Letters from Mr. Fulbright, April 6, 2025

A demonic perspective on the mad king

This thought experiment would not be possible without C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, from which this is unabashedly and unapologetically derived.

Greetings and Salutations, Screwtape:

Thank you for your warm congratulations on our recent accomplishments.

I’ll not soon forget the parties held in honor of our achievement when our victories first came into view nearly a decade ago in human years. Those parties are already legendary. The great master pulled out all the stops. I dare say I’ve never experienced such a feeding frenzy. It was quite a celebration.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

As you well know, I thoroughly enjoy the distress and despair that has transpired since then. Especially satisfying was the destruction of the notion that a great movement of optimism and joy had momentarily taken hold during one of their preposterous elections.

Taking a wrecking ball to the hopes of so many, as has happened in the wake of recent events, has been so thoroughly satisfying that humans could almost see our joy manifest itself in physical form as it spread across the globe.

We have been well fed during these recent moments of glory, but much work remains. It helps to remember how this all came to be.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the conquest arrived in two stages, one of which was simple, the other, on its face, not so, but simple enough that its ease caught most of us by surprise when comparing it to similar ventures.

The first stage was never in doubt. We have tapped many men on the proverbial shoulder, but never in my recollection has one responded with such a positive response, and surely with nothing that can compare to the alacrity of the subject in question.

It is almost as if the fool jumped from a supernatural trampoline whilst screaming from the dark rafters above, “How high?” A sweeter sight I have never beheld. It took me no time to realize that he was gifted to me, a test of sorts, perhaps, to see if I would rest on my laurels.

I know, I know, as fools go, you would tell me that human historians will likely conclude that there has never been a greater one available to us. I’m grateful for the opportunity to “cash in,” as the mortals would say.

The challenge for us, then, became how to create a greater monster from such a base of human vilification. How can a man so reviled as he attain one of humanity’s most acclaimed positions? You asked how the secret sauce, as it were, was made, and I feel obligated, in gratitude, to respond.

In regards to the first stage, quite simply, it was this: The man was, from his earliest years, an empty shell.

I can’t honestly say that I ever found a soul residing within his being, which is itself a rare enough event. Just as you stare into the eyes of a lizard or scorpion and see nothing return your gaze aside from the blank look of pure biology, so is the return of our target’s gaze from those who seek out any kind of emotional correspondence.

I was struck by the cold-blooded sense of animal survival that existed in this individual, which, in the human world, meant that he would, as he grew older, gravitate exclusively to money.

Such instincts often lead to a life of crime. Therefore, I was able to guide him easily along that path. Encouraging him to think of everyone around him as worthless, as nothing more than an impediment to progress toward the “ring,” as we like to call the pinnacle of human success, was a task of almost absurd simplicity. It was like presenting a mountain of candy to a small child and telling her to indulge until she regurgitates the somewhat liquified product onto the laps of all her startled friends.

Because of that key trait, combined with a remarkable vanity that often displayed its characteristics in humorous ways (the orange hair was Gladstone’s idea), he was a uniquely beautiful specimen.

As an aside, I’ll note here that there was considerable debate over the orange hair. I won’t deny that I urged against it, thinking it would be a timeless advertisement of his foolishness, but Gladstone was insistent that it was all part of that uniquely human and perverse (and therefore, of course, joyous) concept of human “branding.”

My team and I treated his existence as the catalyst of a new human disease whose scourge would match the worst of the biological plagues we take such delight in.

This was only possible through the work of the many others who previously (and unwittingly) laid the foundation by establishing a strikingly inane celebrity culture in the target’s country. It was from this foundation that our efforts ultimately grew. Much credit and appreciation to Mr. Romero and his crew.

Much toil has been exerted to build this foundation. Others have described its evolution better than I can. However, I’m a clear beneficiary of this happy cause. During the last hundred years in human time, our armies have silenced the arts and humanities, as well as the pursuit of knowledge, to such a degree in the subject’s part of the world that there is currently nothing more cherished among his followers than a braying monkey with a rapacious appetite for mayhem and an ability to claim retribution as the most important virtue for tribal leadership.

This preexisting set of standards awaited me. In hindsight, the conquest we’ve seen was inevitable.

The challenge with our subject, as it always is, has been to discover how far along the path of avarice we can take him so that he can, someday, if our great master deems him worthy, partake in our famous feeding frenzies.

As you know, unlike human goals, ours are much simpler for their lack of specificity. We urge and cajole, but we don’t define in advance any milestones because, as we all know, this can only lead to disappointment.

Instead, we ask, how far can the target travel along our road? What might stop him? A project such as ours can often end almost before it begins when circumstances become difficult, especially when the enemy is stronger than it currently is.

Speaking of a weakening enemy, I must interrupt my narrative here to offer a shout out to Mr. Bailywick and his crew for their centuries of work in developing so many superbly corrupt factions of the enemy’s religion, which has become a caricature of itself and a source of broad contempt within the human domain.

To this I must offer my loud applause. This has helped the disease grow exponentially in short order. These efforts have also helped us maintain a patriarchy designed almost exclusively to treat human women as second-class citizens. Well done, Mr. Bailywick, I say! I’m sure he can’t hear me, as he’s hard at work devising a cure for the current restive and rebellious state of human females.

Whether the weakened state of the enemy’s religion caused them to neglect our target is far above my pay grade, as the humans like to say. No matter. I was fortunate that the enemy seemed to have let his body remain an empty shell. It’s a curious phenomenon, and, of course, I am not privy to their thinking on the reasons for their neglect. Gladstone worries that it is a test of sorts, that the enemy is preparing an ambush (see my earlier comment on the dangerous state of affairs regarding women).

We considered the possibility of ambush to such an extent that we long ago contemplated reserving our target’s temptations to his rather delightful propensity toward routine corruption and unrestrained sexual bedlam. He could have easily enough settled into such a life. Nary a soul would have noticed in the human world. Everyone in our domain would have been quite content with his existence as a patriarchal misfit and perpetual clown playing a minor role in human events.

However. Those parties I mentioned would never have been thrown. No celebrations would have ensued. The human world would not have experienced its current state of delightful torment and malaise (at least, not in such gloriously immediate fashion).

At the urging of the Council, we soldiered on.

Because the enemy had no presence, we didn’t need to worry about temptations from the other side preventing the target from reconsidering his actions. He was all in, all the time. Never did I need to worry about that all too familiar heinous inner voice whispering something ridiculous like, “That’s not a very nice thing to do” into his ears. No such voice exists within the man. He is nothing but a beautiful instrument for us to play as we manifest this illustriously tragic opera.

Of course, there are millions of souls such as this. What, you must be wondering, made him different?

Thus began our next challenge. Thus began stage two of our project.

I’m excited to tell you this part of the story in my next letter.

— Yours with everlasting and demonic intent,

Mr. Fulbright

Notes

For those of you not familiar with The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, they’re a series of letters written by a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, on how to cajole and tempt Wormwood’s assigned target, an everyday British man.

Thanks for reading!