A Screwtape Letter

Dear Wormwood:
I am very pleased indeed by what you tell me in your last correspondence about your patient’s recent discovery of the ease of bribes.  You chalk up the incident to minor progress, but Our Father below is very encouraged.  You see, once the patient justifies a small bribe to make their life a bit more comfortable, he is that much closer to the complacency which allows him to fill his life with many more- and this only strengthens the incentives for those “enforcers of justice” he pays to inch further from their jobs.  And as I told you before, it is not the major sins such as murder or rape that win us the most souls, it is actually the partaking in the small temptations over time that fuels our victory over the Enemy.

I urge you to continue infusing opportunities “to pay someone off” to get rid of the uncomfortable pin pricks and exhausting bureaucratic barriers in life that you learned in our Tempter’s Training Programme.  Those will eventually erode away at the patient’s patience until he gives in and gets comfortable with using his wealth to buy his way out of any problem or any sense of accountability.

Don’t underestimate the power in this.  It is even better to hear that he is an ex-pat in this country and can blame the situation on having no other choice in this “graft infested Africa.”  His birth privileges and wealth mean that he can exploit someone else’s system run by poorly trained, poorly compensated humans with unstable work paths.  Its perfect, Wormwood- you are making good progress –evidenced by how you were whispering in your patient’s ear when he slipped the traffic cop 100 shillings to let him continue driving after racing through the school zone.  And again when he slipped the government official in the immigration office 200 dollars to “move things along at a proper pace.”  Or even when he paid the doctor to take care of his sister before attending to the sick people who had been waiting there for four days to be seen.  And when he laughed with his American friend who paid the security guard “to look the other way” in that drunken incident in town last week.

All small things which in his mind seem to be harmful to no one.

Your patient was so engulfed by the nagging demands of the superficial world, that he dismissed the rather large snowballing impact of these small little bribes- writing each off as one little foul that would make life smoother- and rushing back to the “oh so vital” hussle and bussle that he won’t even remember a month from now.

So, my dear nephew, stay strong because it is working.  You see, we know this from the community mobs who tried to burn Ben alive written about in Keely Stevenson’s blog titled, “Justice Like a Hot Dog,” and we see further proof in Transparency International’s latest global survey of attitudes towards corruption.  The report reveals that in more than 25 countries, at least one in 10 households had to pay a bribe to get access to justice.  People are losing hope in their fellow human beings and suffering greatly. 

And I just heard from Triptweeze that his patient, the one who has been operating that tiny kiosk shop after her husband died of malaria....well, she feeds her five kids from the $2 per day of shop income, and had to close her shop because the police were getting bribes from everyone as a “protection fee” on the street and she couldn’t afford to pay them anymore.  She is now so desperate to feed her children that she is talking with her cousin about becoming a prostitute.

Your patient is really helping us and he doesn’t even realize it!.  It is as if a silent revolution is occurring and the system of corruption- even the small stuff- fuels a better road to “Our Father” than ever.

Now I am not talking about breaking those “unjust laws” spoken about by one of the Enemy’s greatest wins, MLK, but in fact those who are breaking the "just laws" and paying their way out of it—those are where we find victory.  I could show you a pretty cageful down here.

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

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This letter was inspired by recent frustrations at ex-pats in developing countries using bribes to make their lives easier as well as a literary masterpiece given to me by my friend Sarah Caddick.  First published in 1941, C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters is a satirical account of human life through the letters of Screwtape, a highly ranked assistant to the devil.  He writes to his nephew, Wormwood, advising on the best methods to sway his “Patient” (a young human) to damnation.  Demonstrating a subtle battle between good and evil to win over human souls, the letters bring to life the psychology of temptation through the Patient’s experiences with war, sex, gluttony, and greed.  Luckily, in the end, good wins out and the Patient goes to heaven.