My Dear Wormwood.
I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading
and taking care that he spends a good deal of his time on twitter arguing with
strangers. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you supposed
that argument was the way to keep him
out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few
centuries earlier when humans knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when
it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected
thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result
of a chain of reasoning.
But no more. What the immediacy of the internet and other
such weapons we have largely done away with the idea of argument as inquiry and
replaced it with argument as cheerleading. Your man has been accustomed, ever
since he was a boy, to disregard actual reasoning in favor of emotions to be
praised by others. He doesn't think of Christian doctrines as primarily true or
false, but as academic or practical, outworn
or contemporary, progress or regress.
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him cowed. Make him think Social
Justice is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the
future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
Remember too that your man does not need to be a slave to
the twitter platform—it is only the exclusivity which twitter provides that matters.
Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or
ignore, tends to develop inside itself a greenhouse of mutual admiration, and
towards the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained
without shame because the cause is its sponsor and it is thought to be
impersonal. The longer your man fights for the cause against the world the more
extremist he will become.
And once he becomes a fanatic you will find him very
willing to antagonize and look down on those who don’t share his views. He will
quite naturally view them as hidebound and reactionary, and will view himself
as virtuous. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors
whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote
circumference, to people he does not know on the internet who share his views.
The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. He
will demand apologies on behalf of Native Americans who don’t care that a
sports team is named after them; he will gladly agitate for reparations as a
white bystander. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will
being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You
can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that
smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till
they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable
qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and
are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don't,
of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and
fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real center, what the Enemy
calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by
the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man
from our Father's house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets
there.
Your
Affectionate Uncle,
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