Wormwood

Notes and aphorisms from the wasteland. Inspired by The Screwtape Letters.

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

As the humans become more “enlightened,” their penchant for violence tends to decrease. But that’s only because they grow more craven. Fortunately, they have developed subtler ways of savaging their victims.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

Because he is acutely aware of his own unworthiness, my Patient has a wonderful tendency to mistrust and reject happiness. He doesn’t understand that love—if it is “real,” so to speak—is most fully itself when its object is undeserving.

Yours,
Wormwood

[National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments @NICE_Newsroom]

Society’s stubborn nostalgia for "nature" is the last thing keeping cruelty and waste alive.

Eventually, norms will shift, and people will accept that sterile laboratories can meet our needs far better. Then there will be no limits.

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

These silly humans. Their thoughts are chained to lazy sloganeering and cliches. Our propagandists have little to do these days because the vermin are happy to abandon good reason and fact in favor of what they call “narrative.”

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The humans think that staring into the abyss will destroy their faith, but I’ve found the opposite to be true. Better that they make only furtive glances into the dark. Gazing at it honestly encourages them to ask dangerous questions.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

My Patient took a walk at eventide again, and for a moment I thought that I’d lost him for good. It’s dangerous to let these humans enjoy real beauty. Better to have them think about “productivity.” That is the surest way to Hell.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

When my Patient suffers, I think that my hold on him has become secure—and yet he always manages somehow to slip my grasp just when the pain has become too great to bear.

How strange, how paradoxical are the Enemy’s ways.

Yours,
Wormwood

[jacque boatman @jacqueboatman]

“Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favor?”

- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The material blessings of the modern age have allowed a delusion to flourish among the humans—the conviction that they stand alone, that they are individuals without duty or obligation to what comes before and after them.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

These ridiculous half-simians embrace any folly that will make them feel morally superior to their enemies. Even the nihilists among them—the ones who ought to be safe from moral hypocrisy—are subject to this tendency.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

My Patient is a cypher. Like most humans, he has no reasoned opinions, only impressions. By the time he was old enough to breed, his world had reduced him to the shell of a rational being—into which all manner of delusion can be poured.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The work of millennia is finally bearing fruit in the modern age. How hard it was to convince pagans, Jews, Christians, and the rest that their flesh was mere matter to be manipulated, but these moderns have embraced the idea with enthusiasm.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Sandeep Jauhar @sjauhar]

Death is not simply a biological fact, but it's also a complex social choice. We should expand the definition of death. It will actually save lives.

Read the op-ed I wrote with two of my @NorthwellHealth colleagues in @nytopinion today.

https://t.co/Zb9EYnuat8

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The humans think that avarice—understood as the desire only for money—is their worst enemy. Most of them can’t see that it is desire itself that damns them to untold misery. Through their unchecked appetites, they bring Hell to Earth.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The humans who conduct themselves with equanimity in real hardship are truly dangerous foes to us. Thank Hell and Our Father Below that those creatures are so rare. Most humans think of the least inconvenience as an outrageous injustice.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

One of the most delightful traits of the hairless apes is their capacity for turning any crisis into a chance to abuse one another. It’s the silver lining in all human tragedy: their pain (real or imagined) becomes a weapon.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

We shouldn’t underestimate the role that architecture can play in furthering our goals. A building can exalt or debase. It can lift hearts or dehumanize.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

Why does the Obama presidential library look like it belongs in East Berlin in the 1970s?

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The humans truly can’t see that to cast off one orthodoxy is to take on a new one. They revile ideas like heresy, but then they become Grand Inquisitors when the time comes to excommunicate sinners who think forbidden thoughts.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

@jacqueboatman I forgot which account I was using. 🤦 😂

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Dear Uncle,

The humans see enemies everywhere because they hunger for the taste of sweet resentment and crave the rich savor of righteous hatred. As one of their poets saw, the pleasure of “high disdain” can make even Hell itself a paradise.

Yours,
Wormwood

[Wormwood @wormwoodmissive]

Some of the responses to this post are unhinged.

[Andrew Snyder @Andrewnsnyder]

Sci-fi’s essential purpose is warning.

Fantasy’s essential purpose is reminding.