Sorry, I hope I did not sound all “Holier-than-Thou,” If I did I regret it.
My dear Wormwood,
In another thread, one poster said that
This is a common notion among human beings: that sin goes hand-in-hand with fun; that the way to avoid sin is to avoid pleasure; even, in its most extreme form, that sin is equated with fun, pleasure or enjoyment.
This notion is to be encouraged.
For one thing, it will cause people to discount any real and proper admonitions against morally harmful or dangerous behavior by saying, “They just don’t want me to have any fun.” Like the toddler wants to get into the knife drawer, the child who wants to play with fireworks, or the teenager who wants to go out drinking with the men she met last night, but are forbidden to by their parents, they don’t understand why they are forbidden to do these things and childishly assume that their parents are trying to spoil their fun.
In others, this fun-denial will have a quite different, but even more delightful, effect. With the help of envy, pride, timidity, or sloth, we can get such people to abstain from all fun themselves, and to look down upon, and feel superior to, those who indulge in even the most innocent and harmless of pleasurable activities. We thus accomplish several purposes. We drive a wedge between the fun-havers and the abstainers. We make the abstainers’ lives miserable and dreary. And we promote in them that feeling of self-righteousness and moral superiority that is one of Our Father Below’s most useful tools.
I would be remiss not to point out, however, that fun and pleasure can be very useful to our side, as the poster above has alluded to. We can indeed use fun and pleasure themselves, or the promise of fun and pleasure, to distract them from the Enemy and from the matters the Enemy wants them to devote themselves to. Of course, sexual pleasure is very effective in this capacity, but so can virtually any other thing be, provided we develop it to the level of an obsession, a compulsion, or an addiction. We can then bring them to the point where this obsession affords very little real pleasure, especially compared to the pain and discomfort they feel when they fail to feed it, and to all the other pleasures they will be missing out on in their single-minded focus on their addiction. By this point, they are well on their way to being safely in our hands, for they cannot serve the Enemy if they have another master.
Whatever you do, never miss an opportunity to associate Fun and Excitement with Our Side in people’s minds, and Dreariness and Sterility with the Enemy’s. This is good PR, and need not have any connection to reality to be effective.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape.
Enlightened self interest ?
Personally, I’ve always just used “envy” to mean the healthy version, and “jealousy” to refer to the destructive version; a personal definition as far as I know.
Only if one does it right.
I’m flattered! That may be my first cross-thread quoting.
Your suggestions are good, although I am suspicious of your suggestion to associate Fun and Excitement with our side. That may work for some pagan cults, but they die out pretty quickly as satiation and boredom set in, don’t they? No, it’s far better to emphasize that fun is evil, so that we can cultivate that most useful of emotions: guilt. Guilt is good because it convinces the person that they are broken; we can then position ourselves as the ‘cure’ to this, and since the guilt would be nigh-unending, we can leverage this to trap them to our side for prolonged lengths of time.
An additional positive side effect of criminalizing fun will be that in a certain percentage of those so instructed, it will actually adjust their perception of what is fun, so that instead of liking to do entertaining things, they actually prefer to do whichever limited set of dull practices and rituals we provide for them. This has the dual positive effects of locking them to us, as the only providers of some of these rituals (though one has to beware of copycat organizations here), and also of allowing us to mold their behaviour into something we can then sell as being positive for persons and individuals to be, and thereby stimulate public support and enrollment in our organization. Many people prefer to have quiet, understated, and suppressed people for their neighbors, after all; it’s a saleable image.
As a third potential benefit, if you can convince them that “service” or “obedience” is a fun or good thing, then you can enlist them to fulfil menial and low roles in your organization, where otherwise you might have to spend money on actual employees. Additionally this dedication to self-subjuction can be leveraged either in service projects to increase goodwill towards us from the community, or to fill the rolls of fighters on the more militant fronts of the organization, such as the suppression of rights to or actual elimination of the Enemy. (Though, an additional afterlife angle will likely be necessary to push your followers to the point of dying for you.)
As you can see, this is a win-win situation. I feel it much more likely to be successful than the risky association of your organization itself with fun. That dilutes the image, after all; better to send an unmixed message.
With the exception of greed and envy I’d say all the rest were pretty pleasurable in and of themselves.
Ever had oreo cheesecake? I think that right there is the answer.
Thank you all for the thoughtful and well-written replies.
As an atheist, I don’t attach any significance to the word “sin.” And even if I did, I wouldn’t call most of those activities sinful. Most of them can produce quite a lot of pleasure.
So if they produce no pleasure, why would anyone do them? Because the devil has tricked them into thinking that they’re fun? But real pleasure is loving god and going to church? “The Screwtape Letters” always struck me as pretty dorky–a book about how being evil isn’t actually cool, yawn. It still does, on second thought. If snorting blow off hookers isn’t true pleasure, then I don’t want to know what is.
Why do people smoke? There is little pleasure in it. I suppose sin is much the same.
Most of my ex smoker friends would beg to differ about that.
I mean, you don’t necessarily have to be addicted to sex to find the pleasure in lust. If I decide to spend all day with my vibrator, it’s not because I’m addicted to orgasm (well…maybe a little), but because it actually feels nice.
If “sins” weren’t pleasurable, at least temporarily, we wouldn’t have to concern ourselves with avoiding sinful acts.
I’ve just never been able to think of lust itself as a sin. I don’t think it would be wise to dwell on those feelings if they are inappropriate though. I know the rules here. I can lust after a certain seventy year old actor and even a handsome NFL coach. Nix on anyone from my past.
shrug You’re entitled to your opinion. On the other hand, The Song of Solomon doesn’t seem to have been made up by someone who thought that erotic love was a sin against God, and it’s hard to square accounts of Jesus providing a wedding-feast with miraculously created wine with the notion of ascetic sobriety.
Do you happen to have any cites concerning this “original concept”?
Would they be the ones who used to hack their lungs out over the first cigarette of the day, and who kept on smoking because they knew darn well that trying to go without tobacco would be horrible? I’d hazard a guess, based on personal acquaintances over my life, that a fair few smokers started out for reasons unconnected with any actual pleasure in smoking, and carried on once hooked because quitting was a ticket to misery.
Ambition might be the word you’re looking for. Ambitious people need not be seen negatively and mostly aren’t; greedy ones almost always are seen in a negative light.
Desire may be appropriate here. Desire (i.e. to better oneself) does not infer destructive tendencies, whilst envy (i.e. of someone else’s success in life) does. A synonym for envy is jealousy, which is clearly a destructive emotion.
And me. But I think C.S. Lewis is talking about the fact that a sin does not mean a behaviour but a destructive behavior or even a normally laudable behavior taken to a destructive extreme.
Some sins can produce pleasure in the moment, lust comes to mind as a easy one in that respect. Now if such sin caused a curse or not is a spiritual issue. So yes I think in this world you can sin, have pleasure in the moment and not be cursed by it.
I once spent hours (literally) playing GTA: Vice City, doing nothing but driving a car up and down the Ocean Beach “strip” listening to the radio and seeing how many motorcyclists I could send tumbling off their bikes by smashing into them. I’m not sure what deadly sins I committed by doing this, but it was disturbingly pleasurable.