Dear Stabby,

No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get my patient to stop practicing virtue! She’s just obsessed with doing good! As a child, she was nauseatingly obedient to her parents.  After tireless work, in her teen years I got her to rebel against her parents and teachers, but then she began standing up for students who were bullied. I got her to stop THAT because I convinced her she was burnt-out, and NOW she’s telling people about the importance of self-care. Every time I squash a new virtue, another one springs up in its place. What do I do?

Tired in Tartarus

Dear Spent,

Although it goes against my principles to comfort such a whiner as you self-evidently are, I’m going to have to reassure you. By happy accident, this young lady seems to be merely a tiresome little social activist, and no true threat.

The truth is, that while it should always be our goal, it is VERY difficult to get any human to completely leave the path of virtue. They’re addicted to the disgusting stuff, and for the same reason they are addicted to such material goods as food and oxygen: it is how the Enemy designed them. Furthermore, even those who HAVE been adduced to throw virtue away entirely and come over to our side must almost always be made to believe that they have not done so. Oh they SAY they have rebelled against the Enemy and His bourgeois virtues, but the second you try to get them to overtly indulge and worship themselves, they start justifying their lust and will to power with talk of  “the greater good.”

We do not – and unfortunately cannot – force Humans away from doing good. And even if we could, it would likely turn out to be a bad idea. What we do instead is to turn those virtues that they insist on practicing into sins, which then become weapons in our hands. In your patient you have already noticed these things, but you have been trying to counteract her virtues by attacking them. I can even tell you how you did it. You awoke rebellion by fostering her resentment at her parents’ demands (helped, no doubt, by the teenage hormones that were driving her in that direction anyway). After that, you awoke sloth by fostering her resentment at the ingratitude and cowardice of the spineless victims that needed her help to fight the battles that should have been their own.

Instead of all that work, it would have been much easier and more effective to foster the sins she already had, entrenching them in her character. If you look closely at the soul of any Human you will see that much of what they think of as “virtue” is merely their own fear of punishment. You say she was obedient as a child? Probably that was because she was afraid to rebel. You should have fed that fear until it dominated her and became despair. If in spite of that she rebelled? It was because of resentment at having been dominated for so long. You should have fed that wrath until it became indiscriminate anger at any who opposed her and turned to violence. But as things stand you have taught her the deadly lesson that she can change. You had better hope that this does not lead her to true repentance!

But there seems to be still time to correct your blunders. She is preaching self-care, now? It is still because of resentment at her own exhaustion. Let her apply her own “virtue” to herself until it is all she thinks of. If you do it properly, you will find that she can be induced to turn her proper regard for herself as a person (which the Enemy frankly encourages) into mere indulgence of her ego. All gluttony can be excused, all requests for help (however reasonable) can be denied in the name of “caring for the self.” Done properly, you will even be able to make her resent the normal obligation of every human and turn her into a self-centered parasite who — and this is the wonderful bit — actually believes she is still practicing virtue! This really is the end goal of the competent tempter: to raise up humans who will defend their own sins to the death in the belief that they are really virtues.

If you doubt this just look at their social media, the greatest garden for sins since Hollywood. There you will find the legions of the envious proclaiming their fight for justice, the wrathful trumpeting their compassion, and the nakedly lustful shouting of their love. And should any truly virtuous person dare to question their devotion, they are savaged with the cold fanaticism of the worst of the Crusaders. It is an easy enough state of affairs to bring about with any sin. Just look at the wonderful job we have done with the word empathy. This word, which is at the center of the Enemy’s injunction to the Humans about the danger of judging one another’s hearts and motivations, has been turned into one of the most useful weapons in our arsenal. It is now a shield against any form of criticism. In the name of empathy, the Humans are made to deny plain facts, the confrontation of which would make others feel bad. In the name of empathy self-destructive habits are defended and indulgence is excused.  Have you impressed upon your patient how wonderful she is simply for following her natural inclinations? Fasten her attention upon it, and let her regard any request for aid, and especially any criticism, as a personal attack upon her. Soon you will have a patient who imagines herself virtuous, and who fights for her own corruption with the ferocity of an animal. Which is, after all, fitting.

Stabby.