. Whether any of these reflexes is of lasting value in the eternal score remains to be seen, and we have our own tactics for responding accordingly. Like the most dangerous warriors in the Enemy’s ranks, you yourself must remain vigilant, agile, and persistent.

After all, I need not remind you of what would happen should you waste these favorable conditions.

Your increasingly plump uncle,
SCREWTAPE