A Letter
from a senior Demon, Snakebite, to
an apprentice Demon, Braintwister,
instructing him in methods of tempting men and winning men's souls from
"the Enemy" (God).
From
The
Snakebite Letters by Peter Kreeft, in the tradition of The Screwtape Letters of C. S. Lewis.
My
dear Braintwister,
See? We've won the teachers, soon we'll
have the students. Once you capture the cause, you soon own the effect. And
these teachers aren't limited to the classroom; through TV, movies, internet, magazines and music, we've turned the whole society into a classroom. And the
lesson plans are written by us.
We have a right to preen a bit over this
success, but we should also be realistic and candid. Not only do we have the
usual Enemy counterattacks to fend off; but we're also struggling with a
contradiction within our own strategy, and if the humans ever sense it, our
plans may be ruined.
Here's the problem. On the one hand, we
want the human vermin to be bland, egalitarian conformists. Our strategy has
been to produce photocopied souls, and we've labored long and hard (and quite
successfully) for more than a century now to rid them of the very concepts of
excellence, nobility, superiority, hierarchy and authority. Nearly all of them,
when they hear those words, react with a negative knee jerk. Their unconscious
creed is: What all cannot attain, no one should.
But on the other hand, the masses remain
much more traditional, religious and moral in their beliefs than our
elite. We don't want souls to conform to the real
majority just yet—not until the majority is ours. You must therefore keep your
patient from noticing the contradiction between his egalitarianism and his
elitism.
But here's the good news: You'd be amazed
how easy this is. Remember our basic principle of keeping his mind and his
morals in separate compartments.
The Enemy wants him to be an elitist about
ideas and ideals, and an egalitarian about people; to be suspicious and
critical of ideas but open and welcoming to all people. Our strategy is to make
him just the opposite: an elitist about people and an egalitarian about ideas.
Make him think his teachers and scriptwriters are superior people, but also
that one idea isn't really superior to another, that all ideas are equal, that
there's no objective truth, no real right and wrong, and thus no one has any
right to "impose his own values on others". (You simply will not
believe how much mileage we've gotten out of that hog-wash!)
Once again, keep his mind away from noting
the self-contradiction in our propaganda, the value judgment that there are no
real value judgments, the dogma against dogma.
How can they not notice such an obvious
contradiction? They can, Braintwister, they can—especially the well-educated
ones. The more educated they are, the less they believe in logic and common
sense. It's the firm boys and cleaning women whose minds we've been unable to
twist.
Really, did you think the sexual revolution
of the 1960s just "happened"? No, it was the flowering of a long,
deliberate strategy. The basic principle of our approach is a one-two punch:
Hit them where they're soft and weak, and at the same time hit them where
they're hard and proud—in other words, between their legs and between their
ears.
They've always been soft in the
reproductive organs, of course. How typical of the Enemy to invent that obscene
joke of a "rational animal", to put an angel-like spirit in an
ape-like body! But now we've softened their heads too. They've always had
trouble obeying the Enemy's law of chastity; but they've never had such trouble
understanding it and believing it until now. It's not new that we've tempted
them to live promiscuously, but it's thoroughly novel that we've tempted them
to justify it, to glorify it even to sanctify it.
How did we manage it? We had some success
with philosophers, playwrights, artists, novelists and poets over the last
century, but our campaign really took off with the advent of movies, internet and TV. The secret is the power of images. The humans can put up defenses
against ideas, which have to pass the gate keeper of their mind, Reason; but
they're weak as water against images. Images sneak in through their
unconscious, which is a helpless child.
If we plant the same kind of image in them
over and over again through TV, internet and movies, they'll gradually be
desensitized. Sex and violence are our two specialties, of course. Our media
elite personnel have relentlessly pressured for more. If the sex and violence
curve continues at the current rate, we'll have Hell incarnate in their minds
in just two more generations. There's nothing, literally nothing, these
creatures won't allow. Already, most things the last generation would have
regarded as unthinkable are commonplace on TV and internet.
With the movies, it was a two-step
strategy. First, their films showed more explicit sexual promiscuity, but
within a moral context— "crime and punishment", so to speak. Movies
like Carnal Knowledge, Alfie and Shampoo typify this stage. Then, once
the explicit images became commonplace, the sheep were too passive to protest
the removal of the moral frame. Their moralists played right into our strategy;
they were so hung up on how much flesh was shown that they forgot the lesson
the images taught. They were so shocked at overt eroticism, even in a framework
of fidelity, that they hardly noticed the snide little smirks for infidelity.
The upshot is that now, nearly every single
movie that's made for young people must have a dash of nudity, no matter how
gratuitous (and of course never, never between married people). And every time
a boy first kisses a girl, the next scene always shows them in bed. What a
triumph of image propaganda!
The lesson it bores into them
unconsciously, like holes bored in the hull of a ship, is so obvious I'm
surprised they don't get bored with it: that the normal, the natural, the
inevitable corollary of kissing is copulating.
Notice the power of images, Braintwister.
Not even a professor could be fool enough to fall for that as an argument. Put
it in words, and it's ridiculous. Put it in images, and it's compelling.
Thus we've persuaded them to rationalize
their lust, to believe that feeling, not marriage, justifies sex. Most of them
don't yet believe in infidelity, but they do believe in fornication. The only
structures they put on copulating are "emotional maturity"; and
"contentment", which are vague enough for anyone but an infant to
claim.
Oh, we've had a field day with their heads.
There have been times and places in the past where we've had as much success
with their hormones, but never with their heads. That's because never before
has a society been so educated, and never before have we so dominated the
education industry, especially the extracurricular one, the media.
We've also succeeded in imposing a total
media censorship on the one subject that is the most important thing of all in
the lives of the majority of the people in the country, but which is never
allowed to enter even the most "realistic" movies or public TV shows.
I mean, of course, religious faith. Religion is shown occasionally, but from
the outside, and never as true. The only characters shown as
deeply religious are either bigots or sissies.
Though we've undermined their sexual
morality, we haven't yet rotted away the rest or their Christian ethics. We've
persuaded only a few to accept cruelty, the last bastion of their moral
absolutism; but we've succeeded in glorifying it and desensitizing them to it,
for example, just by making "slasher" movies fashionable. Wait till
they see the next step!
But we mustn't let our love of violence
distract us from our main task. Niceness is as useful as nastiness, stamp
collecting is as useful as murder, if only it sucks these vermin from the
Enemy's grasp. That's the only thing that matters in the end.
The Enemy has this utterly ridiculous thing
about repentance, you know. Sometimes I suspect He deliberately allows us to
tempt some of the vermin to great sins just so that they'll see them more
clearly and repent more strongly, and thus escape our two most deadly nets,
pride and self-satisfaction. That supremely troublesome philosopher Thomas
Aquinas let out a secret of the Enemy's strategy when he said that just as a
doctor may tolerate a lesser disease to free his patient from a greater one,
the Enemy often deliberately withholds that loathsome thing He calls
"grace" and allows a soul to succumb to our temptation to some dear,
external sin in order to free it from pride and bring it to repentance.
The Enemy really will forgive any sin, you
know—that is, any sin He can forgive, i.e, any sin that's repented of. So
impenitence is what we must aim at, by dulling their consciences to guilt,
making them feel more guilty about guilt than sin.
Your patient does, unfortunately, have
something of: conscience. That's our enemy, Braintwister. Conscience is the
Enemy's own mouthpiece in the soul. Shut it down at any cost.
Our end, of course, is not simply to
inveigle the brutes into bed with each other, but
(1) to win their souls
through corrupting their society (after all, a "good" society is
simply one where it's easy to be good, as one of their more dangerous but
fortunately obscure thinkers Peter Maurin, has said);
(2) to corrupt their
society through destroying its fundamental foundation, the family, the one
place they naturally learn the Enemy's philosophy of unselfish love, being
loved just for who you are, not for what you do;
(3) to destroy the family
through destroying marriages;
(4) to destroy marriages through destroying
fidelity, their anchor and glue;
(5) to destroy fidelity through the new
philosophy of
"sexual liberation" and the
"sexual
revolution"; and
(6) to do that through our domination of the media.
It's
a simple six-step sexual strategy.
One of the most pernicious ideas that can creep
into your patient's head is throwing away his TV set and gadgets. That would
burn the bridge by which we march into his heart. But that's an act so radical
that few of them are ever capable of it—no junkie likes going cold turkey.
Your
affectionate uncle,
Snakebite
