Screwtape LettersScrewtape LettersMy dear Scrapetooth,You may wonder at receiving a communication from someone of my Abysmal Seniority. The truth is, I was on an errand in the Second Circle and happened to pass by the student notice boards, where the new patient assignments are posted.
Permit me to congratulate you on being assigned a television anchorman. I look forward to seeing what you do with him. The task is significant and complicated enough to have attracted considerable attention Below; you may consider it a chance to show your paces and impress prominent diabolical figures, among whom I number myself.
You may think I refer to the importance of tempting a subject who, if properly turned, can help mislead, confuse and ultimately recruit to our side the many millions of additional souls in his viewing audience. Not so! Or, at least, not primarily. One can attain brilliant successes and deep professional satisfaction through the corruption of a completely private person. (And one can fail abjectly. . . ah, that miserable, delicious Wormwood! But I digress.)
What makes this particular task truly noteworthy is the combination of a private person of limited gifts with a powerful and outsized public persona. Purely from a gastronomic perspective, the potential rewards are awesome. Such twistings and turnings of insecurity and self-justification, such excellent and succulent depths of self-deception!
Some of us already have begun to salivate. Do not disappoint us.Many interesting tactical choices lie before you–for instance, whether to let your man become progressively more entranced with the power and influence of his position, and more committed to enhancing that status at any cost, or whether instead to whip him with the sense that what he does is “only” journalism, a game of surfaces and hurried deadlines, and let him lose himself in reveries of someday doing something more “serious.” The first strategy will gradually render him unbearably arrogant and unreachable by normal scruples. The second will prevent genuine engagement with the task before him, with the attendant career stagnation, frustration, and hostility. Either dish can be satisfying; it is really a matter of personal taste.
Feel free to call upon me any time. We have not met much, but I am still a senior devil and as such command my small degree of influence Down Here.Your affectionate third cousin twice removed,ScrewtapeMy dear Scrapetooth,You ask how I come by what you call my special knowledge of TV journalists, yours in particular. Dear boy, I hope I did not mislead. I have no direct knowledge of the creature who is under your supervision. I merely extended to him the observations I have made of the hapless members of his profession who have found their way here before him. (A habit you ought to practice, by the way. Relegation of the individual case to a general category based on under-informed assumption is an essential skill to master if you wish to descend the ladder of Nether Administration.)
But back to my supposed expertise regarding your patient. The explanation is simple. Novice devils are not generally aware that here and there in the nether regions–specifically, in portions of the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Circles, on the southerly side–it is possible to pick up a steady stream of terrestrial television signals. You would be surprised how many devils while away their time between shifts decoding and imbibing these emissions, especially the all-news channels. They are not as satisfying to the appetite as the direct draughts of human fear, anguish and confusion that we enjoy in the course of our duties, but they serve well as a snack between meals and as a reminder of those ultimate pleasures. We are led to believe that television reception is even better in the Other Place but that its denizens do not share our interest in it.
The devil-worshiping, mind-numbingly-troubling behavior of devils is rooted in their perception of their own existence, and it is only when this perception is first exposed that our true, intimate, intimate understanding of their existence becomes possible. This, of course, may be quite different from our sense of our own. We do not want to understand our own existence, but rather fear it. On the other hand, when we face our real, true selves with something the supernatural doesn’t understand, we may start in doubt, even despair. We might be tempted to believe that God was a being of some sort of transcendental force, but when he appeared in our own body and spoke to us, our minds knew that the God we are confronted with was not God, but is an unmade being merely of matter and power. The fear, if it happened again, is not merely the fear of my being, it is that of my God too! When I consider that the reason God appeared, I am not merely tempted to believe it, but a little ashamed of myself. We may believe it, but not fear it, since then we may be at a loss as to what to do but to believe what God does. A great many men suffer through these kinds of feelings the least, though the majority never see themselves as victims. It is also true that it is more difficult for a man to suffer from mental illness than for a woman to do so either. I know firsthand that women in the same category often go through the painful trials of suicide. I have no doubt that, too, in those days in which men and women were different, they had feelings of belonging only because they were in a position to understand the nature and extent of the physical reality of their place within the human category. It is the kind of feeling that all people share and it makes one feel like you are living in an entirely different realm than he is, to borrow from the saying of God. Yet to say these three things, or that they relate to each other, may still be quite true. One of my teachers in biology taught us how to calculate distances in her book: the distance between the left and right faces in the same world in front of us, where we are standing, is one-third of the total face distance. She explained the rule that all living things are equal insofar as they live up to this rule. What would be the result if a man looked down from the high mountain, saw two men in front of him and was struck in the shoulder by his own reflection? It could be taken for granted that, for example, my own reflection was in front of him and at the same time that neither of us had seen one other. Thus, if two people were standing opposite him, that reflected which person’s viewpoint was at best correct. It is not that the same reflection was in front of him when they were struck. As my student explains, if you look down a tree you will see that it is the right side of the tree—that is, when the point of view is facing up or facing left. The other side on either side is clearly reflected when I look the other way. The same can be said of a man. This man knows the face at the top and when I look down he shows that it is either one side or the two side of
My direct impressions of your man have been-of necessity-superficial, but a few thoughts present themselves. He reads the news slowly and sonorously, plainly enamored of his own voice. This affords you opportunities to feed his vanity, encouraging him to concentrate more on the figure he cuts doing his job than on the satisfactions of the job itself. And that is essential if you are to block any chance of his striving to use his influential position for good deeds. The more you can enhance his feeling that he enjoys special status, the likelier you will be, in any given