Between the Devil and the Deep Bluesky

My dear Wormwood,

I read your last letter with some exasperation.

You say: “I don’t know whether HQ this week is pro-X or pro-Bluesky. The Infernal Powers That Be seem to find it hard to take a consistent line.” You go on to suggest that tempters of your own generation are better placed to understand modern social media than those (like myself) who are no longer on active service.

All of this betrays a set of misunderstandings that are so fundamental that I scarcely know where to begin.

We are at war. Hell’s objective is to work for the destruction of human souls. We are not interested in boosting the profits of one social media outfit or another. In itself, it is a question of utter indifference whether your patient wastes his time with a crew of imbeciles on X or with a different crew of imbeciles on Bluesky.

Nor does your relative inexperience give you any special grasp of 21^st century technology. On the contrary: those of us who worked on exploiting the printing press (and in particular the pamphlet and the propaganda sheet) in the 16^th and 17^th centuries have the deepest possible familiarity with how changes in the means of communication can be made to work to our advantage.

It does not matter, in itself, whether your patient is to be a partisan of X or of Bluesky. But what matters is that he should think that it matters. Do you begin to understand?

If your patient identifies himself with one camp or the other, various beneficial consequences will follow.

First, such an identification is likely to increase the time that he spends on social media. For your patient, this would be a most desirable development. You have the opportunity to cultivate in him a pattern of behaviour that is both compulsive and unsatisfying. When the patient logs on - just for five minutes, or so he tells himself - and then logs off an hour later, it is usually with a sense of weariness and self-disgust. I have previously written to you that Hell’s greatest triumph is to lead these revolting amphibians away from everything that would bring them happiness, and to give them nothing in return. That is what you should be aiming for.

Secondly, if the patient thinks of himself as an X sort or person or a Bluesky sort of person, then we get all the benefits of tribal identification. Which is to say, the scorn and contempt and dislike that he feels for the opposing tribe will carry a great deal more weight with him than any warmth that he feels for his own tribe. For humans, affection for their own tribe is comfortable and pleasant, like a cup of tea after a long walk. But hatred for the other tribe is addictive, like crack cocaine.

If he decides to identify with one site, encourage him from time to time to look surreptitiously at the rival site, with the (half-acknowledged) purpose of finding something to enrage him. A really skilful tempter could encourage him to set up an anonymous lurking account on his disfavoured site for this very purpose; though achieving this is probably beyond your current level of competence.

The question then is, which tribe should you encourage your patient to join? It goes without saying that he is a fool; the question is, what sort of fool is he?

With some patients, a move to Bluesky has achieved excellent results. The level of self-righteousness that can be generated from something so trivial - coupled with the licence that the site gives for periodic outbreaks of mass psychosis, all excused by a confidence in being on the right side of history - can be most gratifying to us. But I do not think this is the right approach for your patient.

My impression is that he likes to think of himself as something of a contrarian, with little toleration for nonsense and virtue-signalling. What this means in practice is that he likes to feel superior to the handful of his acquaintances who still read the Guardian (a newspaper that he gave up a few years back), and that many of his social and political opinions are conditioned by asking himself what would most annoy that group. In this way, he has come to adopt habits of mind that he calls “being an independent thinker”, when they are in fact so mechanical as to be positively Pavlovian.

Given all of this, I think the answer is obvious. He is to stay on X (which he might be induced still to call Twitter, to show his independence of mind); and he is to make a performance of how much he loathes Bluesky.

Meanwhile, you would be well advised to cultivate a degree of respect for those whose experience and wisdom greatly exceed your own.

Your affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape.