patriotism

When I was a kid, there was a line in a movie or on a show where someone said in a robot voice, "That is not logical." My brother said it all the time. Regarding the overwhelming influx of information, those words are like a perpetual ticker scrolling through my mind. Instead of shutting it off, I'm feverishly searching for more. Like I can't get enough information. I've gone months and months without needing more than a casual scroll through the headlines every week or so. Why, all the sudden, does it feel so vital to know the minute by minute update of what is going on in the world? Especially when I know that I'm going to read conflicting information at every turn. There's such absurd bias in the narrative, it leaves me feeling helpless and physically ill. It forces me into a corner demanding that I choose a side.

C.S. Lewis, genius that he was, wrote a book nearly eight decades ago chronicling the training in deception of a young demon in the form of letters from his Uncle Screwtape. The tricks of the trade are so relevant to our time that it is uncanny. Consider the following passage.

Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "cause", in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or Pacifism

Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours- and the more "religious" (on those terms) the more securely ours.

CS Lewis
The Screwtape Letters, #7

We must take heed, darlings, lest we march into temptation by way of a “good cause.”

Lvb