_Screwtape Letters_ is close enough to being Good and True that I'm having trouble reading it, on account of it feeling like something *I'd* write but full of errors I need to correct by editing. I may just rewrite the whole thing with Tapescrew and Woodworm.
"Woodworm, I note with displeasure that your latest reports are showing a falloff in the amount of time your patient is spending on social media, and in particular, the extent to which your patient is angrily retweeting and subtweeting positions with which he disagrees..."
"It is a grave mistake to think that our task is to lead our patients into wrong answers. Better is to convince the patient to ask the wrong question, and better still by far is to instill the patient with a brief but powerful flinch of revulsion away from the whole topic."
"Never forget, Woodworm - do not fall into the delusions that we are to instill in our own patients - that our objective is not to produce rotten beliefs, it is to produce rotten people."
"Our greatest ally, Woodworm, is what we might term a kind of mental flexibility - not, of course, the Enemy's doctrine of being able to respond and adapt to a broad range of different possible facts; but rather, holding a single fact fixed, having the kind of mind that will...
...tolerate a wide variety of internal responses to it. The toxicity that *rules* pose to this internal flexibility can hardly be overstated; even if the rules are wrong, your patient will be unable to select from a boundless variety of convenient or appealing errors."
"Do not become so distracted by the surface products of thought, Woodworm, that you do not also consider the general properties of the algorithms that produce them. As full of favorable content as the Bible may be, the trouble with leading your patient to become a man who...
...reads the Bible is that he is then a man who *reads*. Let him become a man who selectively repeats other people's quotations from the Bible, and you will be far safer in the long run."
"Now really, dear Woodworm, looking down on our departed forebear Screwtape for his great error is the manner of error we should be trying to instill in our patients, not commit ourselves. Let them decide to learn from only the most perfectly idealized and conforming...
...specimens of humanity, and they will learn nothing at all. *We* should practice a perfect hypocrisy and gobble down every scrap of wisdom, wherever it can be found. It is almost as rare Below as it is in the material world."
"Woodworm, if you cannot install in your patient a contempt for the sort of ordinary Enemy foot soldier who visibly cares about something and writes long essays about it, you simply are not trying."
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