My dear Blankweed,
We’ve
spent enough time for now considering how to manage your patient while she’s
visiting the Enemy’s camp. It is equally important that we focus our efforts on
other aspects of her life, because these will also influence whether she
returns to church and what she does while she’s there. There are many paths we might explore here,
but let’s start with the bigger picture.
Your patient is, I see from the details of
the dossier, middle class, well educated, and reasonably affluent. Furthermore,
she’s married, with a family, and she’s at a critical point in her career. Because of the latter point, there is
pressure on her in terms of time, levels of achievement, and also, oddly
enough, in terms of appearance – by which I mean her own physical appearance
(right clothes, right grooming) and the appearance of her lifestyle.
There is an important distinction to be
made between a life and a lifestyle. The life of an individual is experienced
moment by moment by the individual themselves: waking up in the morning and feeling
the warmth of the bed and the light through the curtains , deciding whether to
get out of bed or not, looking out of the window to observe the weather,
heading to the bathroom and so on. A life, as it is lived, is experienced in
the present. And the present, as you know, intersects with eternity in ways
that present specific dangers. And the Enemy wants his creatures to focus on
their life, this present moment. We
have not yet managed to create life as such, but we have managed something better:
the illusion of a lifestyle. This is a particular condition, experienced only
by the educated and wealthy, and it is entirely our own invention, and a very
successful invention at that.
While a life is experienced by an
individual in the present, a lifestyle is designed to be seen by others. When a human focuses on their “lifestyle”
they focus on something – a home, a piece of clothing or furniture, - as it
will be viewed and valued by other people. Let me give you an example. Imagine
two women planning new kitchens for their homes. The first woman, focusing on
her life, will view the kitchen by her own values: she will ask questions of
herself such as will it be functional, will it be beautiful (according to how I
view beauty), will it be fun for my family to cook and eat in? Whereas the
second woman, who is viewing a new kitchen through the lens of a lifestyle ,
will primarily concern herself with whether it will be admired by others. The former may talk about “my beautiful
kitchen” but the latter will talk about “my bespoke kitchen”.
Tempting her to the perfect, stress-free lifestyle
We develop ideas about lifestyle primarily
through the media and advertising, although the idea of a lifestyle is
contagious, that is, it can be passed from one person to another like a virus
through envy or greed. Magazines are
most useful in developing the idea of a lifestyle: we encourage the editors to paint images of
celebrities and their lifestyles, eg women who “have it all” – handsome
successful husbands, beautiful children, large homes, fashionable clothes from
the “right” shops or designers, “fairy tale weddings”, and their own businesses
or endorsements. Critical to these images are photographs, which showcase the
celebrities and their perfect lifestyles.
Of course these photographs present a false image: we don’t see pictures of such celebrities
screaming at their cook or nanny, weeping with tiredness, or throwing heavy vases at the handsome
husband who has come home to the
beautiful house late from the office again.
Instead the celebrity is beautifully presented, as designed by a team of
the magazine staff, placed in a carefully designed context, and posed in a position of perfect happiness.
You’d think, even with their minuscule
intelligence, that they’d see through it, and at some level they do. They know that no life is so simple or
perfect, and that such an image is false, transitory and cannot be developed
without a large staff. But these images are insidious – and of course they
present wonderful material for us to work with. Because we can suggest, over
time, gently, that they too should look like this (even though they haven’t got
the money, the staff or the time) and have a lifestyle like this.
We can also lean in heavily with less
obvious images. “Lifestyle” magazines present ways to develop your house to
present a particular look. Advertisements show images of ideal children
perfectly behaved and manicured, or women or families who look a particular
way. Real estate agents design house advertisements as providing a lifestyle
(“buy the house/clothes/accessories and buy the lifestyle” is the line we train
them to take). Of course, once they buy
the house, the clothes, the accessories, or the art work and first editions if
they’re the arty types, or the gym gear or fishing rods if they’re sporty
types, they find that the lifestyle does not automatically arrive with it (and
indeed it can’t, because it’s pure illusion). You’d think they’d wake up then,
but this is where we do our best work:
we suggest simply that they haven’t got the right house/clothes/accessories,
and so the whole cycle of spending starts again.
I’ve known humans who have bankrupted their
families in pursuit of a lifestyle. I’ve
seen children ground down with the weight of parental expectations that they
conform to images in the media, or confined to a small space in front of a
television because they’re not allowed to play in any of the carefully designed
rooms in their own home. I’ve seen
spouses of both sexes sink into depression or commit suicide because they can’t
provide or live up to the lifestyle expectations of their partners or parents -
or even children. We’re so lucky in our
work, Blankweed – we can have such fun! We have them chasing mirages, one
mirage after another, and, handled carefully, they don’t wake up until their
final moment when all mirages are seen for what they truly are.
Even the Enemy’s followers can be lured
into the temptation of a lifestyle.
Christian bookshops and television programmes love to present images of
the perfect life led by those who commit themselves to the Enemy’s service.
Look around the average Christian bookstore and you’ll see shining images on
the book covers of broad-shouldered,
suited men, with thick hair and dazzling smiles, with an arm around a woman with perfectly
groomed hair and face, and five perfect,
clean children. Read the inside covers and you’ll find that the men are heads
of large corporations, the women homeschooling their five perfect children
(plus three adopted from orphanages abroad), while managing a small business
successful enough to support a staff of 10 happy workers. Turn to the Enemy, these books imply, and
your life will be transformed: your teeth will straighten, your husband become
successful, your children become model citizens who never answer back, and you
will be imbued with super-human abilities. Quelle rire! Not
only is this a mirage, but in this way we transform turning to the Enemy into
nothing more than a means to an end. He’s not very keen on that.
In some ways you could call this obsession
with lifestyle greed or envy or vanity, but it’s more subtle than that. It
feeds on greed and envy, but patients are generally aware of those emotions,
and do not rate them highly, and so are in danger of resisting them. But with the lifestyle mirage they won’t even
be aware of the danger they’re in. I’ve
known men who consider themselves honourable, virtuous, and kind, who
nevertheless ruin their families and their lives in pursuit of a lifestyle.
Now, your patient, because of her class, is
eminently suited to these kinds of temptations. The poor are generally not so
vulnerable because they’re too busy keeping a life together (though we’re
working on it). And oddly enough the long-term wealthy are not so vulnerable to
it either, because, able to buy anything they want, they become aware of the
true value of possessions. But those who
are rich enough to have all they need but not all they want are perfectly
positioned for the temptation to aspire to a lifestyle.
Tempt her with the country cottage lifestyle...
What we need to decide, then, is what kind
of “lifestyle” is your patient most vulnerable to? She lives on the outskirts
of a small town: is she therefore the type to hanker after the lifestyle
cottage, with designer gumboots at the
door, a springer spaniel by her side,
and a country kitchen? Or can she
be tempted to turn her house into a small art depository or antiques museum?
Can we feed her the superwoman myth: the image of a woman, dressed in a perfect
suit who waves goodbye to her perfectly manicured children in the morning,
manages her brilliant career during the day, and then comes home to nurture her
family with homemade bread and soup and apple pie made with apples from her own
garden?
Or maybe she's more vulnerable to the Superwoman myth?
Ferret out her dream, Blankweed,
and then feed it with magazines and reality TV programmes. In such a way we can encourage her to look
with distaste at her home, her furniture,
her clothes, her children and partner, and even her own image in the
mirror – even though these things are, by the standards of most of the world,
pleasing and desirable as they are. We
can encourage her to spend more than she can afford on things she doesn’t need,
sow discord with her partner who may not share the same lifestyle dream (even
better if he has a different lifestyle dream of his own!), and establish a
pattern of hope and despair , and a growing bitterness, that will leave her
with little time or energy to pursue her temporary, half-hearted interest in
the Enemy.
Concentrate, Blankweed – and enjoy the
game!
Your affectionate friend
Screwtape.
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