Keep Them Distracted - by bionic mosquito

 It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

Screwtape is writing to his nephew about the nephew’s task of ensuring his “patient” falls further away from the “Enemy” (God), and further into the arms of “Our Great Father” (Satan). His nephew, Wormwood, was guiding his patient in reading materialist works, attempting to convince him of the soundness of what ends up a nihilist endeavor. Screwtape says, no; that won’t work anymore.

There was a time that humans understood when something was proved and when it was not. Today? A dozen incompatible philosophies are present in the human mind all at once. These aren’t thought of as “true” or “false”; instead, they are considered “academic” or “practical” or “contemporary.”

The only way to win them to what you want is jargon. Don’t try to convince them that materialism is “true.” Just work to convince them that it is strong, courageous – that it is the philosophy of the future.

I am reminded of Lewis’s work, The Abolition of Man. He describes men stripped of a realist metaphysic and immersed in materialism as “men without chests.” They are now material to be formed into whatever unrecognizable creatures that those doing the forming wish to create.....

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....Don’t give them anything real, anything greater than man, anything more real than what they can see and touch.

Screwtape emphasizes this point to his nephew: Don’t press on them anything real; this will move him to touch on the realities he cannot see and touch – in other words, there is a “real” that he will soon discover exists, but is beyond anything of “this world.” If he wants science, keep him focused on sociology and the like.

Conclusion

But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is ‘the result of modern investigation.’

Remember: you are there to “fuddle” him.

From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!