Dear Stabby,

Thus far, the New Unreality Method has been serving me splendidly. My patient’s priorities register nothing as important that ranks higher on the reality register than her time in the state school, while her free time is entirely taken up by a digital “feed”, which she mainly uses in crafting a persona which is a nervous wreck, proud of it, and has been trained to regard any suggestion of improvement as tantamount to a boot upon her face. She is socially reliant on a fractious and treacherous “support network” of other digital denizens of this kind. She is stone ignorant of the Enemy, regarding Him as a bogey conjured by those who simply will not accept her inner beauty (with a theoretical but largely illusory extension to the beauty of everyone else.) It is, in fact, going so well that I have caught myself in complacency. Please apprise me as to any likely pitfalls or counterattacks.

Yours conspiratorially,

What Can Possibly Go Wrong?

Dear What,

You have clearly made excellent use of your opportunities and have your patient right where you want her. So much so that I almost suspect you of using this letter as an opportunity to advance yourself. The condition you have your patient in is exactly what we would like: a human who trumpets her own flaws as virtues, for the purpose of pleasing people she neither truly knows nor cares for. You plainly have her convinced that the sources of all her unhappiness are external, while the source of what happiness she has (or should have) is internal. This is a great triumph. Because as long as she is focused on the shortcomings of her acquaintances, or the World in general, she is rendered powerless by two main factors: Firstly, she is concerned with something that is mostly fiction. Oh, not that her acquaintances, or the World, do not have shortcomings. We have been hard at work seeing that they do! But her perception of what those shortcomings are all come from the narrow, parochial perspective that must be any human’s view of another. Secondly, that while she can do a great deal to change herself, she can do almost nothing to change others, still less the World.

But the major thing that concerns me in your letter is that you mention no relationships outside of the digital world. No family. If you simply forgot, that is very careless, and a blind spot you had better attend to before the Enemy does. Or, perhaps you have succeeded in isolating her from romantic love or strong friendships in favor of addiction to the digital world. This would be a positive step: we want the Humans to be frightened and alone, and you may think that the loneliness you have achieved makes your patient safe from harmful doctrine and addicted to pseudo-relationships. But there is one great flaw in this that is sometimes overlooked: the patient knows that she is lonely.

If she knows she is lonely, then she will tend to latch on to any real relationship that is offered.  Such as acquaintances inviting her to social gatherings or clubs disconnected with the digital world, or even (Our Father Below forbid) a church! The Enemy is adept at using tactics of this kind, and your patient does not appear to have any attachments that would prevent her from following any person who offered her true Friendship.

Now you might be tempted to make your patient a shut-in. A Paranoid, believing that any person not part of her digital circle is de facto an enemy. But this is harder than it appears, and if it collapses it tends to collapse utterly. Far more reliable is the temptation to Sex.

Sex is a wonderful substitute for relationships and very reliable. In the first place, very few humans are at all hard to tempt into sexual activity, and we have been hard at work making it even easier. I suspect, in fact, that you have laid the groundwork already, and that you will find that her digital circle will be entirely supportive of any and all sexual activity you can induce her to perform. We have taught the humans that, like fragility, sexual promiscuity is to be celebrated as a virtue: that it is bold, heroic, and defiant, rather than being an activity that practically all multicellular animals perform without a thought.

Of course, besides the fact that fornication is a sin (and we have practically eliminated both those words from their vocabularies except as jokes) it has excellent value for you as a means of ensnaring the patient. Firstly, while we have tried to downplay this factor as much as we can, sex ties people together, and female humans particularly focus on the relational aspect. If you play your cards right, you may get your patient to believe that sex is a relationship by itself. But even if you do not, you will be able to tie her to a partner, or better, a series of partners, with whom she will always be seeking fulfillment and never finding it. And the overwhelming advantage to this is that she will stop recognizing  she is lonely. How could she be, with another human always around to leech from, to fight against, and to hate for not valuing her as she longs to be valued? Even as unlikely a place as their own memes have recognized this and put it very well: “The worst thing is not to be lonely, but to be around people that make you feel alone.”

But you must never let her suspect the truth of this. Tie her into romantic and sexual relationships that she cannot find the strength to walk away from, and that can never fulfill her. The mere fact of having a partner whose feelings and schedule interfere with her own will make a true Friendship difficult, and an altered schedule a struggle. And if you have your patient as well in hand as your letter suggests, you should find it easy to guide her toward partners as shallow and empty as she is. Who will also demand that she fulfill them in the same impossible manner that she expects them to fulfill her. Look up the term codependent. Even better would be to make her a mother, and to tie her to children. Those whirling vortices of time and attention will make her unable to focus on anything — especially anything as ephemeral and unimportant as her own soul — for years. And, of course, they are likely, with such a mother, to grow up exactly like her. Hell does still need food, you know.

Sincerely,

Stabby

By Stabigail Van Burnin

With, as always, apologies to C.S. Lewis and Screwtape.

Dear Stabby: Through no fault of my own, I have been assigned to one of the worst patients in the world: a young man who has been raised in a Christian household and who has kept up an interest in matters of faith and theology. He’s most of the way through high school and already advanced in the Enemy’s service beyond most adults. Where do I even start in the face of such a terrible beginning?

–Roasted

Dear Roasted,

First of all, no one wants to hear your whining about how unfair the situation is. Either you were assigned to this patient by random chance, or you weren’t paying sufficient attention to your superiors to influence them better in your favor. The first is just bad luck, the second is incompetence, and either way, no one cares.

The first thing to determine is whether your youth is really as advanced as you believe. Is he truly devoted to the Enemy, or is he merely loud about matters that he truly does not understand? Is he comfortable with the world in which he finds himself? When he is with friends who are not Christian, does he challenge them? Or even hold himself apart from them and refuse to agree with their worldliness? Or does he throw himself in with them wholeheartedly, pretending to be one of them, before going back to his family and his church, where he throws himself just as much into praising his God?

If it is the latter, then you truly have nothing to worry about: the wretched creature is merely imitating his surroundings, and once he goes off to college (I presume you ARE, at least, trying to get him into their colleges, the transformation of which is our resounding triumph of this century in that nation.) he will quickly fall away from any church and into your lap like the ripe — and dead — fruit that he is.

If, on the other hand, he complains that he is alone, and that he cannot find anyone with whom he can be honest: that he feels like a stranger in this world and longs for fellow-workers with whom he can share burdens and confide, then you will have a harder road, because you have a man who has actually begun to realize that loyalty to his God and to his own soul has a cost. This can, however, be fought on two levels.

The first and best is that of simple despair. Draw his attention toward the right kind of people: friends that hate all he stands for and yet are “nice to him,” or even better, “fun.” Draw his attention to how easily happy they appear and how they outnumber the people like him in this world we control. Never let him find like-minded people: if he runs into them, draw his attention to every defect of their characters (humans always have plenty), while downplaying those of the friends you want him to have. This way, when the crisis of faith comes (and it always comes, the Enemy foolishly allows them), he will have no support. In fact, his “friends” may even demand he abandon his faith in exchange for their support.

However, if this were going to work, you would probably already be seeing signs of it. Assuming you are not, then he is more tough-minded, your situation is worse. You have a young man who is already used to losing friends and being called a crank and a bigot for simply not agreeing with everything the popular people say. Therefore he knows that it is survivable. So the best thing in that case, as Undersecretary Screwtape once suggested, is to harp on his conscience and suggest that since he is being persecuted, he might as well dedicate himself to extremes of devotion that will turn him into one. Let him rail against all he comes in contact with. Never let him feel he has “done enough.” NEVER let him remember that the Enemy holds simple endurance to be a primary virtue; that, in the words of Milton, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Although it’s unlikely he’s ever heard of Milton; we’ve got that fellow out of most of their schools. In so doing, you will, at the very least, make his beliefs extremely unattractive to all he may come in contact with, and you may be able to drive him into a cult.

But whatever the course of action, you must work on his emotions and the dread that every human has of loneliness. Do not let him notice the extremes of loneliness that so many followers of Christ went through. Let him believe that if he were really pleasing the Enemy, he would feel better. The Enemy wants the humans to discover the facts of the world and His spiritual principles, to base their actions on those facts and principles, and allow the results of their actions to shape their emotions. We, of course, want to invert this: for them to found their actions upon their emotions, and to choose or declare facts and principles based upon those. Since such “facts and principles” are as watery and formless as the emotions upon which they are based, they are thus open to every manipulation we can devise. We are aided in this by the fact that all human children naturally begin life in this way, and most of them on some level long to return to it.

Stabby

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