The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis is a series of letters written from an older devil to a younger apprentice devil giving him advice in how best to obtain his human’s soul.
Christian or not, The Screwtape Letters is one of the best self-help books ever written (along with Aristotle’s Ethics and Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning) as it’s focusing is on bringing up your character.
Here are a few things you’ll learn from this great book.
They still connected thinking with doing.
Thinking is not doing.
You can delude yourself forever by keeping thinking and doing connected.
You can waste weeks, months, and months turn into years if all you “do” each day is think and convince yourself you’ve acted.
Re-read Aristotle. Virtue is a habit. It doesn’t matter what you think or feel. All that matters is how you act.
Life advice: get past the inflection point, because dreaming and aspiration is easy.
Your first few weeks of anything begin with excitement and then have a real danger of moving to disappointment or anticlimax.
The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour.
You find yourself enchanted by Japanese music, films, culture, and food. So you settle into actually learning the Japanese language. A few weeks down the line, you realise what a monumental difficulty you have undertaken.
You get married to your love and must learn to live together. The honeymoon stage is over. Now your relationship is really put to the test.
Anticipate the inflection point in all of your endeavours. This will stop you being one of those gym goers who abandons their workout routine the first week of February.
The inflection point is where dreaming aspiration transitions to laborious doing. There’s a difficult adjustment period, then it’s (your new) life as usual.
Your emotions should take a backseat to principles.
You have ultimate freedom, but you must do as Marcus Aurelius instructs and let your reason take over.
Your emotions will tempt you into abandoning your dreams and aspirations during the inflection point. But once you get past this, you’re in for (relatively) plain sailing.
If you can write every day for 90 days, you can now write every day for the rest of your life.
We could all benefit from having a set of personal principles and commandments, written down in a moment of clarity and meditation, which are iterative and adaptive to the currents of life, that are there to guide us when the present-moment emotions of grief, jealousy, anger, and fear try to derail us.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Your grand principles exist in the daily, the minute, the regular.
Just like how the whole ocean is distilled in one drop.
You must fight the “daily pinpricks”, the little annoyances, because they are the threads that create the tapestry of your life.
Be honest in your speech. Don’t fight with loved ones. Don’t indulge drug and alcohol abuse. You can say it’s “just this once,” but that’s never the case. We become what we practice. Patterns form without realisation. Suddenly it’s a decade down the line and you’re an accumulation of small pernicious habits that have built up and are monstrous to shake away.
Inner conversion begins outside yourself.
This sounds contradictory to the advice that if you want to change the world you must begin with yourself. But it’s important to remember that a lot of religious proselytising and self-reflection keeps many mired in the sin they so supposedly abhor.
You can call yourself spiritual and pour all this care and attention into your religious practice, but what can you do for others?
Salvation lies in service to others.
Self-examination is excuse, procrastination, and destruction.
Don’t “save” others.
When people pray for others, they focus on their sin. While you’re busy praying for someone to find salvation, all you’re doing is ignoring your own weaknesses and reinforcing a false belief that you’re better than everyone else. You do this under the guise and sick conviction that you are “spiritual.”
You may say in public that you’re concerned with the state of someone’s soul, but really you’re focusing on that which irritates or inconveniences you.
A more beautiful way to conduct yourself is to become aware of how your behaviour is impacting those around you.
How you say it > what you say
In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face […] Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: ‘I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.” Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.
Observe the 7/38/55-rule (you can learn more about this from Chris Voss).
In conversation, content is responsible for only 7% of impact. Tonality is 38%. Body language is 55%. So tonality is 5x more important than the words spoken. We’ve known this intuitively since the dawn of time because we’ve been communicating since the dawn of time. So don’t lie to yourself.
You can say anything if you tonality and body language is measured correctly. And even the most innocent of statements becomes barbed wire when your tonality and body language is off.
You’re an animal, and what your body does affects your soul.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
We live in a society that has elevated depravity, pseudo-communication, and shallow surface over depth.
One in six Americans are on antidepressants. But that figure would drop to zero if people truly understand that we are what we repeatedly do. Consume garbage, act like garbage, and you are garbage.
Studies show the negative effects of racking up high partner counts – Netflix and chill is a death sentence for finding true love. We know what a sedentary lifestyle does to the body. We know that marijuana is linked to schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and suicide. But 420 is cool, man! Our bodies and mind are intertwined and the only way to clean your soul is to clean your behaviour.
Ever see those online digital nomads hawking get-rich-quick courses? Ever look in their eyes? Window to the soul and you can see it! They know they’re rotten, dirty, defiled. Scamming people takes a toll. Work in the mud and your soul will be mired in sin. You can only hide from yourself and your ill-thought-out behaviour for so long. There’s no free lunch in this world. Karma is real.
Your cross is what your presently fear and you must bear it.
We live in the future, in a state of hope or fear. Or replay the past like a sick newsreel on the inside of our minds. Live in hope or fear of that which has not yet happened and you take yourself out of the driver’s seat of your own life.
The psychologists have found that there are two ways to go through life:
- With an internal locus of control
- With an external locus of control
Most people live with an external locus of control. That means they believe the world around them has the power to affect them and takes responsibility away from them.
“You made me angry” = “I am not in control of my own emotions”
This is a low consciousness way of living.
Most flee from what they fear in the present moment, but you only become braver by facing it full on. The fear won’t necessarily vanish. Although it might. Or it might lessen. It might stay the same. But you become more robust regardless.
Start consciously applying the virtues.
Aristotle’s virtues are a great base. Or you could read about Benjamin Franklin’s virtues, which are based on Aristotle. It all comes back to Aristotle. That’s why he’s the grandfather of philosophical thought.
We all know what the virtues are. But we keep them in the circle of fantasy. We delude ourselves into believing we’re good people because we think about doing good things, all the while we keep our ingrained bad habits.
It’s only when the virtues leave the circle of fantasy and become applied will that we start to change for the better. This is hard work and requires conscious work. It took me a decade to rid my speech of lies, untruths, and half-truths. Now whatever I say, I mean. Everything uttered is true to the absolute best of my knowledge and conviction. And I detest lies from others, whilst knowing how difficult it is to really be pure in speech.
Truthfulness is just one of many virtues. I’ve still got a long way to go with some of them, but I work on them as much as I can.
Life is a series of troughs and peaks.
Undulation, ups and downs, occur in every department of life:
- Your interest in work
- Your affection for your friends
- Your physical appetites
This is due to the animal side of your nature.
Always remember that humanity is part way between god and beast. As beasts, we occupy time and space. As god, we can can direct our consciousness to an eternal object.
The more firmly rooted you are in your body, the more the peaks and troughs move you.
Remember this in good and bad times. When we’re on top of the world, we think it’s never going to end. The same is true when we’re going through hell. Both extremes need tempering.
The only extreme worth encouraging is one that keeps you devoted to higher matters. Return to Aristotle’s work on virtues and vice again. Virtue is the mean between two extremes. And extremes = vice.
People often ask: if God exists, why does he/she/it allow bad things to happen?
The answer:
God is forged in fire.
Life can’t be a continuous peak. Firstly, you must have troughs to have peaks. You can’t have light without darkness, good with evil, health without illness, wealth without poverty. Secondly, the troughs, the lows, the bad times, the personal hells, the tortured nights, the tormented trials and tribulations are where we find virtue. It’s easy to be a saint when conditions are favourable (although Dostoyevsky thought man would make a hell of utopia in a day). But being a saint when everything around you tempts you into sin? That is something.
We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.
Which one are you?
Look around and, without judgement, you’ll see that most people are cattle.
Those in the belly of the beast known as Hollywood talk of people being chewed up and spat back out. They’re food. Meat for the monster.
Cattle don’t even realise they’re being lined up for the abattoir. Advertisements, social media, rumour and gossip – the world is filled with conditions set up to use you and suck you of your life. Opportunities to be in service of something greater won’t make their presence known. Unless you look for them.
You can tell if you’re cattle on the conveyer belt towards becoming food or if you’re a servant on the path to becoming a son by analysing how you act during the troughs.
Temptation comes in troughs.
Weakness makes excuse for giving in or giving up.
But temptation also comes in peaks.
When you’re on a peak, your powers of resistance are at their strongest.
Recognise undulations as a means to combat vice-like pleasure.
When you give into craving, all you get in return is ever diminishing pleasure, more craving, and eventually nothing.
Your actions matter.
We’re all sinners. But some sinners are convinced that others sin worse than them. This conviction justifies their own sin. But a small lie on your part is just as bad as another person committing murder if that small lie is what it takes to corrupt you.
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.
Prisoners are the lucky ones. Every day they have the consequence of their poor decision staring them in the face. Steel bars, walls closing in, a toilet in front of a security camera. Those who reform reform hard.
The danger is in the daily. Justifying the insidious evil of the minutiae that builds up over time.
Don’t buy status.
Popping bottles at the club. Pulling up to the valet in a heavily leased Mercedes. Snapping a photo of yourself posing with a book in the perfect lighting so you can scoop up a-hundred-something likes.
It’s like Tyler Durden says:
We buy shit we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.
Be true to yourself. If you like reading a certain book, read and enjoy that book! So it’s not on Oprah’s shill-filled paid-for bookclub or the winner of the oh-so-prestigious Nobel Prize (bunch of old Swiss virtue-signalling white dudes). Who cares!
If you enjoy a certain hobby, who cares if someone else says it’s nerdy? You know who the real nerd is? The one who is so desperate for the faux-approval of scumbag surface-people who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire that they will lie about who they are. Eat the foods you love. Be kind to the people you love. And never compromise what’s truly important for what’s truly not.
Don’t be “humble”.
What most people consider to be humility is actually a vice.
Humility is not about denying your talents or character. If you’re a good person, it’s not humble to deny that. If you’re skilled at something, it’s not humble to say that you’re not. It’s abhorrent and it’s a lie.
Real humility is comfortably embracing who you are, relishing your strengths and admitting your real weaknesses.
Your aim is to be so free from bias that you rejoice in your own talents as fully, frankly, and gratefully as the talents of your neighbour. You want to recognise the potential, ability, and beauty in everything – and that includes yourself.
When self-love dies, the path towards evil becomes clear.
You can only truly be charitable once you learn to be kind, accepting, and loving of yourself.
The Bible says to love your neighbour as you love yourself. But I would hate to be most people’s neighbour as most people don’t love themselves.
Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporary part of time – for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition, look ahead.
We could all become grounded cat-like Buddhist monks overnight if we internalised this belief.
The secret hack to being more present is to look at the world through a lens of love and appreciation. The past can be difficult to navigate, and therapy culture fetishises counting your ghosts, but each day count your blessings and your base-level of well-being improves.
Stay away from the past and you’ve cut off anxiety and ill-intention at the source from which it flows.
What’s reflected is projected.
The world is only a reflection of your state of mind.
You see your psychology mirrored in the people you meet and the events you encounter.
Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.
The most effective Cognitive Behavioural Therapy technique (the only style of therapy that works) is to list out your perceived injustices. We don’t fly into a rage when another driver cuts us off because we care about being cut off. We fly into a rage because we feel personally attacked, disrespected, our safety consciously disregarded.
Challenge your beliefs about the world, especially when they lead to anger.
When anger arises, it is usually due to this background thought: “I’m being mistreated/there is an injustice.”
It’s like this:
Core beliefs —> conditional assumptions (schemas/paradigms) —> Automatic thoughts (“this is unfair”)
These thoughts come from our underlying paradigm of how we see the world.
Here are some paradigm examples that could lead to an angry outburst when confronted with a negative event:
- People should give before they take
- People should not impose their will on me
- If I’m doing my best, people should recognise that
- People should be held responsible for their actions
And here are some questions you can ask yourself to challenge these beliefs and cool the coals of your ire:
- If my best friend had this thought and I wanted to help him/her see things differently, what might I say?
- Will I care about this 5 years from now? Is it really worth the investment right now?
- If I were to pretend to do a u-turn in my beliefs, what might I say or think instead?
- What’s the worst case scenario? Can I live with that?
- Is this thought balanced? Is it fair?
This is a Stoic philosophy.
Consider the words of Epictetus:
People are disturbed not by events alone but by the views they take of them.
Take Viktor Frankl’s advice and reside in the space between stimulus and response.
Your day (and your body) is a gift, like the sun and the moon.
Many feelings of injustice arise from believing we’re having our time robbed of us.
Becoming irritable in a long queue. Having to deal with someone’s ill-conceived “problems”. A last-minute deadline springing out of nowhere.
But when challenge the notion that the day is your own, and see it instead as a canvas with which to paint your loving servitude, your whole attitude changes for the better.
When times get hard, you feel bodily resistance to exercise or work, remember that the casing that contains your soul is also a gift.
Transformation proceeds from within and is a glorious manifestation of that Life Force which Our Father would worship if he worshipped anything but himself.
You can read C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters here.