"In the first chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape explains to Wormwood that there used to be a time when “argument was the way to” keep his Christian patient “out of the Enemy’s clutches.”
Times and methods have changed:
'That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” or “false,” but as “academic” or “practical,” “outworn” or “contemporary,” “conventional” or “ruthless.” Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.'
The above was written in the 1940s. It was true then, and it has metastasized in 2020 to a nearly fatal disease. Emotions and feelings rule the day. The ability to follow an argument must be suppressed to keep the people enamored with experts who do their thinking for them. Keep the people focused on “personal peace and affluence.”
'Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church…. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”."
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