Change

In my earlier reading, I had come across another excerpt that I thought revealing in this culture especially and worth sharing with you here. In this second excerpt from "The Screwtape Letters", this one taken from the twenty-fifth letter, Screwtape is teaching his nephew, Wormwood, how to use and distort for wickedness the natural "change" and "permanence" instituted by God in Creation.

This demand [for change] is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, "low-brow" and "high-brow" artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.