My Dear Wormwood,
Your recent letter to me has, once again, reinforced my opinion that Slubgob has allowed the standards at the Tempters' Training College to slip so dramatically that you can't see one of the most obvious, ongoing tactics from Our Father Below.
You write to me that you're worried that the humans' rejection of these remakes and reimaginings — a brilliant word from the devils in our Marketing Department — will activate the humans' defensive response in what they call "the culture war," and that this rejection will cause yet another attempt at normalizing a culture under our direction to spread to be stopped before it can truly begin.
Do you not see that it doesn't matter?
The brilliance of this operation is that it presents so many fronts that humans can't see the majority of them. Moreover, the harder the fight becomes on one front, the more ignored another goes.
For instance, the human culture war that you speak of makes little difference, and can even be useful to Our Father Below. If these "reimaginings" continue despite their continued protests, even their "victories" — if you want to call them such — can aid us in their ruination. Victory without change only gives the impression of impotence, which in turn leads to the feeling of hopelessness for both those involved in the fighting and those cheering them on. This then leads to acceptance as the fight drains out of them.
You see, Wormwood, our great advantage is that humans live in time, and all things done in the realm of time require endurance, be it mental, physical, or spiritual. As we devils suffer no such issue as grotesque as having a physical body with all its chemicals, digestion, and meat, we may war in perpetuity without rest. We can pursue a tactic without cease, so long as that tactic is not somehow subverted or defeated by the enemy.
As of now, we are in control of the human media complexes, and as such, we can continue to alter and pervert troublesome works that, up until now, have acted as a bulwark against our plans on the macroscopic level.
But I have not addressed your primary concern, and I feel it's a point that should be plain. It has been since you began tempting in your earliest years during the humans' Second World War.
We continue to push these corruptions of old stories in the face of great resistance and a lack of acceptance from those who know the stories because our ultimate aim was never to change the minds of the experienced, but to redefine the values these works invoke for the ignorant and the young. It is through them that we ultimately pull humanity in our direction, into our sensibilities, and eventually, into our stomachs.
Did the Austrian human who led Germany then not say that if he had control of the textbooks, he would then control the youth? Of course, he's not the only dictator to reach that conclusion. It's a principle that has been employed by Our Father Below since the garden. If you can mislead the ignorant, then you can control the world. Have you not noticed, for instance, the work we've been doing in Western education systems? The decline in critical thinking skills? The rise of emotion-based thinking?
Do you believe this was an accident, Wormwood?
On the contrary. Creating the ignorant via systems of "higher learning" to ultimately control them is one of the greatest operations Hell has ever undertaken, and we have been quite successful. We've become so skilled at it that a normal child, from a normal family, and from a normal town can walk into an establishment of higher learning and emerge a year or two later with a host of paranoia, prejudices, and a myriad of conflicting ideas that they dare not reconcile, purely out of spite for the very abundance that they live in so comfortably. They become so infested with our kind that it begins to morph both their mind and body into grotesque shapes, and quite amusingly, they welcome it, Wormwood!
Of course, none of this would be possible without the tireless work of our Research Department, who, with the help of the wisdom from Our Father Below, created the greatest tool we've ever had to use against the humans, "Critical Theory." An invaluable weapon that can reduce the most pure and noble persons, societies, or organizations into villains of the highest order.
The operation is quite simple. Pick a target, point out its flaws continuously, and act as if these shortcomings are so damaging to the oppressed and underprivileged that it must be destroyed for the betterment of mankind. Whatever good it does, or whatever redeeming qualities it obviously possesses, must either be denounced as lies or ignored completely.
Apply this to anything in front of the ignorant, and soon you'll create an army willing to tear down Heaven itself in order to establish a better world.
Surely, you understand the purpose of the reimaginings now, Wormwood.
Take, for instance, the recent corruptions of works from Western authors that, for some time, have created an insurmountable wall that protected Western sentimentality by enchanting and inspiring their young. One, J.R.R. Tolkien, and — possibly the more troublesome of the two — C.S. Lewis had created stories that kept the human young enraptured and truly embracing those horrific qualities of virtue, chivalry, and bravery. Possibly more heinous was the fact that both Tolkien and Lewis instilled a very clear and well-defined line between good and evil.
Thanks to our "reimagining," we've been able to seize both works and, through the use of the humans' televised internet (I do so love how humans often provide the means for their own corruption), we've been able to reintroduce their realms to the young but without the substance that has so troubled us in the past. Now, the young see these refinements and begin identifying these pillars of Western culture as something they're not. Vapid, shallow, and best of all, morally nebulous.
In the old days, the only way to ensure ignorance was to burn the sources of knowledge in a bonfire. Today, we need not rely on something so vulgar and divisive as a giant fire. We need only offer them our values dressed in the costume of something celebrated for generations, with all the flash and plumage of modern-day computer-generated imagery, and they consume it, with the young being nonetheless aware that they're being robbed of their ideological birthright.
The creation ultimately fails monetarily, but the devaluation of the spirit of the enemy that rested so firmly in Western culture is kept from them, and that is worth infinitely more.
Your affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape
