Screwdisk explains it all for you

If you’ve read C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, you will recognize the voice below. The book is Lewis’ version of a senior devil’s advice to his nephew on facilitating the damnation of souls and the perpetuation of human suffering, and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do so.

A few years ago, it occurred to me to imagine what a modern Screwtape might have to say. So, updating his name to befit changes in technology, I wrote a few snippets of what I called “The Screwdisk E-Mail,” which can be found at screwdisk.com. I’ve neglected the theme for a while, but the time seems right to revisit it. So here is Screwdisk, Senior Vice-Demon for Sales and Acquisitions, North American Division, addressing his nephew Scumbucket on the subject of voting…)

My dear Scumbucket—

Our eternal, implacable Enemy, called by some the Creator of the Universe, delights in variety. As opposed to the orderly, precise, uniform austerity found here in the Infernal Realms, the physical plane is a dizzying array of divergent phenomena—a chaotic, fecund mess which somehow manages, at a certain level, to operate with a harmony that we of the Underworld find deeply repugnant.

But this very variety offers us opportunities to disrupt that harmony. Were all humans more alike, then we would have only a limited number of stratagems available, which could be easily thwarted by an equally small range of countermeasures. Instead, we have over the centuries devised a rich panoply of methods and techniques, each befitting this or that kind of human, this or that set of circumstances.

For some of your subjects, for example, the key is fomenting instability—keeping them off-balance and uncertain, and therefore prone to rash and irrational action. For others, the key is maintaining a quiet, stable monotony, shielding them from any troubling external influences or thoughts that might cause them to question the slow but steady downward trajectory of their lives.

Likewise, in questions of political power and involvement, there are different approaches to take. Some of your subjects make fine sheep, following directions and voting based on simplistic emotions of fear or anger. They can be easily led, manipulated and used.

But for the more independently minded, you will want to imbue in them feelings of impotence and futility, and an attitude of disillusionment. Foster the idea that “voting only encourages them”—that their voices actually make little difference, either for solving problems in their local communities, or in the greater world around them. Your fellows have engineered all manner of supporting evidence for you—scandals, broken promises, gross and heinous crimes gone unpunished—use it! Keep them isolated, disorganized and cynical, dismissive of all efforts to improve the lives of their fellow humans.

For in a democracy, when the majority of the people are thus encouraged to neglect their power to vote, the way opens for us to do truly marvelous things with the ones who hunger for power, money or glory, who are willing and eager to do whatever we want for the sake of aggrandizing themselves. Unfettered by responsibility to the citizenry at large, supported by cadres of the sheep I mentioned before, their ambitions can be cultivated to bear outrageous fruit in the fullness of time.

And the most outrageous fruit, of course, comes from those whom we have convinced to think that they are operating under Divine mandate—but I shall save that discussion for future posts!

Your most affectionate uncle,

Screwdisk

A dandy alternative to reading The Screwtape Letters is to treat yourself to John Cleese’s masterful recording. Whatever your theological bent—and mine is somewhat divergent from Lewis’—you will at least find it entertaining, and quite possibly illuminating.