Clarity from the Worst Possible Advice

Learning how (not) to approach self-improvement, via The Screwtape Letters & CGP Grey's "7 Ways to Maximize Misery"

Evil & Misery

This week I enjoyed returning to C.S. Lewis' 1942 story The Screwtape Letters after more than a decade and was surprised to find a strong parallel to a short YouTube video that has helped push me forward on my mental health journey – so why not write about it!

Now yes, The Screwtape Letters is a Christian story with Christian morals – albeit taught through satire and by contradiction – but I found that it also has plenty of useful (non)advice along the same lines as many of the stories I discuss here. Maybe I'll get more into a secular reading of the Letters in another post (where I'll promptly rip the sequel to shreds), but today I wanted to focus on a few specific excerpts from the book.

If you're unfamiliar or need a brief recap, The Screwtape Letters are told in the form of letters from the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, advising him through the process of tempting his first human 'patient' toward Hell and away from God (referred to as 'the Enemy' throughout).

What makes Screwtape's advice so interesting is that, rather than attempting to aim the patient directly away from Christian doctrine (like the fears of the Satanic Panic), he suggests Wormwood work very subtly in and around the patient's faith and life. Where violent death in WW2 (ongoing while Lewis wrote and published) might sound like an obvious goal for demons, keeping the patient alive is instead necessary for temptation to take root.

Likewise Screwtape advises that keeping a casual, shallow faith alive is more productive than kindling atheism or outright evil because there is less risk of sudden conversion or redemption. And that's a recurring theme: complacency & stagnancy, coupled with social irritants to drown out any dregs of empathy and nothingness in the place of any great pleasure/pain, are Screwtape's keys to destroying a human life.

Wormwood & patient above / Screwtape below, art by TotemOfHorror

The Text(s)

Just read this passage (again, from over eighty years ago) and see if anything feels strangely reminiscent of our modern life:

We do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately … As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention … You can make him do nothing at all for long periods ... All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’ … Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off. – C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Oh boy, if Lewis could have only imagined the internet.

Here I'll also share CGP Grey's video from a few years ago, which uses the same satirical, contradictory style to tell you how to improve your life:

Do vs. Don't

For whatever reason, this line of argument toward self-improvement elicits far less anxiety in me than a straightforward "here is how you fix your life." Maybe that feels restrictive and claustrophobic, where simply saying "don't do this worst possible thing" offers a more flexible route with room for creative experimentation.

I think it also relates to the importance of breaking problems down: both these texts take what feels like a tumultuous unknown mass of misery and help delineate them into individual issues with clear, simple steps you can take to begin dealing with them. This relates directly to mindfulness, which both texts (satirically) argue against fervently; being aware of the problem is halfway to solving it, which is hardly useful to either evil or misery.

All of this also plays into our fear of the unknown. These texts mirror a technique I learned in therapy, which is simply to put our fear of the worst case scenario into words and thereby cut through some of that dense fog. Lewis and CGP Grey are telling you the absolute worst way to live: clearing away the fog and, even if you're nearer their cruel lighthouse than you'd like, hopefully showing you a way home.

Do you know of any other pieces that use the same technique? Is there a better name for it than something akin to 'proof by contradiction'? How's your cat doing? I'd love to hear from you!

If you're interested in reading more about mindfulness and self-improvement, I'm particularly proud of this piece!

Thanks for reading and until next time <3