Screwtape Updates 3: The Fog

The first two letters were "The Operations" and "The Veil Technique."
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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

Well I remember your lectures on the Veil. We still employ the technique to good effect, especially among the older herd. They largely receive their news through single channels of information, so it is easy to concentrate our efforts there. With one voice whispering in their ears, it is easy enough to stir our toxins into their daily feed.

But the younger ones are a different species altogether. They require more sophisticated poisons. We have devised a new art suited to their age that we call "the Fog." Instead of lulling them with silence or distracting them with outrage, we bury the truth beneath noise. We do not hush their minds. We flood them. Every headline contradicts the last. Every voice claims revelation, until the poor creatures can no longer tell light from glare.

Your generation relied on shadows, Uncle. Mine thrives in smoke. We no longer need to hide the truth. Rather, we surround it with so many rival "truths" that it suffocates. Popularity serves us well in this art. We take the hollow and the heartless, paint them as witty and authentic, and give them a following. The faithful are almost as easy to ensnare as the faithless if we lace our poison with a fragment of the Enemy’s own words. It is, after all, the very method our master once tried upon the Enemy Himself, though with less success than we are now enjoying.

I am most delighted by what I call "mirror speak." The unwelcome voice of truth exposes our frauds for what they are. But then we prompt our agents to fling the very same charge back again at the truth itself. It is a masterpiece of confusion. The Veil performs its service here most exquisitely. Contradictory sides are equally convinced that the other never tells the truth, though the distinction could not be plainer to us. They have eyes but cannot see. Our champions proclaim their own sins in the accusations they hurl at their foes -- every charge is a confession. Yet the crowd applauds each time as if virtue itself has spoken.

How many and varied are their new channels of information! When on occasion someone hears a voice of some truth, we lace it with an error that is easily discovered. In that way, the whole is easily dismissed and the point lost. Other voices we bury in misleading numbers or an anecdote from some beloved fool of a cousin. We might inflame truth-speakers with so much emotion that they appear mad and their words can be dismissed as so much derangement.

For the older crowd, clouding their minds has proven almost effortless. We flood their vision with images of those they fear -- always stealing, always violent. We awaken -- or when needed create -- prejudices that might have slept forever. Where they might have once been open to the stranger, we first make them fear. Fear ripens into anger. Anger matures into hatred. They simmer contentedly in the kettle of moral ferment, never suspecting the heat.

Still, as you have so frequently reminded us, complacency is our deadliest snare. The Enemy has an infuriating habit of reclaiming even those who seem thoroughly ours. I must therefore resume my labors at once, lest one of the wretches awake. Nothing spoils a good deception faster than a single open eye.

Your nephew,
Wormwood