Dear Wormwood

More of senior demon Uncle Screwtape's Letter 6, advising his nephew about the intersection of politics and Christian obedience.

 Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy

It is easy to pretend to feel affection for someone on the other side of a government program, or indeed, even your own private charity at a distance. In contrast, it is difficult to even pretend to feel affection for your physical neighbor - the person currently before you - if they are the sort which cracks his egg on the wrong end. I don't say a true feeling of affection is impossible in the first case, only that the expressed love for that person is going to look a good deal more like duty than like affection. As I mentioned recently, such affection is directed at what is largely a product of our own imaginations.