Chapter Text
My dear Persclaw--
Yes, Twitter is an excellent opportunity for attacks on the patient’s charity.
Humans are innately both spiritual and physical. Their disgusting hybrid nature is often important to recall in tempting (loathe as I am to admit it), for it allows them to fall into many errors a purely spiritual being will not. As strange as you and I may find it, if the human cannot see the face of their opponent in argument, they will often forget that their opponent is a fellow human at all.
“How can they forget so obvious a truism?” you cry. They do, Persclaw, they do!
Until relatively recently, nearly all humans could only argue with other humans face-to-face, and almost always with humans they knew. We had some luck with anonymous editorialists, Alexander Hamilton and the like, but their loyalty and self-sacrifice meant that with depressing regularity they escaped to the Enemy’s keeping. There are advantages to in-person argumentation, which I urge you not to neglect. The old dry bitter hatred barely felt as hatred can only be cultivated in a personal atmosphere.
Nevertheless, a face-to-face argument is always dangerous. At any moment the human may see the other human cringe with pain at a particularly devastating insult, and their self-satisfaction will instantly dissolve in a solvent of mercy and grief. The one will cry out in sorrow; the other in forgiveness; and years of hard work will disappear in a moment of redemption.
On the Internet, even a quite empathetic patient may turn cruel. I have seen one of those simpering humans-- the kind who loves animals, cannot pass a baby without cooing and refuses to watch television news because it’s too upsetting-- mock another human for being weak enough to feel pain at an insult. In the old days we had to lure a patient deep into our service to commit that sin; today they are doing it for us.
The patient’s desire to be part of the In Crowd can be used to encourage them into deeper cruelties. Give the human a social circle such that the more vicious the remark the more numerous the Likes the human can bask in. (It was a wonderful invention, the Like. In my day we often had to reward the humans for sin with things of value.) Allow the human to feel part of the group (always a strong motivation for any human) by insulting whomever the group is insulting. Keep quite far from the patient’s mind any idea of what it must feel like to have dozens if not hundreds of humans competing to see who can slander you the most eloquently; if such a thought does come up, tell the human not to “spoil the fun” or that the victim deserved it or that the other human is “butthurt,” a wonderful word which conceals the argument (obviously fallacious when brought to the human’s attention) that if you feel pain when I hurt you you deserve to be hurt.
Do not be satisfied with a cutting remark in response to another human’s commonplace stupidity or sin. Cultivate the patient’s hypocrisy, never letting them question whether they have done the thing they’ve criticized, or would have done it in the other human’s shoes. If at all possible, lead the patient to that excellent hobby, which brews such wonderful self-righteousness and thoughtlessness, of finding something foolish another human has said and mocking it as viciously as possible. And of course be quite careful that the patient fly into a rage any time these tactics are used against her--
Your uncle,
Screwtape.