My Dear Wormwood,

I am impressed that after all these years of failure after failure in tempting your patient, you have finally come crawling back to me to inquire what went wrong and how you might remedy it.

Frankly, I am befuddled at how you do not see that your abysmal failure was caused thanks to your blithering ignorance of the greatest of all our strategies: resentment.

It could be more simply called “hatred,” but that ghastly Moral Law given to humans by the Enemy is such that patients are prone to revert course if they realize it is hatred that they harbor in their hearts. Yet if you let them justify their hatred by some misguided sense of self-righteousness, they will fall into the trap without a clue. Thus, resentment is the idea you must embrace.

Had you compelled your patient to cultivate even the slightest tinge of resentment in his character, you would have accomplished a great deal for our cause. Perhaps there is a way yet to draw this out, but I suspect it may be a challenge that even I, in all of my brilliance, would have difficulty in performing.

But before I get to that, I must lay out how emphatically important this grand strategy is.

Though you may lead patients into lives of all manners of sin or tempt them to doubt their Commander, yet you do not tempt them toward resentment, you shall have accomplished little more than nick their toes with your arrows.

If you are able to cast doubts upon their prayers, and hide from them the knowledge of their Master, and if you may make them doubt even the reality of their own souls, yet you fail to make them resent, you are worse than nothing. 

If you cause them to live in luxury without a single thought of others, and even make them steal from the poor for their own enrichment, yet cause no resentment, you have done nothing for our cause.

Resentment has a short fuse and is rude.

Resentment envies others.

Resentment esteems itself highly and puffs itself up in self-righteousness. It behaves unseemly, seeks its own, is easily provoked, and thinks much evil.

Resentment rejoices in retribution and burns hot against the truth.

Resentment takes account of all perceived wrongs and then some.

Resentment assumes the worst. It holds no hope, and it abandons all effort.

If you want your patient to suffer, make him resent. The trick never fails to isolate a man from all his friends and family, and since it is so intertwined with a prideful self-righteousness, it’s nigh impossible for the subject to see their own fault and revert course. What misery there is to rejoice in that!

And the cherry on top of the whole trick is that it sparks a chain reaction. Make one patient succumb to the passions of resentment, and you’ll stoke it in others as a response—oh, it’s quite devilishly glorious.

But I must warn you that the Enemy has long known this tactic, and it is the prime reason He sent His so-called “Comforter.”

If His Spirit should have His way, He would counteract our ploys with that nasty tendency of love.

Fortunately for us, over the centuries, we have successfully muddied up the waters of what “love” is—it’s far from a perfect solution, but it certainly helps.

It has been a long hard road, but we are on the mountaintops of it now. Especially in these last few decades, nobody seems to know what true love is—the kind of love that the Enemy embodied when He became one of those paeons in His silly little scheme.

You must continue to convince them that love is always affirmative and supports the desires of others, whatever that might be. Never let them see that true love is always on the same side as the Enemy’s standards of righteousness.

Or, if they’re too stubborn to take that bait, then confound them with ideas of love that are all tied to romance. Convince them that love is a feeling, a spark of connection—something shallow. This lie of romanticism is to be praised for the havoc it has wreaked on the present generation. Patients who have thus been deceived to lay this idea of love as the foundation for their relationships account for no small portion of broken hearts and divorces.

But above all in this, sell them the lie that love is in the heart of the loved. When they believe love has more to do with the person receiving it than the one giving it, that always throws them in a tizzy, because true love occurs more often than not in ways that the recipient will never see.

Just as resentment is a posture of the heart, so is true love. It is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes their character. You must stomp it out with the wiles of resentment before it can take full root. For when it takes full root, true love cannot be easily uprooted.

In all my years tormenting, I’ve only seen such uprooting happen twice. But an autopsy of both patients revealed that our mission was a success only because some small seeds of resentment were buried in their hearts early on.

Herein lies your last hope at hurting your patient. You must dig through his deceitful heart, find whatever shreds of resentment remain, and feed it until it consumes the patient with a bitterness that knows no bounds.

Employ this tactic, and perhaps I might start having affection for you again.

Your uncle,
Screwtape

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