Screwtape Letters

My 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,

Screwtape

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My 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.

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 situation, to persuade him that on this occasion it is better to keep his powder dry--after all, he is a very important man; he ought to husband his influence and save it for a time when it will do the most good. With a little work on your part, you can make sure that that time will never come.

Your cousin,

Screwtape

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My dear Scrapetooth,

You and your patient gave me quite a scare yesterday evening. Watching him host his special in-depth program on the future of public assistance, I was distressed to hear him delve at length into questions of what human creatures at the moment are pleased to call "ethics." At one particularly alarming moment--I need not remind you of it, surely--he turned those well-known deep-set eyes directly toward the camera, furrowed that striking brow, and asked, "We know this will balance the budget. But is it the right thing to do?"

For an awful second I feared you had already lost control of your subject. I feared for your continued well-being. Had the man developed the habit-the rare, noxious habit-of weighing the morality of everything that passed his lips? The phenomenon has been known to occur, even among journalists. Generally it means some devil has relaxed his vigilance in elementary matters.

Over the last few generations we have been highly successful in limiting the damage done by the popularity of ethical codes in private life--the humans' unaccountable attraction to, if not success at, being truthful, faithful, loving and so forth. We have done this by gradually inculcating the unexamined idea that those codes must be interpreted differently, at any rate less literally,