Letters from the Devil: Report of the Special Task Force on Tactical Development: On the Passing of Time and the Wasting of Brief Lives Neil Patterson In the spirit of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters.  Originally published in Issue XIV of Vulgata, July, 2004.

ATTN:  Col. Baal, Field Commander, Army Group C

There is an excuse that the Enemy, and his followers employ to justify our continued advances.  Remember always that the most devoted slaves of the Enemy are no different from the spin doctors in the pay of every one of Earth's leaders.  We tear through legions of human souls, unchecked and unopposed and even the most stupid and lowest of cannon fodder ask "why"?  They are assured by their captains that it is human free will that allows our atrocities to continue.  Those we consume are those that have chosen to be consumed.  Like any lie, it is proximately true.  His spin doctors are well trained.  Indeed, the sheep are free, but only in the most limited way, not like us.  They can choose to be slaves of us or of the Enemy, nothing else. There are only two choices: the left hand path or the right.  They are either doing His will or ours.  But their lot is even more miserable than this: for what prey would choose to be eaten by the predator?  We win because they are weak. They have free will in the same way that a toddler can walk.  This is easy to forget, for our natures are directed to a single purpose and we never fail to be completely who we are.  Every action that we make is wholly dedicated to the War.  Most of the time they are not even aware of the options put before them or of the relative momentousness of them.  Never forget that the Enemy made them freakish bastards of both animals and angels.  So you will hear them speak of their wills not being strong enough to do what their intellect regards as proper.  It is as if their wills were muscles that struggled against the base instincts.  This is the best possible scenario for us.  Only a man has the will to be a god, but the appetites that prevent him from being anything more than a rat.  So you see, everything is stacked in our favour, but we must be careful, for if my metaphor holds and the will is like a muscle, then it is possible for them to exercise it until it is stronger than their appetites, stronger even then the full force of our Legion (this happens of course only when the enemy unfairly gives His help).

What is to be done about this virtually impenetrable bulwark?  The easiest solution is to make sure it is never erected.  Humans are at their weakest when they have nothing to struggle against, so let them take the watercourse way, the way of least resistance.  You have to understand that the basic human condition is the filling up of time.  From our perspective, human lives blink in and out like fireflies, but to them, all they see is an endless expanse of moments, each demanding to be filled.  The less they are filled, the more irritating they become until the human is literally driven mad by boredom.  This means that no matter what they may say about duty, purpose, meaning or even just banal goals, most days for most humans are consumed in the attempt to kill as much time as possible in a generally agreeable way.  This is true even of the Enemy's followers.  I called them slaves earlier, but this is not quite accurate because He must convince them to actually do what He wants them to do, which is hugely different and more difficult from getting them to profess undying devotion to Him.  His legions, the "Church Militant" as He calls them, are an unruly rabble.  They barely listen to or even acknowledge their officers and most of the time complain about being pressed into services for which they previously volunteered in moments of foolish bravado.  So, again things work in our favour.  It is usually not necessary to convince a human to actually commit an act of evil, rather just convince him to do nothing much at all, or at least nothing that involves making any decisions, improving himself or doing the will of the Enemy.  Just let him be taken along with the natural flow of his moment-to-moment desires and whims.

Remarkably, if you employ this strategy, you will find that your human spends most of his time cavorting with images.  As you know, there are levels of reality, a hierarchical ontology.  This is one of the first things the human philosophers discovered in both east and west.  We are still trying to find the Promethean turncoat who leaked this information in the fifth century BCE, but meanwhile most of them have forgotten this except in the most abstract and useless way.  At the top of this hierarchy is, of course, us.  The War is the only thing that is truly real and we therefore hold in disdain all that is below us.  The world and all that live in it are a mere shadow compared to us.  They rely on us for their existence, since if there was no War, they would have no reason to be in the universe, no final cause (another dangerous idea that came early to human philosophy that we have largely stamped out).  But there is one level below that and that is the level of images: shadows of shadows from out perspective.  They are the stories, television, movies, music and pictures created by humans.  They are so close to being nothing that they are barely worth anyone's concern at all, but humans have a natural tendency to place them above everything else, turning the ontology upside down.  So the War is vague and mythological and metaphorical, while the actions of movie stars (hence the name) take place on the most divine strata of their cosmology.  However, it is not always the case that a human will consciously put images ahead of what is more real and solid, but even those who could not be less interested in celebrity will still spend hours watching TV that they do not really enjoy.  They will go to it because it is nothing.  It eats time.

The greatest example of this, far better than most television or film, is the recent phenomenon of video games.  There are very few things more enticing to certain humans, especially youths and boys (except for the usual sorts of things that you are already well trained in the use of).  It is easy to get a young and otherwise strong, capable soldier to stare for hours at a glittering screen doing literally nothing except moving his fingers a bit.  Even the most complex and well constructed games involve the player spending hours completing menial tasks in order to accomplish goals or advance the story.  There is no real reward offered for the winning of the game, which is true of most games, but in this case the practice and training required to win does not better the player.  Most other games one could name such as chess, soccer and even boxing and the martial arts improve all of the players' faculties from their intellects, to their bodies and passions, even their wills.  Video games do none of these things, nor can they be excused on the basis that, like other games, they are a social activity, for they are not, even when played in a group.  The final reason why getting humans to play more video games is a good tactic for any situation is that not only do they waste time, but they are also highly addictive.  The mind becomes so lazy and atrophied that the human is unable to concentrate long enough to do anything but continue playing.  He will even deprive himself of sleep and neglect responsibilities.  With very little effort, you can cause a child to waste the better part of his formative youth.

While I am excited by these tactical developments, we must be careful not to show our hand.  I am deeply insulted by their failure to give us the glory we deserve as beings more real and solid then they are, but we must nevertheless encourage this lack of respect.  The War requires sacrifices from all of us.  You will very rarely get the notoriety you deserve on earth, for indeed your existence is barely acknowledged.  Why is this?  Why do they go to images and shadows instead of looking to things higher then themselves?  If you were to ask a human, he would say because the War is invisible to him.  This is true, but it is only half the story.  It is in the endlessly contradictory and paradoxical nature of man that it is the shadows and images that are supposed to point above themselves to things that cannot be seen.  This is what humans used to call art and it is very dangerous.  For the more the humans know about the War, the more they will be inclined to choose the side of the Enemy.

That concludes my report.  I trust that much greater care will be taken to ensure that it does not fall into the hands of the Enemy.

Col. Hastsezini
Commander, Research Division