I just finished re-reading “The Screwtape Letters”. I do this periodically. Because it is. Just. That. Good.
Excerpts from Screwtape’s toast at the end of the book, where he’s addressing the Tempter’s Training College annual dinner (using American English spellings so I don’t have to make so many corrections):
…First, the abundance of our captures: however tasteless our fare, we are in no danger of famine. And secondly, the triumph: the skill of our Tempters has never stood higher. But the third moral, which I have not yet drawn, is the most important of all.
The sort of souls on whose despair and ruin we have – well, I won’t say feasted, but at any rate subsisted – tonight are increasing in numbers and will continue to increase. Our advices from Lower command assure us that this is so; our directives warn us to orient all our tactics in view of this situation. The “Great” sinners, those in whom an immense concentration of will has been devoted to objects which the Enemy abhors, will not disappear. But they will grow rarer. Our catches will be ever more numerous; but they will consist increasingly of trash – trash which we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption. And there are two things I want you to understand about this: First, that however depressing it may seem, it is really a change for the better. And secondly, I would draw your attention to the means by which it has been brought about.
…As the great sinners grow fewer, and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become far more effective agents for us. Every dictator or even demagogue – almost every film star or crooner – can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at al, except for the few. Catch the bellwether, and his whole flock comes after him.
/snip
…Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, you remember, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side, we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.
/snip
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with that you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behavior” means the behavior that democracies like or the behavior that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation…It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected wit the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal was the factual belief that all men are equal…As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the lease enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get him to practice, not only withtout shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say “I’m as good as you”.
…No man who says “I’m as good as you” believes it….The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
…and resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects ever mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food..”They’ve no difference to be different. It’s undemocratic.”
Now, this useful phenomenon is in itself by not means new. Under the name of Envy it has been known to humans for thousands of years….The delightful novelty…is that you can sanction it…by the incantatory use of the word democratic.
Under the influence of this incantation those who are in any way or every way inferior can labor more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic.
…What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to nitice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships…[story about how one dictator showed another the principles of government, which was illustrated by nicking off the tops of grain stalks that stood above the others]..But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. The little stalks will now of themselves bit the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
We can see this playing out every day, and the tendency for this behavior is growing stronger. C.S. Lewis wrote this book back in 1942. Can you imagine how he’d feel about our societies today?