The Letters

My Dear Bilchly, It is time to make your patient self-righteous. It is time to give her a dietary preference. Years ago, Americans judged one another viciously for their sexual mores — who was sleeping with whom, and how. Those were rich veins to mine for gossip, judgment, and the self-righteousness that follows. They still judge each other for sex, of course, but secretly. Officially, such matters are off limits now — “love is love,” and all that. Thus our official policy: substitute food for sex. If you cannot hate them for their polycule, hate them for their lunch. Start by having her “do her own research” on diets. The American food system is a triumph of corruption and mediocrity, so you have a great deal to work with. The simple truth is that since her baseline is so atrocious, nearly any diet will make the creature “feel better.” The placebo effect is also your friend. And do not make it too easy on her, either. The best way to cement a new identity is friction. Ensure that someone unpleasant mocks her for the new diet, and give her a flush of noble self-sacrifice every time she skips a treat at the bakery. Noble victimhood will drive her deep into her “digital community” — a fellowship of sufferers nursing the same sort of tummy aches. Congratulations. Your patient now has a dietary preference and, more to the point, a new identity. She should judge everyone outside her little tribe. If you cannot manage outspoken judgment, at least inculcate “bless your heart” pity. And do not forget the tyranny of small differences. A vegan should, of course, dislike a vegetarian — but she should loathe a “vegan who still eats honey.” Make the world revolve around her needs. (Notice that it is already a need and no longer a preference .) Mothers should feel flummoxed at Thanksgiving, friends at a loss planning a dinner party, minimum-wage cooks hopelessly befuddled. A dietary preference, properly executed, should render your patient isolated, self-righteous, and plagued by mysterious flatulence. Yours Indulgently, Mulcifer

My Dearest Nephew, Church shopping is one of my favorite pastimes. Finally, some good news. Americans are delightful. Imagine shopping for brothers-in-arms in the cosmic battle of good and evil! Delicious. It reminds me of the clever commerce in indulgences I architected before the Reformation. Americans are predisposed to think of everything as a kind of commerce, so this should not be hard. Put him in a sophisticated, critical mood. Encourage him to think of himself as a thoughtful and conscientious consumer, not a Christian. If you can, get him to make a scorecard, check Yelp (yes, there are Yelp reviews for churches), and snoop about on each church’s Instagram. The local church, when functional, is a dreadful thing: shaping souls, building true community, instituting a discipline and rhythm that defeats much of our work — to say nothing of actually snatching new souls from the very gates of hell. But your patient does not see that. Few do. Where we see a prayer warrior and tremble, he sees a frumpy old church lady in a long denim skirt. He sees a worship leader in questionably tight jeans, a greeter with smudged glasses, and a pastor who could stand to lose thirty pounds. “Three stars for worship.” “Two for teaching.” That is precisely the attitude we need. The sad reality is that joining a church is rather like joining a gym. If the silly creatures would simply pick one, submit to its discipline, and show up regularly, they would get into much better shape — whether the gym proselytizes CrossFit, Pilates, or “spinning.” Never let him commit and submit. Keep him chasing a nonexistent ideal: a church that agrees with him on every theological particular (because his theology is perfect, of course), that flatters his taste in music, and is full of “his type of people.” And should he ever come close to settling, remind him of the price. The church he chooses will ask for ten percent of his income — and for a sum like that, surely he deserves the very best. Keep him shopping long enough, and he may decide that no church on earth is worthy of his sophisticated faith. Caveat Emptor, Mulcifer

My Dearest Nephew, A dog? You let your patient get a dog? A cat, maybe; a reptile, surely; but a dog? The problem with dogs (unlike their noble forebears, the wolf) is that dogs like people and, worse, they need them. After years of careful labor, I had coaxed a patient to the very edge of self-annihilation. (Even my detractors admit I am an artist with despair.) By this time I had made him an unlovely specimen — angry, drunken, sullen, harsh — and every one of his friends and family had noted my hard work and quietly avoided him. He was on the edge of despair. I could nearly taste the triumph. So I stepped out for a short holiday, a few restful days at Auschwitz. I returned to find that his damn fool daughter had brought home a puppy. Not even a handsome animal. A filthy mutt, the kind of dog you could pick up on any street corner in Karachi. The wretched animal was too stupid to see him for who he really was: a useless and loathsome creature, unworthy of love or even consideration. The dog simply saw the man underneath the crust of sin and judged him worthy of love. The filthy, unthinking dogginess of dogs is a threat to hell itself. The devotion of an idiot animal to its undeserving master mimics, in miniature, the Enemy’s revolting affection for his human creatures. Worse, it needed him. It needed to be let out, to be fed, to be scratched and walked and put to bed. The physical needs of the dog, of the canine, pull a patient out of himself. Self-forgetfulness can ruin months of carefully constructed self-loathing. As long as a man stays curled inside his own misery, he is safely on his way to hell. And so my patient, whom I had labored to make both unlovable and unloved, found himself both loved and needed. But it sounds as though the damage is done. He has a dog. You will likely be punished for this foolishness. I would enjoy watching you get your just deserts, if it did not make me look like a damn fool, too. But we can make the best of a bad situation. I am relieved to hear that your patient purchased the dog from the pound. Make that his entire personality: a “paw-rent” with a “who rescued who?” bumper sticker. Ensure the dog comes before humans. Ensure the patient always sides with the misbehaving dog over his offended friends, or make him skip a dinner party “because the dog has separation anxiety.” Dogs are bad, Bilchly, but relationships are worse. Make the dog a barrier to people, and this won’t be as great a disaster as it should be. If nothing else, give the dog fleas. Surely that is not beyond you. Doggedly Yours, Mulcifer

Dear Bilchly, It’s high time you learned the art of the thought-terminating cliche. The thought-terminating cliche is a one-liner that stops a dangerous train of thought in its tracks by offering a false, but plausible, explanation. A few of my favorites: “I’m spiritual, not religious.” (We discussed this previously.) “Well, I’m just a _____.” ( Pisces, jerk, loser etc.) “Boys will be boys.” “You do you.” “I’m just being true to myself.” “I’m a [ family last name ] so I’m ______.” ( short-tempered, anxious, jealous, etc.) You get the idea. Your patient might ask himself, “Why did I behave so unpleasantly to my friend?” Whisper back, “Because you’re a Leo,” to one certain type of silly person, and, “because you’re just not a morning person,” to another. Never let them suspect that the problem is that they chose to sin . I miss true astrologers, those great magicians and stargazers of the past. Damning those souls took finesse and intellectual rigor. I can hardly believe we’ve devolved from sincere Zoroastrians to latte-sipping girls getting their horoscopes from Instagram, but we must work with what we have. You might wonder why these thought-terminating cliches are so effective, given how obviously bad they are as explanations of the world. The reason is that humans love explanations even if those explanations are false . Simply suggest, “You’re like that because… ” and they are hooked. Never forget that humans are designed to get their “because” from the Enemy. A consequence of their distance from him is that they are now desperate to find meaning – to find a “because” – for themselves anywhere they can. This makes our patients delightfully susceptible to whatever meaning we offer them. Show them a random scattering of dots and they’ll swear there’s a pattern. Built for the “because” of the Enemy, but exiled from his presence, they are susceptible to whatever explanations we present to them. Thought-terminating cliches are a petty, but delightful, consequence of this larger principle. Malevolently, Mulcifer

Most Useless of Devils, I find myself shocked at your ignorance of the most elementary principles of temptation theory. Are you a moron, or merely a convincing imitator? Simple vices, or, to give them a more benign label, “bad habits,” are foundational to the work of any worthy tempter. (Whether or not you are one remains to be seen.) Let me restate the obvious: stop bothering with any unrespectable or socially disliked vices. For instance, in your patient’s circles, bigotry and drunkenness are already out of fashion, so if you set about encouraging those vices you’ll be swimming against the current. Socially acceptable vices, of which every society has plenty, are the obvious choice. In the 1950s, I would have encouraged your patient toward three-martini lunches. Today, I’d emphasize two hours every evening on his phone. Instagram is clearly more addictive than liquor, and much better for our purposes. Booze lowers inhibitions (helpful), but it can also all too easily bring a person into joyous camaraderie (disastrous.) And hangovers are, effectively, built-in penance, an example of how the Enemy unfairly uses natural consequences to steer humans back towards what he cynically calls “the good life.” For our purposes, there are almost no bad ways to use a smartphone. Lust is an obvious point of attack; it is useful, albeit uninspired. I would focus on instilling a low, humming discontent. No one has ever experienced joy on social media. Lean into that. Parade more attractive, more successful, and more accomplished patients in front of your own. Of course, you need not find people who are sincerely happier; appearances are everything. For added spice, throw in a few offensive political diatribes and something shocking. The ideal social media session is sexually arousing, rage-inducing, and, in the final analysis, boring. The algorithms here are your friend. If you cannot learn these basic lessons you may soon be demoted to the mindless duty of stirring up anger at airports–something for which a demon’s assistance is scarcely required. Do not embarrass us further. In Frustration, Mulcifer

Naive Nephew, I wouldn’t be so happy that your patient is experiencing a period of deep grief. Sadness is a tricky thing. Sometimes it drives them away from the Enemy, but at other times low feelings can cause the patient to get closer to the Enemy. This we must prevent. The best approach is to give your patient the impression that it’s not very Christian to experience grief. Whisper a few verses of their precious “Scriptures” out of context and the patient will soon feel guilty when he experiences any negativity at all. You know the silly sort of thing I’m referring to: count it all joy , rejoice in your sufferings , and so on. Instagram and coffee mugs are usually full of the right stuff. Make him think his Christian duty is to perk up. Never let him meditate on the startling fact that the Enemy was called “the man of sorrows.” It pains me to remember it, but the Enemy wept for his dead friend Lazarus even after declaring that he would raise him from the dead. What irrational sentimentality. Jesus knew the story had a “happy” ending, but The Enemy has always been foolishly emotional about the pitiful little creatures. I was there when Jesus cried. To see him so clearly and fully and publicly human was, in a word, revolting . If I had not already made the judicious and practical choice to follow Our Father below, I would have done so that very moment. He “ugly cried” (as some of your patients would say) moments before raising a man from the dead. How disgustingly human . We want to twist the filthy little human creatures to our own ends, but the Enemy wants our patients to become more fully human: not only to laugh more deeply but also to cry more easily, until they stand stronger and freer and more alive than they can imagine. Never let your patient remember that Jesus did things like this often: weeping, then snatching a man from death, then laughing and drinking and feasting all night with his friends. Make him believe that Christians “grin and bear it” and count all sorrows as happy little joys and never cry out in pain on crosses or weep over the dead. With a little luck, you’ll make your patient less and less human and more and more “Christian” every day. Cheers, Mulcifer

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

My Dear Nephew Bilchly, Congratulations on your recent graduation. Soon, you will leave the warm halls of hell and join the legions of tempters on earth. Warping human souls is a proud family tradition. I confess to a certain nostalgia for my own happy days of harassing humans. As you start your career, keep one thing uppermost in your mind: you must not embarrass me . As Senior Undersecretary of Dark Technology, I am within striking distance of the top job. I cannot have a bumbling idiot of a nephew embarrassing me. My delightful demeanor remains, I assure you, conditional. Happy hunting, dear Nephew. Yours, Uncle Mulcifer

My Dearest Bilchly, I will begin by stating the obvious: you have not begun well. The fact that your patient has already joined a “bible study” (or “life group,” or whatever sad branding is now fashionable) is potentially calamitous. Particularly in that the other members of the group are, I shudder to report, sincerely pursuing the Enemy Above. As pathetic as these groups appear to us—the sniveling humans eating gluten-free snacks and half-confessing their most uninteresting sins—these circles do much damage to our cause. They transform patients from passive consumers to active conspirators. There is a silver lining, however. From one of your recent letters, I recall that your patient feels pressed for time. Good. The leader of the Bible study, I see from our records, suffers from an acute case of Christian tardiness. Christian tardiness: a useful phenomenon in which well-meaning leaders quietly abandon the concept of time, permitting sermons or discussions to extend indefinitely. A competent tempter can usually seduce pastors, and especially worship leaders, into letting their events overrun by, say, fifteen minutes. These leaders think they’re serving the Enemy Above. In reality they are most often drunk on their own eloquence. Back when I was a lowly tempter like you, one of my patients was a pastor. He had, as usual, exceeded his allotted time and was on the verge of concluding his sermon when I nudged him to expand on one of his less-inspired points. To my delight, he thought, “The Spirit is moving me to continue.” Delightful! A spirit was moving him. It happened to be me. The Sermon on the Mount (I shudder to remember it) lasted a bare fifteen minutes and then broke for snacks. But today, pastors heedlessly blabber on, believing themselves exempted from the most common-sense courtesies. How should you leverage Christian tardiness in your situation? I recommend the straightforward approach: make sure your patient is annoyed every week when the Bible study runs long. Remind him how reasonable his frustration is. A bit of watch-checking and a half-read email just before the start of the meeting will do wonders. Slowly make him dread meetings because he “knows” they’ll run late. Then, when he is quite tired, whisper to him that he could skip, just this once, so he can get to sleep. After all, they always run long. Eventually, a bit of Christian tardiness from his leader and a few lies from you might safely sweep him away from the group altogether. Expectantly Yours, Mulcifer

My Dearest Bilchly, One of your patients describes herself as “spiritual, but not religious”? Excellent. What an inspired little phrase. It’s the sort of lie that feels immediately plausible, a thought-terminating cliché. Of course, religion is simply the practice of spirituality. Separating the two is impossible. She might as well say she is “athletic but never works out.” What the dim little creatures mean is that they aren’t so unfashionable as to actually go to their churches or give up a vice in light of their beliefs. Indeed, by “spiritual, not religious,” they usually mean the very opposite: that their spirituality in no way gets in the way of their own impulses. At the same time, they remain under the illusion that they are somehow still associated with higher, spiritual things. This combination enables us to have our way with their impulses (has vague spirituality ever stopped someone from selfishness or gossip?) while at the same time giving us a neat little box to accommodate the occasional flashes of spiritual longing that all but the most deadened of the creatures experience. At the same time, this helpful little phrase appeals to our patients’ endless vanity. They love to seem “deep” and “interesting” to one another. (In fact, most of them would rather seem to be something desirable rather than be something desirable). In this way, being “spiritual” safely aids their tireless subconscious campaign for social acceptance. This is a promising start to your work with this patient. Keep her convinced she’s far too complex to involve herself in “organized religion.” In doing so, you will keep her far away from the Enemy’s camp. Delightedly Yours, Mulcifer

My Dear Nephew, You’re wasting your time. Pseudo-intellectual atheism only works on the really dumb humans. We have put enormous energy into the “new atheism”, with precious little in the way of results. The movement failed precisely because it tried to be intellectually rigorous. Hell can never have lasting victories on the battlefield of reason. Remember: truth, even in its flat syllogistic form, is from the Enemy, so any fair argument is dangerous. Never let an argument be fair. Your goal is simple: create a vague impression that “clever people like me” don’t believe in such things. Never let them examine the logic or (even worse) the historical record. Just let them see a clever Oxford don with distinguished gray hair say something confident about the idiocy of the church. Impressions, not syllogisms! Vibes, not curriculum vitae. But there is good news. If pure intellectual argument never drags a soul to hell, it rarely elevates a soul to heaven. Only encountering the Enemy can do that. Men don’t meet God in reason, except in the highest and headiest realms of pure mathematics. (I shudder at the rate at which we lose theoretical physicists). Even that loathsome bore Aquinas needed a raw encounter with The Enemy at the end. The real risk is rarely in a book full of ideas. The danger is in beauty and people. So by all means, fill his feed with all the pseudo-intellectual nonsense you can. But I’d much rather you try something useful like starting a fight with his mother or getting him addicted to sports betting. Your Uncle, Mulcifer

My Dear Nephew, You asked me how your patient might be led to avoid beauty. I was momentarily stunned by the intelligence of the question; but then I recalled that you are, despite the frequent evidence to the contrary, my relation. The good news is that the American church has given up on art. (Have you seen their movies?) No contemporary Christian art is dangerous. Let him wallow in Thomas Kinkade and whatever other Christian kitsch catches his fancy; pastel puritanism can do us no harm. Neither can critically acclaimed ‘fine’ art. They’ve chosen controversy over beauty so completely that the whole enterprise would collapse if it wasn’t such a convenient way to launder money. But I fear for the future of art. We’ve never been able to fully extinguish the humans’ instinctual desire for beauty. We’ve corrupted culture’s commanding heights, but the mob still thirsts for the sublime. Innocent rubes are making art for the joy of it, and I shudder to report that some of it isn’t bad. I fear that technology is undermining hell by democratizing the creation and distribution of art. Today, the only way to make a movie is to raise millions of dollars in Hollywood. That centralization makes our work easier. But when any fool with a computer can make a full movie in his basement, I’m afraid that we will see movies that don’t try to stuff hell’s best ideas down the throats of the masses. These truly independent movies could be - I shudder to consider it - good. But today, the oldest problem remains the most dangerous: nature. Don’t let your patient indulge in even a walk through the park, let alone a long weekend in the mountains. Make sure he sleeps through the sunrise and is trapped in a cubicle each sunset. I fear the change of leaves in the fall and the audacity of wildflower weeds in the spring. You can lose a soul to a single rose. Keep him glued to a screen. For now, at least, that is safe. Yours, Mulcifer

My Nephew Bilchly, I am concerned about your patient’s church. I reviewed some recent sermons and find very little to like. I believe it’s time to initiate a campaign targeting your patient’s pastor. Most of these so-called “pastors” got into their loathsome profession because for some undiscoverable reason they like people, and, more to our purposes, like being liked. This is an obvious opening. I once knew a demon who led a textbook campaign against the pastor of a small congregation. For two consecutive months, the demon enticed a different member of the church to send an angry, disappointed, or emotionally distraught email to the pastor after each sermon. Many were just a few lines with rampant misspellings. They still devastated the fool. Finally, the tempter had one of the congregants send an irate email to the entire church elder team, excluding the pastor himself. A delicious stroke! At last, the pastor enjoyed a Monday of peace, only to have the elders forward the message to him the next day. That pastor never spoke a hard truth from the pulpit again. He is now a mere prophet of the obvious, endlessly rehearsing only the safest universalities. I can report with satisfaction that we’ve also carried off most of his congregation since then. When the Enemy Above came to earth during that revolting little sideshow they call the “Incarnation,” his sermons were rarely crowd-pleasers. I am proud to report I personally stirred up the mob that nearly stoned him in Jerusalem. Why would pastors expect good reactions to their sermons? Have they met their congregants? What makes them think that repeating the Enemy’s absurdities (or “truths” as they call them) would be popular ? Pastors are responsible eternally for the souls in their congregation. One would think that this would be enough to drive them to ever-greater efforts for the spiritual edification of their flock. But no. We must remember that these time-bound creatures forget the stakes quite easily, even the spiritual “professionals.” With a flock of several hundred, it should be easy to find some tempter who is still capable of something as simple as enticing a nasty email out of his patient. Pastors everywhere should live in fear of their email inboxes on Mondays. That they do not is a sign of the general decline around us. Promptly become part of the solution, Bilchly. Yours, Mulcifer

My Dearest Bilchly, Your patient’s church is starting a sermon series on giving? Disappointing. A few weeks of emails like those discussed previously would have prevented this. But of course, tempters today are not what they used to be. It would be best to prevent your patient from giving at all, but that is probably a lost cause. Your patient is advanced enough in the ways of the Enemy that he is unlikely to hear a sermon on giving and then disobey in an obvious way. But if we cannot stop the actual disease of his “generosity,” we might at least inoculate him against real virtue. Two treatments come to mind. The first approach is to make sure the vain little creature makes a great external show of being generous. Charity auctions and public gifts are particularly useful here. The more public and noisy the giving, the better. The Enemy Above memorably lampooned this sort of behavior when he was on earth, but if your patient is as ignorant of scriptures as you’ve led me to believe, he may not know the dangers of letting his left hand know what the other is doing. The second approach is to entice him to make a great internal show of giving. If no actual crowd applauds him, he may yet applaud himself. This will make the act of giving emotional and painful for him, a grand and difficult gesture for which he sees himself an unsung hero, deserving of the public recognition he “selflessly forfeited.” This kind of occasional gift from the patient, given grandly, can give him the idea that he is generous when he is, in fact, quite the opposite. Make sure he checks that devious little box, “One-Time Gift,” on the form. Whisper the sweet word “philanthropist” in his ear when he writes the rare check. The ultimate danger lies in allowing your patient to develop a real heart of giving. Not just the habit of giving, but a genuine trust and dependence on the Enemy. If that happens, our cause is lost. I’ve damned men who thought themselves quite generous. They “gave so much to their families” by filling their homes with the trappings of wealth and success, but never gave away an amount of money that forced any real change in their lifestyles. I chuckle to think of them. Each of those greedy fools still warms my heart with hellfire. Unselfishly Yours, Uncle Mulcifer

My Dearest Bilchly, The “minor technical tricks” that you scoffed at in your last letter are the true essence of modern temptation. I love a good bewitching or possession as much as the next tempter, but you can’t expect your work to be so glamorous all the time. It is, after all, a fallen world. Your role is to nudge, to cajole, to redirect even a single degree. We rarely get the satisfaction of a large, sudden change. A hundred tiny compromises, a thousand microscopic injustices, ten thousand unrepented slights: these are what pull a modern soul down to hell. In this, technology is an ally. When I first became Senior Undersecretary of Dark Technology, I led a slew of successful programs to influence humanity at scale with just such small tortures. The smartphone (which I had no small hand in developing) was a once-in-a-career achievement. But as a true craftsman, I take more pride in the more subtle, exquisite little evils we have produced. Here are a few of my favorites: The infinite scroll. Consider the success of this invention: at this very moment, a million mothers ignore their infants and a million lovers miss eye contact. Friends don’t let silences ripen into camaraderie. All this because humans are pouring their lives en masse into endless scrolling inanities, eternally looking for the faintest titillation. The “reply-all” button. How much despair has been caused by this little innovation? How many embarrassing emails have been sent to everyone ? That I did not receive a Dark Nobel for this innovation mystifies me. The push notification. We have reduced a vast swathe of humanity to being mere tenders of notifications. They live in fear of missed emails and forgotten text messages. The result is beautiful: they prioritize red dots over relationships. If the trend continues, we’ll create a world in which most people live to create and consume notifications. The autoplay feature. Playing the next video automatically, albeit after a pro forma little countdown. How many hours of simple, precious sleep have we stolen? It warms my heart to see an entire nation become sleep deprived. No wonder they are all angry at each other. And oh, the things we are beginning to do with virtual reality—truly remarkable! Soon a patient without a pornography or social media addiction will be unheard of. But I shall leave boasting on that front to the future. You may be eternal, but you still must keep up with the times, Bilchly. Use technology to your advantage. Yours, Mulcifer

Young Bilchly, You convinced your subject to watch pornography simply because he was sexually aroused? Utterly unimaginative, and ultimately less effective. I concede that digital pornography may be the best thing to come out of the Infernal R&D department in the last century. It does, of course, gratify the simple delights of lust and, if you steered your patient well, at the same time opens the door to misogyny, racism, and violence. (And they call us devils.) Nonetheless, I can hardly think of a less creative way to exploit this technology than by simple sexual desire. An act of lust is a tasty little victory, but his heart is the real prize, my unimaginative nephew. It’s much better to tempt him to a pornographic binge when he’s not sexually aroused. Say, when he feels powerless, sad, lonely, unsuccessful, or uncertain. Then you can not only teach him all sorts of foolish things about sex, but you can do so when he really needs something else entirely, like a kind word from a friend. It turns out that guiding any patient (male or female matters little) toward pornography while sexually aroused is easy, and warps only their sexuality. But enticing the same person to pornography when they are experiencing some other form of emotional lack lets you truly begin to warp their soul. Do better, my dear nephew. At Your Service, Your Uncle Mulcifer

Dearest Bilchly, I cannot fathom how you are struggling in this environment. It’s election season, Our Father be praised. If you can’t work your subject into a near-constant state of sin during an election, you’re as useless as the human politicians. The key is to replace people with politics . Convince him that his vote on social security and abortion matters more than what he’s actually doing to care for widows and orphans. (I once got a subject so busy tweeting about welfare policy that he stopped serving at the local soup kitchen. Exquisite.) Destroying human connection is the first step in sowing political division. Why do you think we’ve worked so hard to make bowling leagues and rotary clubs a thing of the past? Do you think front porches disappeared by accident? Remember: isolate, isolate, isolate. You want your voice to be the only one whispering in your patient’s ear. I’m disheartened (though not surprised) that you asked me which party you should push him towards. I couldn’t care less. I’ve damned everyone from royalists to anarchists. The important thing is to inculcate self-righteous tribalism. Encourage your subject to believe that the other group is evil, foolish, benighted, and (when times are particularly good) subhuman . The best work you can do with politics is in the family. We’ve been so successful at sorting friendships by income and subculture that almost no patient has any friends who seriously disagree with them about politics anymore. That means that dinner parties among friends are quite useless for our purposes. Family dinners, however, are another matter entirely. Plan ahead with the tempters of your subject’s family. Unbearably opinionated text messages in the family group text are an excellent appetizer. Then, when they gather, induce a bit of indigestion and a rude regurgitation of a talking point from cable news and you’ll be well on your way to destroying a family. Yours Infernally, Mulcifer