5 of Uncle Screwtape’s Best Lessons About How to Become a Bad Person

C.S. Lewis was an extraordinary Christian writer. He’s most famous for The Chronicles of Narnia, which was an amazing bit of fiction, but I’m of the opinion that Mere Christianity was his best book. If a non-Christian wanted a recommendation of a book about Christianity to read other than the Bible itself, that would be the book I would point toward.

However, I am also a great fan of The Screwtape Letters. That book is about a demon named Screwtape teaching another demon, his inexperienced nephew Wormwood, how to tempt humans, undermine God, and lead people toward Hell. The book is a well-thought-out, beautifully written, subtle, and entertaining exploration of morality that doesn’t come across as tedious or preachy. In a time where far too few people are discussing moral issues, it seems like a book worth revisiting.

It came to mind for me this week because the violent, poorly behaved, obnoxious students protesting against Israel on college campuses across America reminded me of one of the most memorable quotes from the book. We’ll start with that lesson about leading humans astray from “Uncle Screwtape” and then go on to cover some of his other most notable ways to get humans on the highway to Hell from there.

1.

One of the great ironies of modern life is that we have so many people in our country trying to signal their virtue to the world by supporting the “right” cause or group of people, but they’re simultaneously horrible to the people they actually come in contact with on a daily basis, whether it’s on X, Reddit, or some other social media site or just in real life.

If you were trying to prove that they were a good person in a court of law, they could give you a laundry list of approved causes they supported, but if they were asked to point to examples in their own day-to-day behavior, they’d have very little evidence indeed. Granted, this is a particularly fun example:

We see this everywhere now. How many black businesses were wrecked or burned down during the BLM protests? How many “kind, compassionate” liberals scream abuse at people all day online? How many people talk ad nauseam about how much they support the trans community, but go out of their way to be mean to people that detransition?

Virtue signaling doesn’t really mean all that much if you have infinite compassion for people you’ll never meet but treat many of the people you actually come into contact with like hot garbage.

2.

“It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

If you ever read books about profiling and tracking down criminals, one of the things you will quickly pick up is that people tend to graduate to higher levels of evil. A serial killer might start out by taking pleasure in hurting another child, murdering a family pet, committing an assault, beating someone within an inch of their life, committing a rape, killing someone, killing another, and then committing increasingly brazen, bloody, and violent crimes. That’s an extreme example, but the process works that way for all sorts of things.

Blasphemy. Cruelty. Pornography. Drugs. Theft. We go so far, then we go a little further and a little further and a little further. Then we realize that we’ve gotten to a place that would have shocked us if we had started there. You’re either getting better or worse. Growing or getting rotten. Whether you’re talking about your life or your immortal soul, even if the steps are small, it’s important to always be going in the right direction because one day, you might actually get where you’re going.

3.

"Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror, and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."

We humans are oblivious creatures and it’s amazing how many of us can do things that violate our most sacred principles and beliefs without even realizing it. Furthermore, the smarter we are, the better we often get at coming up with justifications for the immoral things we do. “Well, normally you shouldn’t do that, but those people deserve it!” “They’d do it to us if they could!” “Sure, I said it was bad, but they did it, so why shouldn’t we do it, too?”

The most drama-prone people will say they’re puzzled about why drama follows them everywhere. The liars will tell you that they have to be that way because everyone around them is a liar. The nasty-tempered bully will tell you that they’re a “victim” and people keep picking fights with them. Sometimes they know they’re full of it, but guess what? Oftentimes, they live a life of self-delusion so great that they can’t see anything but what they want to believe about themselves. Unfortunately, a bad person who makes the world a worse place because he’s deluded is still a bad person.

4.

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those, we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

One of the things Dale Carnegie really drove home in his legendary book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is that almost no one thinks of themself as a bad person. “Evil” is always something that OTHER PEOPLE DO while what we do is just “defending ourselves” or “doing the smart thing.”

Do you think executives at cigarette companies or, for that matter, the upper-level management responsible for making Twinkies, Oreos, and Doritos think they’re monsters when they read about someone dying after regularly stuffing themselves with their products? Do you think the journalists deliberately fanning the flames of racial strife during the BLM riots were horrified when someone got killed or some small business owner lost their livelihood as a result of the stories they’d written? How about the Soros prosecutors who see citizens robbed, raped, and murdered by criminals they refused to lock up? Do you think those prosecutors view what they did as “evil?”

Evil is all around us in our society and it’s being done by politicians, journalists, activists, preachers, teachers, professors, lawyers, judges, and all sorts of “regular” people. These people usually don’t ever question whether what they’re doing is evil because how could someone like them be evil when they’re not some dictator, serial killer, or crime boss?

5.

In our society, we lie to people non-stop, all day long, throughout their whole lives because we don’t want to hurt their feelings, because the truth is considered “cruel,” or just because it’s easier.  

“You were a man, but now you say you’re a woman? Okay, whatever you say.”

“It’s not your fault you’re homeless! Society just hasn’t done enough to help you!”

“The reason men don’t like you is because you’re a strong, successful woman, not anything you’re doing wrong!”

“Sure, you can be 400 pounds and healthy! That’s what body positivity is all about!”

“It’s your body, so it should be your choice about whether you get rid of that parasite inside of you or not!”

We do this in a hundred different ways in our society, but where does that leave people long term? It leaves them living a lie. It can cost them decades of their lives. It allows people to build their personalities and belief systems around lies that can ruin them. People need the truth about life, about the world, and about God. The further they get from the truth, the less likely they are to be good people with good lives.

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