Screwtape Letters to America 18 -- The Great Disease

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My dear Wormwood,

We have watched with a certain jealous admiration the chaos you have contrived in the Colonies since the election of 2016. Doubtless some of it owes to mere chance or perhaps to the quiet assistance of our master. But the results are nonetheless delicious.

Across the world, our operations have prospered. We have succeeded in elevating to power those splendid specimens who combine vanity with ruthlessness. These are the kind who will wound their own people while imagining themselves saviors. In former ages, we seldom troubled to disguise their motives. But in these more delicate times, we have learned the advantage of clothing brutality in the language of patriotism, freedom, and faith. How obligingly so many applaud the very hands that bind them!

We remain somewhat puzzled by the pestilence that spread across the earth in 2020. Though we delighted in the death and confusion it produced, I have never received clear confirmation that any of our department initiated it, let alone the master himself. To be frank, the whole affair upset several of our more promising operations. 

I suspect you found it equally inconvenient. It seemed you were only beginning to reach full momentum in your cultivation of chaos in the States when the contagion struck. And because the human machinery of governance had not yet entirely rotted, certain measures were still able to check the destruction. For these reasons, many of us suspect that the Enemy permitted the pestilence precisely to interrupt our designs, however it may have begun.

Even so, you turned the moment to remarkable advantage. You shrouded the whole affair in a splendid haze of contradiction and suspicion -- what a fog indeed! You persuaded some that the sickness was a hoax, and many more that it was a scheme of their own rulers to enslave them. How easily distrust became their daily bread. Some even perished through their own disbelief, cursing their rulers for imagined crimes even as they drew their final breath.

Then, as the plague began to clear, you replaced true memories with false. You shifted blame for the crisis onto the next ruler. You made him the scapegoat for every wound the plague had opened, including the global economy. You even taught the populace to despise those who had labored most earnestly to help them, turning their mercy into malice and sacrifice into deceit. It was a triumph worthy of song in the Lowerarchy.

How I rejoiced to see how easily you persuaded certain Christians to cry "persecution" when asked not to gather and spread the pestilence. Believing themselves heirs of those once burned at the stake or stoned like Stephen, they imagined that mere inconvenience was martyrdom. They mistook reckless license for true freedom. While their brethren worshiped safely through those infernal "online" contrivances, these champions of freedom gloried in spreading the contagion among themselves -- all, of course, in the blessed name of the Enemy they thought they were serving.

I have marveled no less at how you have trained them to sneer at those who know the most about anything. It is as though knowledge itself is a vice to be shunned. You have taught them to despise science, to rewrite history, and to fashion pleasing myths in place of fact. Indeed, they would be far less pliable to our cause if they were not already accustomed to rejecting the plain truth before their eyes in favor of whatever conspiracy most flatters their fears. What a triumph -- to make ignorance feel like faith!

Yet, amusingly enough, the pestilence appeared to throw your enterprises off course. Their leader, who had shown such delicious promise for your purposes, seemed to find his momentum stalled by the contagion, especially once he succumbed to it himself. For a brief season, the glamour surrounding him seemed to wilt, and it may well have cost him the prize he sought.

At least that is how it has appeared to us on this side of the Pond. I should be most curious to hear whatever alternate explanation you might contrive, bearing in mind, of course, our rather longer experience in such matters.

Your affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape

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Previous chapters

• 1 -- The Operations
• 2 -- The Veil Technique
• 3 -- The Fog 
• 4 -- Hard Hearts
• 5 -- Focus on Feelings
• 6 -- Blinding Indignation
• 7 -- Spiritual Inoculation
• 8 -- The Fumes of the Enemy
• 9 -- Moral Inversion
• 10 -- Reliable Race
• 11 -- Misdirection
• 12 -- The Very Elect
• 13 -- The Great Wedge
• 14 -- The Revolt
• 15 -- Deepening the Wedge
• 16 -- Church over State
• 17 -- The Great Election