A Glorious Muddle

My Dear Nephew,

I’m disturbed by your reports about your subject’s new friend. This friend shows “startling clarity of thought”? That’s an atrocious attribute for a human to have. If you can’t destroy their relationship with your patient entirely, at least do everything you can to keep them from having long talks.

Clear thinking has destroyed much devilry. We can do much more with a muddle than a syllogism. That is why we must be so careful not to ever say what we mean.

For example, I once convinced a young Christian to quit attending his weekly one-hour Bible study because he “needed time for his schoolwork.” This was while the same subject (I chuckle to remember it) spent two hours each day on social media.

Of course, if he’d stopped and thought for a moment, my subject would have seen how his decision could hardly improve his grades. A lie clearly stated is halfway to being debunked. He quit the productive use of time and kept the unproductive one!

Muddled thinking pairs particularly well with unfair judgments. For instance, you could work on encouraging your subject to develop a general sense of disgruntled discontent with Christian institutions. Give him a sense that, say, all televangelists are hucksters, or that all pastors on Instagram are narcissists, or that any church that owns a building (especially a big one) is selfish. Of course, don’t let them ever actually watch a sermon by a televangelist, or go to a church with a social media presence or a building. Just keep him filled with half-remembered, secondhand, generalized critiques. That’s where we can really work.

If you give your subject a faint sense that most Christian institutions are corrupt, you can keep him from thinking about what he himself ought to be doing. A person fixated on the imagined evils of some vaguely known church is unlikely to ever volunteer at his own. Never mind that your subject’s Christian calling is completely unaffected by the supposed sinfulness of any other person or institution.

Malevolently,

Your Uncle Mulcifer