MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
It is indeed fortunate that Our Father has seen fit to quech our appetites in another way and put you in a new role despite your losing in quite dramatic style your former patient to our Enemy. At least you have the good sense to continue our counsel together.
I note what you say about your patient’s apparent obsession with things terrestrial and that you’ve been taking care that he sees a good deal of his apoplectic friends. You have an opportunity here that with any modicum of sound judgement and decisiveness will yield more favorable results.
Recall that our business is foremost to get him away from the Eternal (not to mention any association with our Enemy) and from the Present, lest he conduct his life in a way that makes him of any real use to Them. Keep his passions pointed at the Future and all such wildly imaginable possibilities that the present warming of the terrestrial could cause — significant hardship, terrific bouts of weather, droughts, disasters ad nauseum — with no way to know the outcome.
For him to act as you wish your patient must believe himself capable of both utterly dismantling creation and being its savior. Encourage him to depend on cleverness and ingenuity to think his way out of these problems, never mind that they exist only in his own mind. He is thus kept foresquare in the midst of all of Our Father’s best vices – fear, avarice, lust and ambition – all the while thinking himself the selfless humanitarian. I say again, we want a man hag-ridden by the Future, haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth, dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see.
Make the results of his scientific inquiry of a veiled past certanties to him. As long as Hypothesis is truth he will use it to guide all of his actions and attitudes. Since his truth is devoid of “grace” scorn and blame will abound. Others will be goaded into following, expanding your influence. Never allow him access to Truth else he will become like that Moses who used the Enemy’s famines and disasters over our Lord Ra in Egypt to benefit the Slaves. Or worse still – the Son of the Enemy to whom weather and swine submit.
Our Father always encourages in humans the sense of ownership – ownership of life, body, time, the elements, & etc. Humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and Hell. Much of his environmentalism (such an artful term!) comes from the patient’s belief that his world is utterly affected by the smallest of his actions. His “ism” becomes a pastime in which it is only a matter of time until he can bring it completely under his maternal submission.
Just as he reaches the zenith of his personal piety don’t neglect to remind him he is merely an ape and has no more right to lord over the planet than any fungus. Or that he is in fact toxic fungus with no right to exist. Such despair is a feast for the senses!
Our Father has not yet ascertained why the Enemy is gently warming the terrestrial world, nor why He is granted free reign to unite governments and scientists and industrialists and activists in fruitless attempts to stop it. Until then you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it and then do the opposite. If all that can be accomplished for now is blame heaped upon mankind and the patient alike, and blindness to the Enemy’s hand in these affairs, you will likely achieve more success than before.
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
