Khari’s Reviews > The Screwtape Letters > Status Update

"Once they know that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. WE have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective 'unchanged' we have substituted the emotional adjective 'stagnant.' "

..."And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on."

Screwtape: "The Enemy...wants men...to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking 'Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?' They will neglect the relevant questions..."

"The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice."

"Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's beliefs that they 'own' their bodies"-those vast and perilous states, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another."

"The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged. The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in heaven and in hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's beliefs that they 'own' their bodies"-those vast and perilous states, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves ....

"Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of 24 hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which those deductions have been made was...his own personal birthright."

In the age of filters and ai, this is even truer and scarier.

"We are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible."

"We have engineered a great increase in the...representation of the...nude in art...It is all a fake, of course; the figures in ...are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be...As a result we are directing the desires of men to something which does not exist."