My Dearest Wormwood,
It was pleasing to read the last account of your subject regarding his conversion to the neighborhood cult. However, your ecstatic celebration of this event tells me that you are far too confident, perhaps ignorant of your own naivety. While cults and factions are indeed false representations of the enemy and have the potential to eventually lead our subjects to our Father, they nonetheless bring the person within a distance of Him, a chance we should be unwilling to take. I have an uneasy feeling that our Father would be less than pleased. We should not want the person simply hoping in a false truth. We should do our best to bring the person either to a point of total commitment – where the person falls so hopelessly into its grasp that they can no longer escape – or sway the person to another place: one where there is no belief at all, where the very notion of believing is considered ridiculous. What is even better here is to have him believe there is no such thing as truth at all.
He is so surrounded by such a variety of opposing views that that he must eventually choose one. Or, could it be that he might reject them all? Christianity, Islam, Daoism… Republican, Democrat, Libertarian… Truth, False-truth…. Why must he choose one? Should we not take advantage of this? After all, with so many belief systems to choose from, who says he cannot be so utterly confused so as to come to the conclusion that none are plausible? If we can lure him to believe there is no such thing as truth in the first place, we do not risk the chance that he might choose the enemy over the others. You see, if he is to choose a false view, he is just as likely to later convert as he is to remain there. But if he doesn’t consider any view point possible then he is far more unlikely to join the enemy since he will consider the very notion of any belief as preposterous.
It is not so hard to do this. In fact, I have seen more people in Western society falling into our Father’s grasp by this very notion than any other. What’s more is how our task becomes particularly easy when disbelief is no longer seen as a negative but rather becomes the Zeitgeist of the times. We can accomplish our objectives more effectively when the society in question encourages its subjects to disbelieve our very existence.
You may have seen it for yourself among persons so beholden to such things as postmodernism, moral relativism, and even among certain “intellectuals” like the deconstructionists. These schools of thought call into question any notion of real “truth,” causing the listener to question his own motives to the point of complete ambiguity. And that is our goal: ambiguity. If truth cannot be completely destroyed in the person’s mind, we must lead him to believe that it can only be thought of as a distant impossibility, not something which one can actually hold, think on, and comprehend. The goal here is to leave truth in such a haze as to make it seem distant and beyond something, even if that “something” does not exist.
When in full play, the effect this has on people is astounding. Here, the so-called educated sit around discussing this theory and that theory and an array of hypotheticals and scenarios with no solutions until the answers once considered understood become oblivious. Rhetorical questions dominate conversation while everyone expects not to find answers but rather more questions. If one leaves the company of others feeling they have been given any “answers” to life, one feels as if he has not reached any sort of intellectual progress. On the other hand, if he leaves in confusion, he feels as if he has achieved some type of epiphany of “higher-thinking” and, if we are successful, he will follow this with a notion that he has actually been made brighter. This state of mind will accomplish two purposes. First, he will consider himself better than others… an intellectual who is able to think higher than those around him. Second, since he will undoubtedly believe he is better than those “lower persons,” his arrogance will cause him to feel he has no need for the Enemy, or any set of beliefs for that matter. He then becomes his own god, all along not realizing he has fallen into the greatest trap our Father has created for this age: self worship. This religion of the self is full of scholars, theologians, and philosophers whose only answer to life’s difficulties is that there are no answers at all.
However, if it does not seem that you can get him to follow this line of thinking, you must get him to attempt to merge said thinking with his own beliefs. Many have done this. While a step down from the previous suggestion, this will at least accomplish the task of ambiguity I mentioned earlier. In such a syncretistic state, he will likely secularize his beliefs, or at the very least call into question or even deny anything claimed to be authoritative. He will criticize traditional belief terminology in favor of softer, more accommodating terms. Words like “religious” will be abandoned for the user-friendly version, like “spiritual.”
He will abandon the notion of truth and call it humility, saying such things as “This is just my opinion, but…” or “Since I can never really know Him…” or “It’s not important to know Him, only to try to know Him.” Perhaps he will then make God not an authority, but only an element of life. Not life itself but just a part of life. God can then become a hobby, a game he plays on Sunday mornings before he pushes it to the back of his mind for the remainder of the week, only returning every once in a while to check his score.
We must make full use of this fantasy religion with its substitute god. In this fantasy he will undoubtedly think so highly of his religion so coated in ambiguity that he will forget all about the Enemy altogether, always turning religious talks into simple therapy sessions, where the pastor is the therapist and the congregation is a group of patients. This is okay. They can sit on the couch of religious therapy all the way into our Father’s hands.
Your affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape