I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands -- but nevertheless, I found it impossible to resist publishing this hellacious dialogue between an important Undersecretary in hell, Screwtape, and his nephew Wormwood, a less-than-competent junior tempter.

E-Mail Message One

My Dear Wormwood,

After your last fiasco, I am frankly surprised that certain individuals in the lowerarchy have seen fit to hand you another assignment. Despite the best counsel, your egregious errors led to the loss of your patient’s soul to the enemy.

Let us hope those fifty years you spent at the House of Corrections for Junior Tempters (even as it is currently organised and managed by Slubgob) have finally taught you something about the fine art of temptation -- and the painful consequences of failure.

Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape

E-Mail Message Two

My Dear Wormwood,

I note with pleasure the truly excellent progress you are making with respect to your patient’s personal computing habits. I refer specifically to his tendency to copy software, rather than purchase it outright. I must say you have surprised me, and I feel rather embarrassed at my earlier lack of faith in you.

Perhaps you really have changed.

Through your earnest efforts, you have apparently persuaded your patient that the software piracy in which he is regularly engaged is a legitimate and even praiseworthy habit. And of course, you have done this by marshaling all the usual arguments -- entirely fallacious, though they may be -- and shielding him from the naked truth of the matter.

This truth, while as obvious to you and I as the nose on your patient’s face, must, ideally, remain invisible to him. The truth being, of course, that copying software is just as dishonorable and illegal as breaking into a computer store at night and stealing the disks -- or, for that matter, stealing anything of comparable value to the copied software -- including, yes Wormwood, money itself.

We are aided in our efforts by the fact that your patient is engaged in the regular, wholesale theft of computer code, rather than tangible, physical, material objects. The rather primitive brain structure of your patient -- and of the hairless bipeds in general -- leads them rather handily towards these types of erroneous judgments.

Viz., their usual way of thinking is to believe that anything in physical form tends to have value (regardless of how cheap and shoddy it may actually be); and conversely, anything that exists solely in non-physical or non-material form tends to be thought of as having little or no value -- if, indeed, it is recognized as existing at all.

Of course, this general inclination towards crass materialism should be vigorously encouraged whenever possible, since the benefits to us go well beyond those of mere computer piracy. In fact, they strike at the very heart and soul of spirituality itself: our primary centre of interest.

To the extent we can convince your patient that materialism is what really counts, we can get him to turn away from the spiritual life entirely and become the very grossest and most desirable (from our point of view) materialist -- an entirely left-brained, two-dimensional, faithless, skeptical, "I’ll believe it when I see it" type of human being -- the type of person we really like to have with us down here in Hades.

These human types make great sport, and the pleasures we derive from seeing them "wake up" to the truth of existence -- when it is entirely too late for them -- well, let me just say that those pleasures are, for us, what make life worth living.

Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape

Screwtape Revealed!

E-Mail Message Three

My Dear Wormwood,

I might have suspected it, Wormwood -- a setback.

You must know by now that the proper procedure to employ when you patient has begun the act of illegally copying software is to encourage him to click his mouse quickly and mindlessly through the various setup screens, hitting "Yes" and "O.K." and "Continue" without giving the process in which he is engaged a second thought.

By so doing, you can ensure that he will also breeze through the screens which warn about the penalties of copying software -- and, worse, the many compelling reasons why, all penalties aside, he shouldn’t be doing it anyway.

You should have worked harder, Wormwood, to distract your patient at this critical time in the installation process -- filling his head with thoughts about anything -- pretty girls, lazy days in the sun, the upcoming weekend, newer and faster computers, whatever it takes.

The very last thing you wanted your patient to do was to pay any attention to, or hell forbid, READ those warning screens. But that is exactly what happened, Wormwood, and it is something you should have prevented at all costs -- because, for a heartbeat or two anyhow, your man actually became concerned that perhaps he was doing something wrong!

I must say, however, that you recovered from the situation nicely by creating in your patient’s mind an allusion to the FBI warning which appears at the beginning of every rented videotape. Since this warning is almost universally ignored, and even joked about, your patient made the short mental leap you wanted him to make, concluding that all this copying business really was trivial nonsense, and could be ignored in the same way the humans ignore those videotape warnings.

Now Wormwood, I do not wish you to get a big head, but I must say -- I especially liked the artful aside you tossed in by evoking heady memories of your patient’s student radical days at Berkeley, a time when his anti-authoritarian fervor was at a peak.

In this nostalgic yet rigid and righteous frame of mind, he was bound to dismiss, out of hand, any and all admonitions to act in a certain way -- any way! -- even if that way was demonstrably and inarguably honest, fair, responsible, and worthwhile.

Thanks to your efforts, Wormwood, your man proceeded, blithely, to install fourteen software diskettes: a bootlegged copy of Microsoft Office 95, currently valued at approximately five hundred of the humans’ American dollars. Had he been caught stealing $ 500 from his local convenience store, he might have spent time in prison -- or even been shot to death by an overzealous policeman in the act of committing this crime.

But alas, Wormwood, we must be content with our victories, however small they may seem to us, and however infrequently they may arrive.

Keep up the good work.

Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape

E-Mail Message Four

My Dear Wormwood,

I suspect, like myself, you find it especially humorous when the humans talk about their so-called "information age." Of course, they do have some concept of the value of information, just as a chimpanzee, for example, might be said to be a "tool-using animal" were he to grab a stick and use it to roust some ants out of their hill for an afternoon meal!

True mastery of information, however, is something that very few humans have been able to manage. This shortcoming derives because of their highly-useful tendency to confuse what they want to believe with what is right, true, fair, or best.

There was a time in their history when the humans were far better than they are today at submitting to the rigors and discipline of adherence to certain codes of behavior. This highly-desirable turn of events is largely the fruit of our labours.

However, there is still much work remaining before we will be able to rest secure in the knowledge that the humans can be trusted to act, without our incessant intervention, in an entirely irresponsible, egoistic, and self-absorbed manner.

That is why "ceaseless vigilance" should be your watchwoods, Wormword -- I mean, your watchwords, Wormwood.

Your Affectionate Uncle, Screwtape

E-Mail Message Five

My dear, my very, very dear, dear Wormwood:

A most fascinating and disturbing event occurred yesterday, an event which, I am not surprised to say, you were not present to witness.

It appears that you were engaged in a game of "capture the soul" with some of your former cellmates from the House of Corrections for Incompetent Tempters -- a source of comradeship which, I am happy to report, you will soon have the pleasure of reexperiencing.

While you were playing at this sophomoric betting game, your patient was exposed to a source of information which you should never have allowed him to see. He was at his local cafe and magazine shop, and wandered over to the personal computing section.

There was no real danger in this, of course; for the section is filled with magazines which more often than not, reflect intense (indeed, inexorable) advertising and commercial interests, editorial and computer industry politics (both internal and external), and a desire to entertain everyone and offend no one, on a mass scale.

These publications present a gilt-edged, rose-coloured, artificial (or synthetic) view of the realities of personal computing and personal computing products. Their glossy pages and upbeat tone reflect an almost total lack of editorial objectivity and honesty, as well as one of our favourite human failings, a lack of personal integrity and courage on the part of the writers, editors, advertisers, and publishers.

You know and I know that real computing professionals do not read these magazines for editorial or subjective content (for this content is usually dubious and untrustworthy), but merely for news of objective events and pieces of useful, concrete information related to people and products in the business -- you know, bug fixes, new releases, lists of features and capabilities, announcement dates, web addresses, telephone numbers, and so on.

Only in these objective areas can these magazines be trusted; otherwise, they are very unreliable -- or you might say, from our particular point of view, very reliable indeed.

By way of example, the industry giant, PC Magazine, was recently purchased by a Japanese Publisher known for its extremely close and some might say "unholy" ties to the Japanese computer industry.

This company, now massively in debt thanks to the PC Magazine acquisition, publishes what, in its native country, are known as "shopping magazines," publications which sit cheek-by-jowl with the cash register, like so many copies of The National Inquirer or Reader’s Digest.

These computer shopping tabloids contain comprehensive lists of new hardware and software products (and again, for that, they are helpful), along with glowing, perennially positive descriptions and reviews of even the most second-rate hunks of silicon and careless collections of computer code. They are nothing more or less than sales tools – promotional literature for the industry.

Readers of the Japanese edition of PC Magazine, for example, would be surprised to know that the editorial copy they are perusing has been ruthlessly censored; many derogatory comments related to the quality or performance of certain products have been excised.

In this particular reality (which I find wholly admirable, for its fundamental lack of truth), there is no such thing as, for example, an NEC Multisynch Video Monitor that is less than perfect, or an Okidata dot matrix printer that would not make a splendid addition to a reader’s home or office.

It is that delightful Russian Communist Credo, "We Don’t Make Mistakes," all over again.

Of course, this censorship happens continuously, on a more subtle and pervasive (if invisible) level, in the American Computer Press as well, for reasons of commercial and other interests that are as old as we are, Wormwood. Or, almost as old.

Now all this is well and good, and had you not been engaged in the process of fiddling while Rome burned, you would have been there to ensure that your patient’s eyes and hands remained in contact with these admirably "safe" publications.

Unfortunately, due to your negligence, your patient’s eyes fell instead upon a cheaply-printed, hand-spun personal computer "’zine" known as "Guru Views." This low-budget, shoddily-crafted, laser-printed tome (the paper is too cheap, even, to justify calling it a "rag") contains dreadful truths and a degree of candour which, from our perspective, is extremely dangerous, tending as it does to lead readers into manners of thought, analysis, and action which we vigorously oppose, and which, as is the nature of these things, do not remain safely contained in the personal computing arena, but which, if left unchecked, can spill over or spread into other areas of life, with deeply undesirable results.

Now mind you, Wormwood, it is not that any of the opinions expressed in this "Guru Views" are, by themselves, particularly noteworthy, important, or even intelligent -- they are not. The same goes for many (although gratefully not all) of these so-called "’zines."

It is more the attitude, or the tone of these publications, that worries us. They are, you might say, revolutionary in the true sense of the word, because they advocate sudden, dramatic, fundamental change in the service of personal freedom, whereby so-called "alternative" publications like "Wired" are actually counter-revolutionary -- or, you might say, reactionary wolves in revolutionary sheep’s clothing. Their true goal is to enslave, not to liberate, their readers.

As you know, Wormwood, the "Wireds" of yesterday are the "PC Magazines" of today and the computer shopping tabloids of tomorrow. That is one great advantage of being old souls -- we tend naturally to take the long view of things, and thanks to our unceasing efforts (combined with ordinary human short-sightedness) the long view tends almost always to act in our favor.

Which brings me finally, Wormwood, to the disposition of your case, a case for which, you might say, taking the long view will be your only alternative.

Uncurtailed curiosity having gotten the better of him, your patient actually shelled out five good dollars for that despicable Guru Views publication, took it home, and (thanks to a deplorable breakdown in our communications network, caused, it appears, by the direct intervention of the enemy), found himself in sole possession of a two-hour slot of uninterrupted time.

He used this time to read Guru Views, and found an article on software piracy, which somehow managed to speak directly to his sense of right and wrong. Like most of the humans, his moral sense is usually in a kind of anesthetized or sleeping state, but not, regrettably, dead. It is a sense that we are extremely good at numbing, but only rarely successful at killing.

Anyway, his moral sense stirred, and what happened next, Wormwood -- why, it makes me furious to recount it. The human vermin ran to his local computer store and wrote a check -- a good check, Wormwood! -- for more than $ 500, and became, by hell, the licensed owner of his very own copy of Microsoft Office 95! And when he got home, damn it, he erased all the bootlegged disks he had made for himself, and replaced them with legitimate backup copies of the disks that were now, by law and right, his own!

Of course, it is not too late for your patient, Wormwood -- he is still in possession of many habits of thought, body, and action which tend in our favor. But I am pleased to report that certain powers in the lowerarchy have chosen to remove you from this particular assignment.

I have enclosed for your amusement a new, updated brochure describing the latest addition to the House of Corrections for Incompetent Tempters. I refer you specifically to the recently-opened Screwtape Memorial Behavior Modification Rooms, Remedial Punishment Chambers, and Recreational Dining Hall, the profusely-illustrated descriptions of which I believe you will find particularly engrossing.

The facilities are staffed round-the-clock by experienced and persistent professionals who have had an extremely high success rate in extracting necessary improvements to the performance of incompetent tempters such as yourself, Wormwood. And you will be pleased to know that, in my continual and unswerving devotion to you, my favorite remaining nephew, I have generously volunteered to manage these facilities for Slubgob on a regular basis.

Therefore, there is no need for me to say good-bye, Wormwood, for I dare say we will be seeing quite a bit of each other in the upcoming weeks -- while there is still enough of you remaining for me to see, that is. In all honesty, I greatly look forward to the undoubtedly delicious and satisfying time we will spend together in the dining hall.

Rather than bid you adieu, Wormwood, I will simply say "Bon Appetit."

Your increasingly and ravenously affectionate Uncle, Screwtape.