Screwtape+Proposes+a+Toast

"...it would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality...Oh to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler!...It warmed your innards when you'd got it down...Instead of this, what have we had tonight?...a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realising that he was corrupt, and chiefly because everyone else did it..."

"Consider, first, the mere quantity. The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls in more abundance...We are tempted to say that such souls...are hardly worth damning. yes, but the Enemy...thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did."  "To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of 'too much.' For then, of course, all would possibly have been lost. They might have seen; they might have repented."  "There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about //individual// temptation at all, except for the few."  "//Democracy// is the word with which you must lead them by the nose...You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power...You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men //are// equal."  "As a result you can use the word //Democracy// to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings...The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say //I'm as good as you//...induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid resounding lie...I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says //I'm as good as you// believes it. He would not say it if he did."  "[One could] actually draw back from it for fear of being //undemocratic//. I am credibly informed that young humans now sometimes suppress an incipient taste for classical music or good literature because it might prevent their Being like Folks...They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals."  "But now 'democracy' can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks."  "An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a //trauma//...by being left behind."  "All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by 'religion' ever vanishes from the Earth...Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar."