In Honor of C.S. Lewis...

To all junior demons,

We are about to launch a new seminar to prepare you or to aid you in dealing with your patients. We believe strongly that too many of our field operatives, and yes that includes some of our finest workers dedicated to Our Father Below, have failed to keep ahead of recent trends in the mortal realm. We have every indication to believe that our past efforts have sparked this monumental surge forward in divisiveness of our Enemy's ranks and the increasing flood of deserters from our Enemy's cause. However, this does not permit us to be lax in our management of our patients--to the contrary!

It is the unfortunate result that our Enemy designed these pitiful bipeds with the capacity of reason. How more providential to our cause if He would have disdained rationality for emotionality, abandoned all necessity of reasoned thought to the dictates of gut feelings! For we all know, being able to see the entirety of our Enemy's Church, the inevitable success our Enemy must attain, and how against reason it is to declare its defeat, much less its nonexistence. As our efforts continue to, temporally, bear fruit in these realms, we must in turn step up our efforts to distract our patients from noticing how unreasonable they are being.

Our seminar will comprise six sessions, and attendance will be mandatory unless our advisory board deems that a patient cannot be left unattended for the duration. Thus, unless the patient displays imminent, but reversible, inclination towards the Enemy's camp, the mandatory requirement will not be waived.

Our first session will deal with the new advances in the biped's notion of love, how it has developed in recent years, and how difficult our battle will be to continue to nurture this notion of love. Remember, we are not opposed to love, only that love for our Enemy that we find so distasteful. Self-love, on the other hand, provides us with no end of entertainment, and it is towards this that we have worked so hard. And it has indeed born fruit in unexpected arenas, and deserves direct attention so we can properly handle its cultivation.

Our second session will stress the recent upsurge in atheism. In some of your reports, I have seen gross complacency when the patient embraces a wholly materialistic view apart from anything supernatural, and this must be curbed. The atheist, while deep in our camp, holds the most untenable position of them all, and we must, I repeat, must be diligent in our efforts to maintain this position. We must keep forward in our efforts all those feelings that would lend credence to this ridiculous notion that our Enemy does not exist, including foremost that the biped's notion of the Enemy must be correct and thus contradictory. We will visit classic arguments, such as "Can the Enemy create a rock He cannot lift?" While this is elementary for most of us, it deserves to be revisited, for it encompasses most of the flawed arguments the bipeds will latch onto.

Our third session will address the topics of suffering and addiction. The bipeds in the developed world have discovered lifestyles that, initially, seem to remove even the slightest discomforts from their lives. Always in the past, our efforts have been directly predominantly at the unfairness of the immense suffering man has had to endure, but in the developed world, we can no longer guide our patients down this course. The ease of their lives and the abundance of their wealth, coupled with that accursed reason bestowed by the Enemy, eventually gives rise to the notion that they can actually help those worse off than themselves. All thoughts in this direction must either be curtailed or monitored carefully. We advise that any charitable thoughts must be redirected back at the patient, so that the patient uses the semblance of charity for personal benefit. However, this is a fine line to walk, and we will discuss how best to approach this.

Our fourth and fifth session will be devoted to those recent medical discoveries that have raised controversial issues across the developed world. We will touch upon the materialistic demotion of man to an expendable resource and review how that ramifies into all areas of the bipeds' society. We must be careful in this area to always keep the patient's focus on the utility of discovery, even at the expense of others. This past century has seen some of the most delightful evils come to pass in the mortal realm because of this misguided notion, and with care, we should be able to cultivate an even greater harvest in the future.

Our last information will cover the dissemination of information. In the modern world, anyone has the ability to make his viewpoint, his findings, his opinions, and even his blatant lies known to thousands if not millions of others. This in turn is a great resource we must tap into. We must always keep in mind that a lie repeated a thousand times is no longer considered a lie. And when the patient has, at his fingertips, a thousand times a thousand differing accounts for a single action, a single decision, or a single moral point, even the most blatant lie can been an adequate bludgeon against his reasons. Always keep the patient confused, unsure of who to trust. Keep him away from the only consistent authority there is, namely the Enemy and His abominable Church, and keep him focused on the worldly authorities, whose flaws are depicted and denounced by thousands of disagreeing factions, who are in turn denounced by others, and so on. This vast confusion is a great boon to our cause, but we must be sure to keep the resulting cynicism grounded so that he does not turn to the Enemy as a last recourse.

At the conclusion of this seminar, we expect to notice vast improvements in your reports and a renewed dedication to the work of Our Father Below.

Senior Administrative Assistant,
Screwtape