I’ve been re-reading C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. If you haven’t encountered this masterpiece, or it’s been decades since you last picked it up, I strongly recommend giving it a read or re-read.
For those unfamiliar, the book is a collection of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his subordinate tempter, Wormwood, advising on how to manipulate a human soul toward damnation. What strikes me most is how Lewis identifies so many of the devil’s core tactics that have worked for millennia.
One such tactic is leveraging despair and anger to separate man from his relationship with his loving Creator.
Throughout history, those who seek to control populations have understood something fundamental: a hopeless, angry people are far easier to manipulate than a peaceful, grounded, centered one.
Despair is a tool of control. It makes people reactive rather than intentional. It hollows them out from within while they’re distracted by outrage.
The recent release of the Epstein files has crystallized something I’ve been tracking for years, as the despair and anger I’m encountering in nearly every conversation I have these days is palpable.
The files confirm what many of us have been saying in the wilderness for decades: the documented connections between powerful government figures, intelligence operatives, corporate titans, and a network of sexual predators. The evidence of planned bio-warfare. The brokering of information among elites. The institutional capture of our government, culture, and education systems by individuals who operate without conscience or accountability.
We were right. The “conspiracy theorists” were right… yet again.
At the end of Chapter 8 in the book, Screwtape writes to Wormwood about a particularly dangerous Christian; one who has stopped hoping for justice in this world, yet continues to obey God anyway:
“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
The “Enemy”, in Lewis’s framework, is God—Christ himself and the strategy of the forces opposing God’s Kingdom is to make the world appear abandoned by God, to make obedience to His Divine Will seem pointless, and to transform righteous anger into paralyzing despair.
And yet, the most dangerous person to the powers of darkness is not the one who remains hopeful that the system will fix itself.
The most dangerous person is the one who has seen clearly that the criminals will not indict their fellow criminals, that justice will not come from within corrupted institutions… and who obeys God anyway.
This is the moment we’re living in today.
Having studied for decades at this point the who, why and how we got here, I stopped expecting justice from a captured system many years ago.
I’ve witnessed too many patterns. The powerful protect the powerful and the institutional mechanisms designed to hold them accountable have themselves been compromised.
Yet this clarity, paradoxically, has been and is liberating.
It frees us from the paralyzing hope that somehow, someday, the right investigation will finally happen, the right prosecutor will finally act, the right person will be elected, the right evidence will finally find the light of day… and matter.
In my humble opinion, that hope kills action and personal accountability. What we CAN control is our own actions and reactions with our families, our circles of influence, our choices about what systems we participate in and which we resist.
This is one of the many reasons why I believe digital sovereignty matters. It’s not libertarian posturing. At its root, it’s spiritual resistance.
When you move to a phone, tablet or laptop running an operating system not controlled by psychopaths who are actively working to enslave you, when you opt out of the surveillance infrastructure that powers the system’s control mechanisms, you’re not just protecting your data.
You’re refusing to feed the beast that tracks and manipulates populations into despair.
Which brings me to Lent.
For most Christian traditions, Lent begins this Wednesday. It’s a season of prayer, fasting and intentional refusal.
Historically it is a time to draw closer to God by stepping back from the world’s noise and demands. I’d like to propose something for you, whether your spiritual journey follows the Christian calendar or not: Consider giving up social media and daily news feeds for the duration of Lent.
Not forever, just forty days. Six weeks.
Instead, so you can’t use the excuse of claiming you NEED to know what’s happening in the world, try weekly news sources like Agenda Weekly, which gives you perspective rather than reaction. Consider signing up for the physical weekly newspaper from The Epoch Times, which is something you hold in your hands, read intentionally, then set down.
The minute by minute outrage cycle, that gets you mad as hell and not wanting to take it anymore, is designed to keep you spiritually fractured and politically reactive.
Breaking it, even for six weeks, re-calibrates your soul.
Once you’ve done so, I guarantee you’ll see more clearly. You’ll be less controlled by anger. You’ll stop putting your trust in man, and man made systems.
You’ll trust even more that God will ultimately have justice… not in accordance with our demands and timelines, but His.
You’ll remember, or discover, how freeing it feels to focus only on obeying God’s Commandments in a world full of distractions that seems at times to have abandoned all of humanity, not just you.
This, I believe, is the most subversive act available to us today.
Give it a try, and let us know how it goes.