The Slubgob Correspondences: Letter IX

My Dear Screwtape,

I’ve received some complaints from Central Command on your inability to lock down sufficient numbers among the poorest inhabitants of that dreaded planet. Attacking the wealthy is easy what with the camel and the eye of the needle sort of thing, but the poor have always presented at one time the most populous yet most difficult demographic to secure.

Yes, yes, I know the Argentine Pontiff has been making things difficult. It was much easier when the higher echelon clerics professed a more aristocratic view of class. Sure, the Church has always helped the needy but an offensive this strong hasn’t been seen for some time.

What’s He doing up there?  What’s He up to? Unfortunately, all we can do is wait and see. It’s impossible for us to know at any one time what His plans are. But He is acting very aggressively and that’s troublesome. Our traditional stratagems grow increasingly impotent against His efforts.

No matter. If one thing can be said about humanity, it’s that they’ll always want more for less. That is, more pleasure for less effort. This is a prime moment to aim at causing spiritual atrophy among the humans. It works like so: Humanity’s spiritual inclinations motivate it toward compassion – you’ll recall my attempt at a definition from a previous letter. There are two means whereby the spirit aims to deliver compassion: 1) Out of a sentimental attachment to another person be they stranger, friend, or family – they may refer to this as feeling sorry for someone; 2) Out of a sense of duty. They’d rather be doing something else or nothing at all; but through will power, they ultimately take such action because morality dictates it.

The first one is a dead end for us. If someone is inclined to help another, it is very difficult to tempt them away from it. We can try logic and attempt to rationalize; such as convincing them that poverty is the result of some character flaw and helping that individual would be encouraging their flaws. But if you work them too hard, they’re likely to become inclined to your temptations yet perform the charity anyway. The Enemy can "tempt" too. That’s when they get a taste of what it means to truly behave morally – when it is the result of will power succeeding over what they desire. Then, the person experiences such joy from helping others that it's liable to become a grotesque habit.

The second one backs them into a nice little corner but it can also backfire disastrously. Suppose someone helps another out of a sense of duty; since humans are flesh and blood, there’s a certain weariness that comes along with acting from duty. Learn to tell when that weariness comes on, and strike then.

This is what your students should be encouraging among the masses. Nearly all humans possess a computer where they can access all the lies and propaganda our Troll Divisions spread around on the various sites advocating selfishness and damning of the poor. Those without a computer have a television no doubt, and you can convince them that they earned their leisure time. And when that revolting sense of duty comes upon them, you can use this inertia to your advantage telling them: “Why should they have a free lunch? You work. You have a job. Why can’t they?” 

Do you see? By convincing them to judge the less fortunate as lazy you can actually bring them to a state of sloth themselves. Not only would they be committing the sin of sloth, but the sin of hypocrisy as well. Quite a return, my dear fellow! Quite a return!

The danger again comes when they experience the feeling they get from being willfully selfless. It is an intoxicant of a most vile vintage. It’s beyond fermented, it’s putrid! It clings to your nostrils like the stench from a smiling baby! Like the awful purity of a virtuous orgasm! It makes me wretch just writing about it.

It makes us wretch and howl, because it is Him making His presence known to our target. It is a brief taste of what Heaven feels like to the souls of His faithful once they enter. What’s more, He allows them this feeling whether they believe in Him or not. But the real danger, I mean the real pain we experience from a person sharing with the less fortunate is not the loss of their charitable soul…but that the poor with whom these gifts are shared feel less desperate. That's the harder defeat. Just as the charitable one gets that brief euphoric taste of Heavenly experience, the recipient of such charity takes on the doubly disgusting disposition of one who once felt abandoned but is now embraced.

So, if your targets are in a state where their spirits are sentimentally inclined to help others. Just let them go. Let them have their righteous cake and eat it to. Inevitably, a time will come when another needs help and their spirit isn’t so willing. When that time comes, remind them of all the times they helped someone in need and now it’s someone else’s turn.

When you’ve used this inertia to your advantage enough, you’ll start to notice a habitual selfishness come over your subjects. Soon you’ll have them using their memories of the few times they helped the needy to justify all sorts of marvelous offenses. I’ve helped people in need; therefore I earned a prostitute. Or, I once helped a fellow change a tire on the side of the road – I don’t need to pray. Or, I work all day and my wife doesn’t have supper ready for me; I think I’ll give her a whack across the jaw.

That’s the approach. Note where the focus resides; it’s entirely dedicated to fulfilling the whims of the self. That’s half the battle. The other half is in their feeling of entitlement to their vices. Get them to think they’ve earned it. That they’re too good to people who don’t deserve it and can therefore demand whatever they wish of the world. Then when they don’t get it, it’s because He failed them. That, my friend, is proper spiritual atrophy.

                             Your Merciful Master,

                                  Slubgob 

The Slubgob Correspondences: Letter VIII

My Dear Screwtape,

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO! You still don’t get it!! Sin has no qualitative properties! It is impossible to tempt a human to commit a sin so horrible that they’re forever put out of His favor. We can persuade them to certain attitudes which make them more susceptible to our advances but there is no magic bullet where one action in one moment in their time damns them to our eternal feast. The mere fact that the Enemy forgives, renders such a strategy implausible. This is what you fail to understand.

Conversely, however, it also means there is no single virtue which puts anyone out of our reach forever. This is the aspect of our struggle on which your students should focus. Corrupting the virtuous can be far more rewarding than maintaining the path of the damned. And corrupting a virtuous community drags many subsequent followers down here.

We have two primary tools at our disposal. You may view them as lanes on a highway: On one side lay secret guilt and the other, public punishment by the human community. Now, while it may be entertaining to keep our subjects wallowing on one side or the other – as it is always fun to witness their guilt and/or humiliation – these are the two places where the Enemy is most likely to grab them.

Where do we want them? Right smack in the middle!

Allow me to explain: On the side of secret guilt, this is a place where someone has committed some act for which they feel penitent. Nobody – or at least few - knows about this act. This is something the subject feels privately and in isolation and is almost always an offense to the Enemy Himself rather than another person. Because of this, they feel separated from Him and are left with a kind of dull empty ache. As this feeling becomes more pronounced, they start drifting off farther and farther to the side of the road until they finally admit to their sin and earnestly request forgiveness. The Enemy obliges and the soul moves out of our sight for the time being.

The other side is one of public humiliation and ridicule resulting from some sin usually committed against another person or a community of persons. This one is a bit more complicated. Crime is the best example. There’s usually a singular victim and the community sides with that victim and against the perpetrator to bring about justice. There’s always a degree of humiliation a human feels when caught in the act.  There’s even a form of humiliation felt when one is falsely accused of the act for which they are being humiliated.

Thankfully, the humans have managed to find a way to institutionalize this humiliation of their criminal element – we call this incarceration. They've institutionalized this practice for two key reasons, ensuring that “justice” is swift as well as distant. Remember how I spoke of compassion before? Their system puts distance between the citizen and the criminal as a way to deny the citizen of any compassion they might feel toward the criminal. What’s that saying of theirs? Out of sight, out of mind? The prisoner is therefore subject to a compassionate void. This lack of warmth keeps the humiliated from going off this side of the road just as pride keeps the private sinner from going off on the other.

There are some citizens who find the opportunity to express compassion to the imprisoned and sometimes it works. Many prisoners who were previously on the straight and narrow toward us, managed to have discovered the eternal benevolence of the Enemy and later fallen off. In nearly all cases, this is because they managed to find just a modicum of compassion amidst the desperation of physical confinement.

We must keep them firmly in the middle of this road. For the private sinners, we win when we convince them the Enemy is the source of their guilt rather than the cure. And for the prisoners, we win when we convince them they are undeserving of compassion thus driving them to the following conclusion: “If I am to be treated as if I’m evil, why bother being good?”

                         Your Merciful Master,

                                      Slubgob 

The Slubgob Correspondences: Letter VII

My Dear Screwtape,

It seems you are making excellent progress with your band of misfits and our stocks are quite high…for now. But like any other organization, our delight is tempered by higher expectations.  The better your performance, the more our expectations grow.  There are no plateaus in Hell.

In line with this thinking, I will advise you on your question of abortion. It is a topic which causes tremendous excitement down here. It does so because it is one of the few areas where almost all roads lead here. It is very easy for us to capture any human who possesses a strong opinion of the matter one way or another. So we do well pulling these strings on His puppets.

First, let us consider those against the procedure. They view it as murder and therefore see it as wrong and wish to abolish it. Within any one of these groups there is a leader – one who claims to infallibly know the will of our Enemy and wishes to spend eternity with Him. Here, we take a line from scripture: Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be disbursed! Find his weak spot and press it. Our colleagues in the IT (Individual Temptation) department can help immensely with this. They will be interested in getting that individual down here, and your team must be interested in making such a journey as public as possible so we can grab his followers like lemmings off a cliff. I am copying Dungwart on this correspondence so he is aware of what we’re attempting and can assist accordingly.

Secondly, for those considering the option we must take careful stock of where they are situated on our journey. If we have them mostly well-in-hand, it might do us better to steer them away from the procedure and toward having and keeping the child. Humans who are already on their way here – those who have succumbed and whose hearts have already been sufficiently hardened – would give us the extra benefit of passing this stubborn selfishness onto their offspring with little effort on our part.

Make available to them messages which talk of how having a child makes them feel. Not real love mind you, but that wretched warmth they get when being the object of another’s affection. I know, I know – it’s a revolting thought, but remember we’re interested in the long game here. This reinforces in the mind of the subject that the child’s sole purpose is to please the mother. Not in any permanent sense, of course, but in the temporary moments of a baby’s cuteness. Therefore, when the child is not being cute – i.e. when it requires something of its parents – it is not fulfilling its obligation and is to be punished for being bad. That’s our hook, my friend. The child is to be no more than an object of entertainment. These individuals often know this routine well from experiencing similar punishment from their own parents. Abuse is a most effective tactic.

But before you intend to proceed along this route, make sure their heart is sufficiently hardened. The symptoms of such resoluteness usually include some kind of addiction – drugs or alcohol, it doesn’t matter. What you must avoid are any feelings of legitimate guilt a parent may feel from treating their child poorly. Shame, on the other hand is fine, let them believe they are a bad parent and that they can never be a good one. Our daytime talk shows do wonders for encouraging this. Pride is better – “I’m this way because I love my kids and I’m better than those fools on TV.” If they can justify their abuse this way, we’ve really hit the jackpot.

The third group, and one of the hardest to hold on to, are those that have actually terminated a pregnancy. The fact that someone having and keeping their offspring yields longer term benefits for us, is certainly counterintuitive but true nevertheless. Because of the Enemy’s abominable capability for forgiveness, one who has had an abortion may always be welcomed back into His graces with a sufficient degree of guilt and faith in His eternal benevolence. They are lost to us at this point unless we can make them proud and turn them into those types who protest and insult those whom they resembled just a brief time ago.

The aim in these circumstances is to encourage their memory to dwell on uncivil confrontations between them and the so-called pro-life camp. Because the pro-lifers claim to represent the Enemy, those who ultimately decide on an abortion are inclined to think: “If God chooses these jerks to represent Him, I want no part of Him.” This puts the individual well on our path though it requires effort to keep them there. If they ultimately decide against abortion, we convert them to the rabid pro-life camp where they will make their way to us by encouraging others to reject the God they claim to represent. Their intentions may be otherwise but that matters little to us.

The ultimate victory is encouraging the procedure because they feel ashamed of their actions and wish to hide what they did. This causes a rift between them and the loved ones from whom they hide their torment. Torment is something humans are incapable of handling alone and if used properly leads to suicide which is the ultimate act of despair and, therefore, an express ticket to Our Father Below. If it doesn’t lead to torment directly, it leads to indifference, which leads to repetitions of the same battle and the more battles we win, the more ground the Enemy loses. Then, it becomes simply a matter of time.

So, to summarize: The consciousness of the abortion conundrum among the humans by itself lends us tremendous advantage. The three main types: 1) The rabid pro-lifer, 2) The abusive mother, and 3) The unfazed serial abortion patient, all present advantageous opportunities to achieve our goals. There are only two narrow yet strong bridges which the Enemy has managed to keep for those in this camp: 1) The path of humble penitence for the sin, and 2) The strength He so readily provides to those who carry their children to term only to make the willful and disciplined decision to give it up to someone else capable and desirous of raising children.

If you can keep them out of these last two areas, our success will be great.

                                  Your Merciful Master,  

                                      Slubgob

Cc: Dungwart, Senior VP of Operations for Individual Temptation and Soul Procurement

The Slubgob Correspondences: Letter VI

My Dear Screwtape,

     You pose an excellent follow-up question, my sweet subordinate, though you could’ve posed it more delicately. If the Enemy draws humans together for His purposes, aren’t our purposes best served by keeping them apart? See? That’s a much nicer way of putting it.

     The answer is that the inclination among humans to interact with one another is innate. Even the most introverted among them has some desire to connect with another person. There are several means whereby these humans connect with one another – we may call them, “ties”. The primary categories are familial, neighborly, utilitarian, and social.

     Family and neighbors are easy to describe. Most know who their family is and most know their neighbors – though neighborly ties are becoming more and more frayed. Neighbors are other humans encountered regularly in proximity of one’s home. They have little deep knowledge about one another but they exchange ritual pleasantries, look out for one another’s property, and even help each other with a minor task from time to time. To sow strife among neighbors, we usually strike at the aspects of character that cause one to either be overly involved in the affairs of their neighbors or closed off to the point of open hostility in the face of sincere interest.

     Coworkers fit under utilitarian. These are the people with whom they conduct their occupation. I include the staff to supervisor relationship in this category as well. They have coworkers they like and those whom they dislike. But, for our purposes, they’re quite similar to neighbors in that we can strike at them the same ways. At times, we can do so quite easily because they are often forced to deal pleasantly with people whom they despise. Neighbors can always avoid one another but coworkers not so easily.

     The strangest ties are social ones. This is a very unique category because the individual has no say over who their family is and fairly limited say in who their neighbors and coworkers are. Social ties are those which one chooses to have with someone else. When we talk about our advantage in a human’s isolation, it is these ties which we must unravel first. Families, neighbors, and coworkers are not ties that can be easily unraveled, and we’re not all that certain that we’d want to considering the advantage such relationships afford us. If we can damage friendships, we can leave the individual to be ripped apart by his or her obligations to the other three groups.

     The way to poison such relationships is to encourage a false fulfillment of the desire to connect with others - social junk food if you will; something that tastes good, is attractive, and even provides pleasure at times but offers little in the way of true nourishment. A fellow stubbornly pursuing an unrequited love, a woman addicted to an abusive boyfriend, or a homely bookish type invited out among a group of ‘fashionable’ people solely for their amusement – these are the types of social relationships in which we delight. They appear real but ultimately leave the spirit emaciated.

     But, alas, it is not a perfect world for our breed and such connections can often result in an ultimate realization of their superficial nature…and this can prove most disastrous. What we’re attempting in our new approach – the approach to which you are instructing your students – is creating a new form of social connection similar to how a church may operate.

     People attend churches willingly and often to fill a spiritual void. The church encourages socialization amongst its members and often – to our dismay – lead to wholesome friendships. What we’re after is to fill such a void by asking people to dedicate themselves to a purpose. The purpose must appear good, but be rooted in what they dislike. We’ve had success in the past with such groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but membership has dwindled with the increasing tolerance for people of other races, religions, and ethnicities. The key is that the group must be entirely contrarian and offer strict guidelines to distinguish the “us” from the “them”.

     It may seem antithetical to our previous strategy of social isolation, but believe me when I say that a preference for social isolation must first be rooted in something that seems good. In these instances, an individual’s lust for power over a particular group will lead to in-fighting and accusations that certain leaders are not “one of us”. Soon the ground starts shrinking around who “us” really is until only the self is left. But if we are to succeed in leading them into this, we must do so by appealing to their urge to connect with others. Our job is complete once they’re convinced any genuine connections are impossible.

Your Merciful Master,

Slubgob