Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

For the last couple of years since the coordinated birdemic-peck program was launched, it has become obvious that we live in a totalitarian world - therefore an evil world; and the nature of this evil is increasingly extreme (as must and will happen when evil dominates - evil feeds-upon itself).Why, then, do not the world-ruling evil powers not just get-on-with-it and launch a world war? ...Considering that so many of the political, media, bureaucratic and corporate leaders are obviously so very keen on the idea. The Global Establishment could easily start a war at any time, if they really wanted. So why don't they? 
Of course, it may well happen, and may happen today; given the way that the large and strong elements within the Western powers are incrementally provoking and escalating the situation - indeed, there is already more than sufficient reason, and has been for several weeks. But this merely emphasizes that we need to understand why it has not already happened. Given the evil of the Global Establishment; why are we still at a stage of restrained and localized conflict, of proxy war - of remote and deniable actions rather than explicit, direct unrestrained aggressive interventions? Surely - we may think - a world war would be the best possible way to promote evil and the damnation of Men in vast numbers? If so; why the restraint? The global leadership class are not at all 'restrained' in their other coercive behaviors - so why should they be restrained when it comes to war?   The outline answer is, I believe, given in that wise book by CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, an experienced chief devil, writes to a junior demon concerning the outbreak of the Second World War (the following excerpt has been edited by me). Notice that Screwtape exemplifies the inverted-value system that are shared by our current world leadership - what Screwtape regards as positive and desirable, Christians regard as evil - and vice versa. 
You say you are “delirious with joy” because the European humans have started another of their wars. I see very well what has happened to you. You are not delirious; you are only drunk. For the first time in your career you have tasted that wine which is the reward of all our labours—the anguish and bewilderment of a human soul—and it has gone to your head...
I must warn you not to hope too much from a war. Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? The Enemy [God], true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalise and torment us. Because, war has certain tendencies inherent in it which are, in themselves, by no means in our favour. 
We may hope for a good deal of cruelty and unchastity. But, if we are not careful, we shall see thousands turning in this tribulation to the Enemy [God], while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self. I know that the Enemy [God] disapproves many of these causes. But that is where He is so unfair. He often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He thinks bad on the monstrously sophistical ground that the humans thought them good and were following the best they knew. 
Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of God's party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! 
And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever. God’s human partisans have all been plainly told by Him that suffering is an essential part of what He calls Redemption; so that a faith which is destroyed by a war or a pestilence cannot really have been worth the trouble of destroying. 
So, Lewis's impersonation of the devil Screwtape provides an insight as to why (probably, plausibly) the evil strategists of the Global Establishment have, so far, reined-in the impatient and lustful clamour of lower-level demons and sadistic humans among national politicians and in the mass media - those who see no further than gratifying their own state of delirious delight at the prospect of massive human aggression and misery. After all, the real and causal war is spiritual - not physical - as the senior devils well-know; and the cause of evil in the spiritual war may (as Screwtape explains) substantially be set back by a global and physical war. War may encourage net spiritual Good. It is likely that the high-level strategists of evil greatly prefer the current faked, proxy, manipulated media-war - promoted to The West as infotainment, and a novelty 'crusade'; an opportunity for spitefulness to masquerade as principle, virtue-signalling to pretend to boldness, and servile credulity to suppose itself wise. 
High-level Strategists of evil therefore prefer to avoid, if possible, the spiritual dangers of a war in which courage is en-couraged, and where personal experience of existential (not virtual) realities might awaken masses of people to the truths of this world, and the next. As Screwtape said: In war not even a human can believe he is going to live forever. Yet the demonic strategists are themselves very keen on inflicting extreme and widespread human misery; and at any point may prove unable to resist for longer the pressing temptations of short-term, selfish indulgence attainable from unleashing chaotic evil. 
In the long-term; the short-term will sooner-or-later prevail.