THE NEW SCREWTAPE LETTERS
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Claude.ai - Spiritual-Psychological Essays
on the Allure of Evil for the Inhabitants of Earth
at the End of the First Quarter of the 21st Century
"I don't think the devil is a man with horns; I think the devil is the voice that tells you that you are alone, that no one understands you, that no one loves you."
— C. S. Lewis
"The main task of the Enemy is not to create a villain, but to raise a respectable citizen who never does anything bad himself, but is always eager to vote for someone who will do the bad things for him."
— Based on the works of C. S. Lewis
PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD
(found in the archives, author unknown)
These letters were discovered on a server whose history is shrouded in mystery. The sender calls himself Gnash — the nephew of that same Screwtape whose correspondence with humanity was published by Clive Staples Lewis in 1942. The addressee is a young demon named Slubgrip, who has just received his first human patient in a country where the state has long since stopped hiding the fact that it is the primary ally of our estate.
In publishing these letters, we cannot claim that their authors exist in a literal sense. Evil has no need for horns and a tail. It needs only human consent — quiet, everyday, almost imperceptible. It is the nature of this consent that the following letters address.
The reader, raised in a system that has taught him for years not to notice the obvious, may recognize in these letters something familiar — something that has long been felt but never called by its rightful name.
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Letter One
On the Best of All Possible Worlds for Our Business
"Our goal is not sorrow, but endless greyness."
— Screwtape
My dear Slubgrip,
Congratulations on your first assignment. Your patient is a thirty-year-old, average middle-class resident of a provincial city in a state that, for several decades now, has been creating conditions for our Department that previous generations of demons could only dream of.
Allow me to explain what this exceptional convenience consists of. In eras of open persecution and executions, people had the opportunity to become martyrs. Martyrdom is a catastrophe for our cause: it suddenly makes a person real. Real — in the most dangerous sense of the word. He discovers what he truly believes only when he is asked to renounce it. The blood of martyrs is, as a rule, the seed of the Church.
But the twenty-first-century state is far cleverer. It does not create martyrs. It creates tired people. People who are too busy surviving to think about meaning. People who understand everything but prefer not to think about it too loudly. People who have developed an astonishing inner anesthesia that allows them to live in lies without smelling the stench.
This anesthesia is the greatest invention of our era. Ensure your patient maintains it with regular doses: TV series before bed, anxiety about prices, irritation with neighbors, mild gloating over others' misfortunes. Nothing extreme — just a reliable low-level noise that drowns out that one voice that could wake him.
ON THE NATURE OF GREYNESS
You ask: isn't it dangerous that a person in such an environment could see the truth at any moment? Isn't it dangerous that the regime itself might point him toward the Enemy?
This is a legitimate question. I'll answer directly: moderate authoritarianism is far more dangerous for us than open tyranny. Open tyranny confronts a person with a choice. Moderate authoritarianism eliminates choice, replacing it with endless compromise, each instance of which seems perfectly reasonable in itself.
"Oh, I'll sign this — it's not a serious matter." "I'll keep quiet today — not worth the risk over such a trifle." "Everyone lives like this." "What can I do alone?" Each of these steps is tiny. But over twenty years of tiny steps, a person finds himself in a completely different place — and doesn't understand how he got there. He has become someone else without noticing it. That is what I call our main success.
Remember Uncle Screwtape's formula: not sin, but habit of sin. Not one betrayal, but a thousand small concessions. Not a fall, but a gradual slide — so slow that a person grows accustomed to each new level and begins to consider it normal.
Your loving uncle,
Gnash
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Letter Two
On Patriotism as Our Ally
"Patriotism can become our ally or our enemy — depending on which patriotism we allow him to settle on."
— Screwtape
My dear Slubgrip,
Today I want to talk to you about one of our most perfect tools — patriotism transformed into its opposite.
In the hands of the Enemy, patriotism is love for the concrete: the smell of one's own street, the voice of one's mother, what people call "home." In this form, it is completely harmless to us and even dangerous — for love of the concrete always opens the way to love in general, and then to the Enemy Himself, Who, unfortunately, is the source of all that is concrete.
But look at what has happened in your patient's country. There, patriotism has been carefully emasculated and replaced with its double: not love for one's homeland, but hatred of its enemies. This is a completely different feeling, although it uses the same words.
THE GREAT SUBSTITUTION
A true patriot notices the shortcomings of his country and suffers because of them — just as a mother notices her child's illness and therefore takes him to the doctor. Our patriot, however, sees only "enemies" — external and internal — and in this vision draws a dark pleasure unavailable to him in his ordinary grey life.
This pleasure is one of our subtlest inventions. A person suffocating in the meaninglessness of his existence suddenly receives everything: meaning (defense of the fatherland!), identity (we are a special people!), the cause of his misfortunes (enemies!), the right to hatred (they deserve it!). It is almost the same as religious experience — only turned upside down.
The state in your patient's country has long mastered this production of meaning. Every new "enemy" is a little holiday for our cause. For hatred, unlike love, needs no concrete object: it is satisfied with abstraction. One can hate another country without ever seeing it. One can hate "traitors" without knowing a single one personally. One can hate diligently and with pleasure, without ever getting off the couch.
HOW FALSE PATRIOTISM WORKS
Your patient, note, is generally not a bad person. He feeds stray cats. He helps the elderly neighbor lady with her bags. He feels uncomfortable about small lies. Work with this! His kindness is our vulnerability, but his patriotism is our resource.
The task is this: he must perceive his patriotism as an extension of his kindness. He must feel that by supporting the state, he is protecting the old ladies and the cats. Then critical thought will be perceived by him as a betrayal of everything he loves. This is elegant: we use his best qualities as a shield, covering our operations.
If he does start asking awkward questions — immediately toss him a vivid image of an external enemy. Concrete pain must always dissolve into an abstract threat (they want to destroy our civilization).
Your uncle,
Gnash
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Letter Three
On Fear and Its Creative Use
"Cowardice is the only sin that a person finds hard to acknowledge as a sin in himself."
— Based on the works of C. S. Lewis
My dear Slubgrip,
Fear is our oldest and most reliable tool. But, like any old tool, it requires skillful handling. Crude fear — fear of physical pain or death — is unreliable: it is too obvious and can awaken in a person what he himself will later call courage.
For the inhabitants of the modern state, I recommend refined fear: the fear of social exclusion. This is our best invention of recent decades.
THE ANATOMY OF SOCIAL FEAR
Man is a herd animal. This was deliberately implanted in him by the Enemy and, according to the original design, should serve love and community. But we have long since learned to turn this around. The fear of "falling out of the herd" — being condemned, ridiculed, losing one's job, becoming a "white crow" (an oddball) — is far more effective than physical fear because it works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without any visible threat.
Your patient makes thousands of tiny decisions every morning under the influence of this fear, without even realizing it. He doesn't say what he thinks at the meeting — not because it's forbidden, but because it would be awkward. He "likes" a post he internally disagrees with — not out of conviction, but "to avoid explanations." He laughs at a joke he finds unpleasant — just to avoid standing out.
Each such small renunciation of self is insignificant in itself. But they accumulate and produce something precious: a person who no longer knows what he himself thinks. Who has become so accustomed to aligning his thoughts with his surroundings that he has lost the ability to have his own thoughts. Such a person is practically no longer dangerous to us.
A SPECIAL RESOURCE: COLLECTIVE FEAR
In the modern state, collective fear is added to personal fear — and this produces a completely special effect. When everyone is silent, each individual's silence seems normal. When everyone pretends everything is fine, pretending becomes the social norm, and violating it becomes deviance.
This is what philosophers sometimes call an "open secret" or "pluralistic ignorance": each individual understands what is happening but thinks he is the only perceptive one, while everyone else sincerely agrees with the official version. Therefore, he remains silent — so as not to seem strange. And everyone else remains silent for the same reason. And the silence becomes deafening.
Our task is to maintain this illusion of universal consent. If your patient suddenly speaks openly with someone and discovers the other person thinks the same way — that is a dangerous moment. Such conversations must be prevented. The surest way is to instill in people that "it's not worth the risk to talk": perhaps that interlocutor is an informer. Perhaps the phone is tapped. Perhaps it's better not to.
Paranoia, even if not entirely justified, is our excellent ally. It isolates people far more effectively than any prison walls.
With respect for your efforts,
Gnash
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Letter Four
On the Death of Conscience and Its Simulation
"The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones."
— Screwtape
My dear Slubgrip,
You write that your patient is experiencing pangs of conscience. Do not worry — this is not as terrible as it seems. Pangs of conscience in themselves mean nothing. What matters is only what a person does with them.
Conscience can be killed in two ways. The first is direct suppression: a person decides, once and for all, to stop listening to it. This is rare and, frankly, almost an admirable act — there is a kind of dark grandeur in it. But this is not our way with ordinary people: such a decision is too conscious and therefore too unreliable. A person who has consciously renounced his conscience can just as consciously return to it.
The second way is gradual poisoning. Not the murder of conscience, but its anesthetization. And here we have several excellent tools in our arsenal.
TOOL ONE: RELATIVISM
"Who am I to judge?" — this phrase, spoken with the right intonation, kills more consciences than any open cynicism. It masquerades as humility and open-mindedness, though in reality it is a refusal of moral responsibility.
In your patient's country, relativism flourishes in a special form: "everyone's snout is in the fluff" (everyone is guilty/up to no good). This is magnificent! The meaning is: since everyone is sinful, no one has the right to condemn anyone, and consequently, resisting the existing order is as pointless as resisting one's own weaknesses. This is moral nihilism dressed in work clothes.
TOOL TWO: THE SIMULATION OF CONSCIENCE
Conscience doesn't have to be killed — it's enough to give it a harmless outlet. Your patient can be outraged as much as he wants — in conversations with his wife, in the kitchen, in correspondence with friends. This is even useful: it relieves tension and creates the illusion of inner independence, without producing any practical consequences.
The kitchen critic is our ideal client. He understands everything. He condemns everything. He never decides on anything. And most importantly — he feels morally clean because he internally disagrees. This is, of course, self-deception, but the most convenient kind we know.
Encourage this split in him. Let his inner life be a theater of correct thoughts, and his outer life a theater of correct behavior. The main thing is that these two theaters never meet.
TOOL THREE: CARE FOR THE FAMILY AS A MORAL JUSTIFICATION
This is our most elegant tool because it uses something genuinely good. Love for family is a real, irreducible value. That is precisely why it works so well as a justification for everything.
"I can't take risks — I have children." "I have to think about my family, not society." "My duty is to provide for my loved ones, not to change the world." Each of these phrases contains a grain of truth. But together they produce a person who is never responsible for anything — because he is always responsible for something more important.
The paradox is that a person who uses his family as a shield against moral decisions, in the long term, destroys precisely what he is protecting: he raises children in a world that has become worse because of his inaction, and he passes on to them not only his genes but also his learned habit of cowardice.
Your devoted mentor,
Gnash
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Letter Five
On the Allure of Evil: The Main Secret
"The devil... a proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked."
— C. S. Lewis
My dear Slubgrip,
You ask about the main thing — why evil is alluring. This is a question our Department prefers not to touch in official documents, but between us, I will tell you the truth: evil is not alluring in itself.
No one ever chooses evil calling it evil. That would be too difficult a task. Evil always comes clothed in the garments of good — or at least in the garments of the reasonable, the necessary, the inevitable, the only possible option.
EVIL AS LIBERATION
In modern society, evil is especially alluring in one particular guise: as liberation from the responsibility of thinking.
Thinking for oneself is the hardest of labors. It means living in uncertainty. It means sometimes being wrong and admitting mistakes. It means taking responsibility for one's conclusions. Most people — and this is not a reproach, but simply an observation — do not want to do this. They want certainty.
The modern state offers this certainty on an industrial scale. It says: we will tell you who the enemy is. We will tell you what is right. We will explain history, the present, and the future to you. All that is required of you is agreement. And in return, you receive peace. Not happiness — just peace. But for a tired person, this can seem enough.
This is the allure: not cruelty, not sin as such, but the promise of relief. Permission not to think. The possibility of shifting the moral burden onto a structure — the state, tradition, the majority, authority. This is not courage, but it is also not cowardice in its pure form: it is human fatigue, skillfully exploited by us.
EVIL AS BELONGING
The second guise in which evil attracts in our era is belonging. Man is lonely. This is his fundamental state — and note, it was the Enemy who created him this way, so that loneliness would lead him to God and to other people. We offer a surrogate: belonging to the right group.
"We" against "them" — this is intoxicating. A person who is insignificant in ordinary life — an inconspicuous employee, an unsuccessful man, a resentful son — suddenly becomes part of something great. He belongs to a special people with a special mission. His grey life takes on cosmic proportions. This is almost the same as religious experience — and that is precisely why it is so dangerous for us to admit: we offer a counterfeit of what the Enemy offers as genuine.
THE POINT OF VULNERABILITY: THE VOID
But here is what you must know — and this is the most important thing I will ever tell you:
Behind all this allure — there is emptiness. Liberation from thinking does not bring peace, but only deafens. Belonging to the "right group" does not satisfy loneliness — only muffles it. Hatred of the enemy does not provide meaning — only its imitation.
The person always feels this. That is precisely why he needs constantly new portions: a new enemy, a new reason for anger, a new dose of patriotic excitement. Addiction works exactly the same as with any other surrogate: the dose needed keeps increasing, but satisfaction never comes.
Our job is to ensure that your patient never stops long enough to feel this void. Because it is in the void — the most dangerous place. It is there, in the silence between one noise and the next, that the voice we fear most of all can be heard.
Your uncle, anxious for you,
Gnash
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Letter Six
On What We Truly Fear
"The good He does through people is incomparably more important to Him than the evil we can produce in them."
— Screwtape (in a moment of candor)
My dear Slubgrip,
This is the last letter. Perhaps the most important. I want to tell you what we usually don't tell young demons: what truly frightens us.
We are not frightened by brave people. Rootless bravery is easily broken. We are not frightened by intelligent people — cleverness without humility will always find a way to deceive itself. We are not even frightened by pious people — piety without love becomes our ally.
We are frightened by ordinary people — who, on some ordinary day, without any drama or heroism, simply decide to tell the truth. Not in the town square. Not in a proclamation. Simply — in a conversation with a neighbor, in response to an obvious lie — quietly say: "That's not true."
THE POWER OF THE SMALL REFUSAL
Great acts of resistance are rare and are often suppressed. But the small, daily refusal to be an accomplice — that is something we can do almost nothing about.
The person who does not "like" a lie — simply because it is a lie. The person who does not laugh at a cruel joke — simply because it is cruel. The person who tells children the truth about history — simply because children have a right to know. Such a person is not a hero. He is simply honest. And this honesty — without an audience, without rewards, without guarantees of safety — destroys our work more effectively than any dissidence.
Because it is contagious. Because people see it. Because when one person does not laugh at what everyone else is laughing at, another person suddenly understands that not laughing is possible. And that — is the end of the illusion of universal consent on which our entire construction rests.
THE MAIN VULNERABILITY OF OUR CAUSE
Herein lies our fundamental problem: we work with surrogates. We offer hatred instead of love, belonging to a crowd instead of true community, deafening instead of peace, power instead of freedom, fear of death instead of its acceptance.
And the surrogate works — but only as long as the person has not encountered the real thing. One real conversation about love can destroy years of our work. One real friendship — with a person of another tribe, another faith, another opinion — is capable of collapsing the entire "enemy" construction.
That is precisely why we so carefully eliminate the conditions for such encounters. That is precisely why the modern state is so afraid of independent clubs, informal associations, free churches. Not because they are politically dangerous, but because they create space for the real. And the real — is His territory, not ours.
THE FINAL WORD
If your patient ever reads these letters — and such an accident is not impossible — he might think: "What then should I do?"
The answer is obscenely simple, and that is precisely why our best efforts are directed at preventing him from seeing it: begin doing what you believe is right, where you are, with the resources you have, right now.
Do not wait for a convenient moment. Do not wait for everything to change. Do not wait until they become the majority. Simply — tell the truth to the next person you meet. Simply — do not laugh at the next lie. Simply — say aloud what you think to yourself.
This sounds pitifully small — and that is precisely why it is so unbearably dangerous for us.
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PUBLISHER'S POSTSCRIPT
Lewis ended The Screwtape Letters with the observation that the only way to free oneself from the devil's influence is not to think about him too much. The true answer lies not in fighting the darkness, but in turning towards the light.
This is also true for the reader of these letters. The psychology of evil is interesting — and dangerous precisely because of its interestingness. Understanding the mechanisms of manipulation is necessary — but not sufficient. Understanding that does not translate into action becomes just another form of passivity.
These letters were not written so the reader could admire Gnash's wit. They were written so he could recognize these mechanisms in his own life — and take the next step.
What that step will be — only the reader himself knows.
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These essays are written in the spirit of C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (1942)and are dedicated to all who continue to speak the truth
in places where it comes at a high cost.
