Screwtape’s Master Plan: A Satirical Take on Christianity and Culture

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Segmentation and Swollenness

My fellow demons,

I am pleased by the recognition you bestow upon me this evening and I look forward to the servile acts that I am sure you will direct to me over the coming eons. My advancement from undersecretary of a department to Supreme Strategist at the Training College is, of course, a great honor, but one that is fully consistent with my exceptional intellect and my extensive experience befuddling humans. You should always remember that Our Father Below, who installed me in my new post, recognizes my formidable qualities. In my Installation Injunction, he wrote: I am sure you will devise and implement a Master Plan that will decisively extinguish in your region the Enemy’s Light.

Over the past hundred years we have made great progress diverting humans from the Enemy, thus keeping them blind to the Enemy’s vision of their potential. We have also made strides in isolating and desalinating those who call on the Enemy, thus rendering their religion ever less relevant to those outside it and even to some within. But we must never be satisfied with our gains, for the Enemy is always on the move.¹ His unendurable adoration of the spiritual animals, regardless of their condition, and the joy he experiences when even one of them turns to him in genuine honesty and humility, are noxious to all who swear allegiance to Our Father Below. So, my fellow tempters, even though we can now see Darkness at the end of the tunnel, we still have much work to do!

This week at the Training College you will receive my Master Plan, which explains the values and principles for defeating the Enemy’s insurgency in our region. Low Command has made it clear that our campaigns must not awaken any dangerous questioning among those humans who view the Enemy as a mere construction of the human mind.² Questions like Why is there existence rather than nothing? and If my ideas are nothing more than chemical reactions in my brain, why should I believe them? should always be suppressed. Meanwhile, among those who call upon the Enemy, Low Command insists that we never awaken in them questions like, Why do those outside my faith view my religion as ridiculous? and Was my Commander confused when He said, ‘Love your enemies’? Most important of all, do not allow them to ask, In what areas am I blind and in need of a complete turnaround? If even ten of them asked this of the Enemy with genuine honesty and humility, our cause would indeed be in jeopardy. But fear not, for they do not desire the Light nearly as much as they imagine.³

The fundamental principles that will guide our grand strategy of subverting the Enemy’s purposes are segmentation and swollenness. Segmentation is the art and science of fostering in humans a compartmentalization of life’s activities, relationships, and philosophies. We desire that the creatures lead un-holistic (and of course unholy) lives. Swollenness is the ploy of taking anything that the Enemy intends for good and gently guiding humans to distort it out of all proportion to its original purpose. Our Father Below delights in twisted goodness because it undermines the Enemy’s perverse interconnection between the spiritual and the material and it wounds those made in the Enemy’s image, which of course hurts the Enemy himself.⁴

Our aim is to insert segmentation and swollenness into as many dimensions of hybrid life as possible, but some areas are more critical than others. This week at the Training College I will begin by explaining why we hate creation and especially the material beings that the Enemy has made. I will then teach you tactics for reconditioning hybrid thinking and behavior in the areas of sexuality, intergroup relationships, self-actualization, work and vocation, and understandings of Jesus. Allow me to inflame your appetites by giving you an example in each of these areas.

When the Enemy created the universe, he introduced matter and energy into reality. Such materials are thoroughly unspiritual and thus nauseating to all who are loyal to Our Father Below. But an even more profound transgression followed when the Enemy fused materiality and spirituality in the form of those disgusting hybrids, which he boasts are made in his image and likeness. The wretched creatures are half-breeds (part material and part spiritual) and thus good for nothing except to be captured for our consumption. One of our chief tactics for segmenting hybrids from the Enemy is to help them believe that the universe is the only true reality and the Enemy is a superstition. We categorize this hybrid viewpoint under the heading philosophical materialism; it is a foundation upon which many other useful distortions follow.

Distorting the philosophical perspectives of hybrids is entertaining and productive, but we take special delight in deforming their sexuality. By disrupting their reproduction there will be fewer of the Enemy’s animalized image-bearers populating our region and those that do breed can be made miserable and more amenable to our plans. Consider the hybrid that swears fidelity to his wife and even prays with her, but then becomes addicted to pornography. With the proper applications of segmentation and swollenness, we can devour the man, draw the wife and children into great despair, and destroy the infernal union between the man, the woman, and the Enemy. Moreover, we can lead the man to be a small cog in a worldwide pornographic industry that is, in the extreme (and we relish extremes), genocidal in the impact that it has on the thousands of women and children who are systematically coerced into the sex slave industry all around Our Father’s world. Of course, the man will be completely unaware of his own part in the atrocity industry, which is why we can so easily befuddle him.

One of the most enjoyable and fruitful forms of Segmentation is the virtually unlimited capacity of hybrids to form into tribes. As material beings, hybrids have an innate biological drive to be part of an inner ring clique, which they view as us. Once the us is formed, even untrained demons can assist the most sophisticated hybrid to see that anybody that is not us is them. From there, a small amount of befuddling is usually sufficient to get hybrids to believe that those who are them are enemies. Those who call on the Enemy are just as prone to tribalism as anybody else. It is not just we demons who are responsible for the more than thirty thousand denominations that make up the segmented church worldwide.⁵ Most of the time we just stand by and watch. Moreover, we are not the ones primarily responsible when religious hybrids burn Korans, conduct witch hunts, persecute scientists, or rationalize condemning language against political opponents. Meanwhile, we are able to assist those who do not call upon the Enemy to imagine that they are too enlightened for such behavior. The Enemy tried to counteract the hybrids’ lust for us/them thinking by telling them to love and pray for their enemies, but even those who call on the Enemy do not follow such commands.

We are making excellent progress in our region in helping hybrids believe that they are the focal point of the universe. We use the term epicentralism to represent the religion of the self. Remember, Our Father Below is in favor of religion, as long as it is the right kind.⁶ For those who call on the Enemy, we prefer that they substitute a tame god (or gods) for the Enemy. In this way they can attain all of the comforts of religion without facing any of the real work that the Enemy wants to perpetrate in their lives.⁷ For those who do not call upon the Enemy, there is great elasticity in deciding what kind of epicentralist to be. Some prefer to worship nature or sex, while others are obsessed with money, power, or knowledge. It does not matter to us what they center their lives around as long as it is not the Enemy. By the end of this century, the population in our region should be close to one billion hybrids. With the proper applications of segmentation and swollenness in the area of self-actualization, we should be able to enjoy an exponential increase in our region in the number and variety of gods that the hybrids create in their own image.

Once the hybrids reach a certain age they must work to provide sustenance and pleasures for themselves and others and to fulfill creative drives the Enemy put within them. The Enemy prefers words such as calling and vocation for such activities, but we find this terminology noxious and imprecise. Work is a fertile field for us to apply our creativity in segmentation and swollenness. One of our most effective tactics is to help hybrids believe that their work is the sole foundation of their life and the basis of their identity. With such a swollen view of work, hybrids can be made to sacrifice virtues and relationships (including relationship with the Enemy) to their jobs. Another favorite distortion is helping hybrids believe that some forms of work that the Enemy desires are actually of secondary importance and not valued by him. This ploy has allowed our fellow demons in other regions to foster the wholesale withdrawal of those who call on the Enemy from science, journalism, the arts, and education. In this way, whole cultures have been rescued from