My Dear Wormwood

Dear Wormwood,

Seeing as your Uncle Screwtape is busy after being promoted to a particular world leader, he has handed you over to me. Now, my dear Wormwood, I see that the possibility of a human war, and all that leads up to it, has enticed you. It is of vital importance to your mission that you remember your greatest weapon: a worldly contentedness.

Perhaps you wonder, “But what sort of man would be content amidst his country in turmoil?” and to that, my sweet, daft Wormwood, is precisely why you still are given instructions. The type of man who is content to disown his brother, hate his sister, and disregard his fellow countrymen is the man who believes in himself over against another.

It doesn’t much matter how one gets a subject to this point, or even the particular flavor of which he indulges. All that matters are his indulgence and his whimsical disregard of reality. You see, Wormwood, in the midst of suffering one is compelled to action, especially those called by the Enemy. Unfortunately, you cannot touch what the Enemy has made, but you may distract it. If one merely theorizes suffering, but never sees it nor gives it a face, there, my dear Wormwood, lies the recipe for disaster. You let them proclaim their God but do not let them act. Give them reasons why their inaction is somehow righteous, however you may want to go about it is up to your preference. All at once you destroy their faith while simultaneously destroying any potential faith for another watching him. And that, my simple Wormwood, is what we call collateral damage. Here are but a few methods of distracting these two-legged beasts:

1. Convince your people to be Toss them wherever the wind blows, giving equal credibility to every argument despite whether the Enemy already readily condemns one side or another. Let them be obsessed with being quick to listen, but never acting. Let him hear the case of both the man dying on the road and the priest who passes him by in the name of fairness – and if you keep him listening long enough, the priest will grow weary, and the man will die anyways. He will give up, assuming the dying man to be logically inferior and unable to attain a virtue of listening such as his, and will be lulled into an angry, pessimistic security that he is the only rational man left. Should he withdraw or side with evil is irrelevant, only that he should disregard the suffering as the result of the dying man’s inability to articulate himself correctly.
2. Overwhelm your people with trivial matters. Bring up every slight injustice they might find that should distract them from what is immediate. Does he take issue with the dietary choices of the priest and his desire to force them on others, or does he take issue with the dying man’s clothes that were made with child labor? You see, my dear Wormwood, neither of these things matter. Should he be caught in relatively trivial matters, the man will die and the priest will merely be annoyed with him. He will never actually become the Samaritan he idolizes, but he will be convinced in his militant stances that he is the defender of the oppressed simply by virtue of being sensitive.
3. Convince him to be a man of conscience. Should a man be bound by his own conscience, you have made him the most malleable of all. Perhaps you could convince him of the dying man’s potential crimes that lead him to that space. Perhaps he could follow the priest into town, being convinced that he’s imitating the one entrusted to watch over him. Perhaps you could convince him that he simply does not want to help the dying man, and that is enough warrant. You see, Wormwood, these people are the weakest and most succulent of all humans simply because they view themselves the most resolute. They have confused their own minds to be the Enemy speaking to them, so all we must do is speak, and they will listen. They will never know the difference between a disturbed conscience and a deceived one – we must only make them comfortable and confident, and they will do all we wish.
4. Make them men of duty. If he becomes a man of duty, then to avoid confronting suffering only demands the right puppeteer. Should he consider his actions not his own, then the priest may order him to let the man die with no objections. He finds himself retaining no responsibility, and the death of the man is simply something to be obeyed. My dear Wormwood, should you find a man like this, it is likely he is already under the special hateful care of another who has been assigned to him.
5. Make them champions of their own freedom. Beware, my not-so-cunning pupil, as this is by far the most dangerous of all. Should you fail, they might rush headlong into suffering, confront it, and be conformed to the Enemy. But, done correctly, they will disregard any and all rules, descending deeper into evil in the name of justice. For some, the threat of rules, prestige, and conscience constrain a man to contemplate his actions carefully to the point of inaction. But the releasing of these constraints has a sulfur-lake of possibilities. Perhaps in a frenzy he will rob the priest for his dereliction and murder him for his cloak on behalf of the dying man! You see Wormwood, if we can convince a man to commit an evil even greater than the one he seeks to remedy, we not only render him ineffective, but altogether hopeless and deranged.
   But, perhaps he rushes headlong into suffering, take off his own cloak and bear the weight of the dying man all the way into town. He ignores the sin of the priest and focuses only on the task at hand. At all costs, my blithering Wormwood, do not let this happen. Should a man disregard himself for the sake of another, there is no turning back; the Enemy has won.
6. Make them concerned with their private virtue. Commend them to be so wary of becoming stained that they take no action at all. My dear Wormwood, if their minds are consumed by what not to do, they will never have any meaningful action in the world at all. The man will see the dying man only to remember that it is unlawful to touch the dead. Like the priest, he will circumvent the dead man and arrive safely at our unholy temple, where he can praise his abstinence and revel in his inaction, being convinced that his refusal of confronting suffering was admirable above all else.

I hope this has been insightful. Your goal, Wormwood, is not that you should deter them from acting, but have them convince themselves that their inaction is, in fact, action.

Your not-so-affectionate stand-in,

Bitterhaven

Inspired by C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters” and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Ethics”, particularly his Ethics as Formation chapter.