It has been some time since I heard from you, and so long valuing our letters and your impeccable guidance, I realize with some shock at my past presumptiveness that such lapse indeed falls upon me. Well I shall remedy such foolishness this instant and take up a pen bursting full with bold and sudden comprehension. Alas to have been so caught up in this vile mortal realm that I should disregard our correspondence and you, who in esteem I hold, having, I know, no need to speak aloud but expressing simply in sheer emphasis your articulate and pragmatic counsel, no other higher save our very guiding Light. But excuses I must plead and for this reason – I feel obligated to inquire if have you encountered in these past few decades the maturation of what I now call the New Thinking.
I confess, dearest uncle, that I, like my patient, ignored, disregarded with some bemusement the planting and even germination of such a thing, finding it excessively dry and nonsensical, obsessing with bizarre senses of justice and reparation, creating an experience in my own brief dalliance with early primers such a resistance in the mind to its inquiry much like biting into a raw turnip. And, like so many human creations, I cast it aside. Now, looking back, I realize I had noticed something even then. That, despite its trappings of humility and charity, I actually had never before encountered something so unlike the work of our Enemy. That its very repellence was not alien to me but as if some thwarted hunger, more the effect of the same poles of two magnets brought together.
It occurred to me, after an embarrassing quantity of time spent, in some irony, within its very fortress and nursery, that early New Thinking’s very ugliness, its dusty self important resistance to thought and critique, was no defect. It was a bitter rind not meant to be eaten save by the most specialized feeders, those who knew to seek it out and cast it abroad in their droppings just so, where only others of their ilk and specialized digestion might be introduced to it as if the most forbidden and revelatory of fruit. As if our Enemy had placed upon the Tree the very opposite of the Apple, both in savor and wisdom. To hang forth a clear and repulsive simulacrum of dust and ash and anti-knowledge but openly dare every Eve and Adam to taste. To devour the entirety.
Had I known then the genius in this conceit, how patient and shrewd and audacious such mischief could be, I would have goggled in disbelief. Can a devil feel a prude? That such a concept appears, though I struggle to admit or even conceive this, to be not the work of one of our own but that of humans themselves puts me in a state of existential shame and incredulity. I would ask that you inquire around – who might I have missed capable of such works?! I worry you will find your hands wringing as much as mine own.
But alas I meander on, leaving you, if indeed unfamiliar, with what this New Thinking could represent to inflict such tortures upon me. I have not the time or space here to even summarize the endless respawning rhizomes, light-smothering vines, and strangulating lianas now burst from such a germ, so I instead poise such revelation as a challenge: why are we so meek? Why, given the stakes against our Enemy, do we content ourselves with wearing down a soul? Why not, the humans (!) ask, seize it all at once and make it thank us for the relief! Is this not what the Light shining promised? Is that not the very essence of our battle? This, my dear uncle, is the audacious design of the New Thinking: single souls are for the Fallen. But the Rising would take everyone everywhere all at once. For once, I am entirely at a loss for words and witticism. I will owe you a whisky upon next reunion.
Lest you think I elevate this in naivete, for sake of sheer embellishment or melodrama, allow me to share the first and most revered, nigh holy principle of the New Thinking: There is no truth.
Even to write such words fills me with atavistic alarms and anxieties that we are discovered. That we become too bold, too visible. That we forget the Enemy and His power. That we should cower, flee to the shadows and seek shelter from the firmament. But then I recall these words were written by man. The same man, by His own decree, that be allowed to craft his own ends and ending. And, as you have so sagely advised, the same man that can so easily forget His power.
But this, of course, is *our* message. We did not shy from it solely for fear of the Above but also befitting mere practicality. We knew few humans worth collecting could accept such an absurd concept. We, of course, know what truth is and, sadly, know the human possesses the same basic instincts, if only for self preservation. But here is the second piece of genius, the second clause of the New Thinking that unlocks it all: Only Power.
Do you see? Do you see it? Oh, I so gnashed my teeth in envy and humiliation when I realized what they were doing.
There is no truth. Only Power.
By adding that second clause, you short circuit a human’s very sense of self preservation and turn it against its own. Even an alert human may think in this they have found a most valuable truth, that danger is at hand, hidden and all around them. By denying truth and claiming danger, you elevate the reptile, the serpent, in the man. Critical thinking ceases as both self preservation and self advancement align with vaguely perceived moral indignance. The ego falls in line believing it has been handed hidden Truths and a path to betterment. You position Plato’s dark caverns as shelter from a sinister world – oh how the picks and shovels come out then! How the Sun becomes a shadow on the soul! As we ever preach, in such contradictions, the mind self levels and rationalizes away all the myriad contradictions and paradoxes towards comfort, certainty, and self gain!
As we, I laugh fondly to pen this, well know, individuals, of course, are not all so easily swayed. This is again why the rind, the outer coating, that first contact, is so deliberately bitter and off-putting. Only those truly desperate would ever eat such fruit. Only those, who would chew and swallow, who seek to exclude themself from the common man, to rise above them in their own perceived moral clarity and insight, could ever masticate something so hollow and foul. To make such a flawed crop enticing would invite others, unstarved and with clear senses, to taste and recognize the poison and corruption within, to fire then the fields and rip out such infections by the root, flogging any caught spreading such unhealthy, parasitic, and destructive seeds. The early eaters know it must not propagate above the ground, it must go deep and spread silently, ever the rhizome and the creeper, until it has undercut even the deepest oaken taproots.
Only once a protective vanguard of these eaters (those so hungry they would eat ash coated poisons) and rhizomes have been established in ubiquity, the New Thinking can enact its next phases. Here the ash fruit must be shed and its spoilage made into mash. Do you follow, uncle? The next stage requires the pure sweetness of corruption. It must be distilled to attract and coax out more discerning spirits. Each sip now says: You are not to blame. Because You are not You. You are a slave to Power.
I can imagine your salivation. It takes little imagination to envision the drunkard of such toxins. From this any action can be dictated and any self-contradiction will be countered by the reptile spirit. All you must do is never stop the New Think, so cycles of endless contradiction are created:
Even if you have done nothing, you deserve Power. If you have Power, you must give up your Power.
Power is the Problem. Power cannot be created or destroyed so Power must be distributed. Therefore, everyone should have Power.
The sheer blatancy of the Lie! But let us return to that in a moment. For now, try to argue against this when under attack. You must defend your power, thus admitting tacitly you are the Problem. Or you must deny wishing to receive Power, thus arguing against your own self-interest. The reptile reigns in such a state. And few humans, in their confusion and as ever tied down by the frailty of their mortality, realize they simply have to gaze and grasp the Truth to escape, but instead turn in panicked circles, never even thinking to look up or outwards or what they already hold in their own hands.
To continue this hypnosis and hallucination, the New Thinker will continue to engage the reptile and prevent the human from regaining consciousness. Fear upon fear will be deployed to distract, worry, and grow the reptile spirit. You must give up your Power or else!
Uncle Screwtape, I have seen they will, brilliantly and without the trace of coy smirk or hint of unease, claim that if you don’t give up your power, no matter what you have done or will do with it, you become responsible for the sum of ills and evils of the world from the birth of Man onward. You must give up your power or your sin will return no matter your Confession or good deed. They have shrouded and supplanted the Confession and the Sacrifice itself by casting much that is good as evil and much of the inverse, leaving just enough to disorient and to serve a sense of guilt and self-deprecation. There is little attempt to hide this. Indeed, in all such cases, anyone who will stand up to their beguilement with direct evil and violence will be dismissed and never again spoken of, unless and only if their advancement or discrediting serves in the abandonment and transfer of their target’s Power.
And lately uncle, somehow dissatisfied with the rate of an already unprecedented celerity of conversion, they have added that if you do not comply, not only will you be cast down, but that our own realm will rise up, the human world will heat up and become a literal Hell. Ah, to gaze upon those lush saurian realms sans man once more as Grandfather so often told, but I am short on ink and must not stray…
Uncle, to think that all we needed to do was to tell the Lie directly and out in the open! To simply tell it so big and so relentlessly that we make a serpent of the Garden in the mind of every listener! Can you wonder now why I so delayed in my correspondence when doomed to convey such assumption and error?
The final principle of the New Thinking is never written. It is assumed, parenthetically, to be discerned only by the earliest or most nuanced eaters. As I have insinuated above, we know now the whole cult is driven on the message of You must give up your Power. But, as skillfully obscured as if written in our own devilish script, the original clause actually read thus: You must give up your Power (to US).
I shiver despite my surroundings. Here we see the miasma disperse and the real rationale for the repellant obscurity of the New Thinking germ. That bitter rind ensures only those who first consume the seed can ever see the unwritten reward and position their maws precisely to feast on all such shed power.
The moment the New Thinker realizes this, as if his very shadow darkens and invisible wings the envy of any devilkind erupt, he realizes he can and will do anything to maintain this debasement of souls and harvesting of powers. Emboldened, he now takes a page from us and realizes the devil’s truth: he can simply double every Lie to counter its reflection. In so placing any innocent who strays into this hall of mirrors in earnest, and soon recoiling from one false path after another, looks askance, they will see nothing but their own countless reflections pointing back at them. Uncle, here is no limiting principle, no end to the labyrinth they will etch into the mind to keep one desperate and standing in place.
When the Truth is a Lie, the Lie becomes Truth. Death becomes New Life and so grant death to have true life. New Life becomes Death and so end it to preserve it. Fiction becomes fact when it advances the Lie, which is Truth. Fact becomes fiction when it thwarts the Lie, which is Truth. Outcomes become Causes because Outcomes rely on Power, which is the Problem. Solutions become Problems because solutions increase available Power and defeat the Lie. Problems become Solutions because they feed the reptile spirit and advance the Lie. The only rule is never stop lying.
So desperate are those intoxicated in this maze, no longer bound to any sense of truth, their inner ear whirling, so mistrustful of their senses that they reject everything but their own fears, they at last extend the Lie inward. Told he must shed his power, Adam imagines himself Eve, and celebrates his powerful powerlessness. Told she is a slave to husband and brother, Eve imagines herself Adam, and hands herself both ends of the supposed whip. The fit, the healthy, the robust, once immune, equate their doubts, their last fleeting hold on Truth, and assume sickness. So soon conflates the physic and farmer with poisoner, the surgeon with butcher, the parent with captor and tyrant. The sloven, the wretch, the glutton raise up their afflictions as tonics to health and vigor even as they perish. The criminal becomes hero. The hero a criminal. You see, naturally, that even arithmetic cannot escape these implications.
I shudder and wonder if this is how my patient feels when he considers and with most reluctance accepts my gentle guidance. But the harvest we shall reap from this! We gain the eater and the eaten and by the time those still seeing the Truth realize that the Truth cannot counter this malignancy and, in desperate pride, seek to fight Lies with Lies, we gain them as well.
And, with that, my dear uncle, I hope you will understand and excuse my long absence, and will now leave you to ponder this new weapon.
Your faithful nephew
Wormwood
