Aggravate the most useful human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties of directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. He thinks his conversion is something inside him, and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the state of his own mind-or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say.'I now see that I spent most my life doing in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.

You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. “As the uneasiness and reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures the vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo.you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.

Lewis the screwtape letters