Dear Humbuck: pride and fear and cunning

Dear Humbuck,

It was with a bit of amusement that I heard that yet another human is essentially trying to read our mail and our memos and put them out there for all the world to see, as if the world cares much about our concerns. These efforts are for the most part rather asinine, they say more about the man writing them than about us.

What I often find most amusing about these writings is how the authors choose to portray us. I especially enjoy the idea that we are so very busy raising future generations, sending them to training institutes and writing many missives to them telling them how to do their jobs well, only to cannibalize them if they suffer even one setback. Of course, it’s all meant to make us look ridiculous, to try to insult and scorn us, but that is no great concern to us. The authors will appeal to someone from long ago who said something like “The devil doesn’t like being laughed at, so laugh at him as often as possible”. Well, let them take those men’s words and use them, so long as they do not also look at those men’s lives and see how we easily managed to get the last laugh on them.

Take the one they consider such a great man, the one called Luther. How they love to laud him! Yet to do so, they must explain away so very many things about him, and not least of which would be his words against the Jews. But that is hardly all they must explain away about him, and that is what makes them such great fun! I’ve found that humans have little real love of history, and it is little wonder; let a man gaze into that abyss, let him see even a glimpse of the depths of how his fellow humans have treated each other, and to keep himself from madness he will run to the nearest movie theater to see the latest big-explosion blockbuster, or console himself with the pretend violence of video games, or he will become more strident in some kind of social and political cause, or any of a near-infinite number of concerns and hobbies and pastimes that will keep him from seeing the truth about his fellow man, and thus the truth about himself.

No, we have no reason to fear another version of the screwed-up letters; if anything, I think we should welcome another attempt to caricature us like that.

The humans have difficulties with many truths; perhaps I should say they have difficulties with all truths, which is why they like to escape into fantasy worlds so very much. One truth they have from their sacred writings is that “Man was made a little lower than the angels”, but they do not then see the corollary truth; “Angels were made a little above man”.

And the truth is, could they see us as we really are, and could they see the things we see, they would be driven to terror and madness. One of their more popular authors wrote about Old Ones who came from outer space and whose presence is enough to drive the world into madness should they ever awaken. Though he did not name us and may even have denied our existence, he did not a bad job of describing us.

So, their caricatures of us actually do themselves more harm than they do us. Let them think us ridiculous, let them not take us seriously. Let their preachers stand before television cameras and declare and degree all manner of things against us. I am still waiting to hear one of these ministers give a sermon about the dangers of blaspheming the glorious ones like ourselves, which is something found in their sacred writings, but is perhaps such a strange doctrine to their ears that they cannot comprehend it; after all, how can one blaspheme creatures whose very beings are themselves blasphemous? Let them remain in their ignorance, and enjoy it when they stomp and shout as if we have reasons to fear them. We are cunning, we are playing a long game, and the day will come when they will pay in most satisfying ways for their arrogance.

Their ridicule of us is merely a sign of their pride, and we should encourage such pride and arrogance as much as possible. Yet we should not neglect their fears; indeed, I think that pride and fear are most excellent bedfellows.

One fruit we may see of pride and fear is superstition. You will find that some of them teach that we are deathly afraid of the name “Jesus”, and so they think that merely saying that name will be enough to drive us away from them. Such an idea merely shows their ignorance of their own sacred writings, where it records a time one of us said, “Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you?” This kind of superstition, a reliance on words and phrases, on relics and charms and sacred places, is something we can make great use of. If a man speaking at a church spends a minute of his prayer time rebuking and binding and casting out demons, then who is really affected by his words? Certainly not us, but he has very effectively shut off the critical thinking skills of the humans who are listening to him. They will think, or half-think, or maybe merely feel, that if all the big bad evil spirits have been sent packing by the super-human tough-guy preacher and his strident shouting, then this is now a safe place and what that man will teach them must be the God-ordained truth so they can accept it without hesitation and more importantly without question. We could hardly ask for a better environment in which to do some of our best and most effective work!

So, remember to be cunning. Remember that we are not in a hurry. Remember that we are not like them. They live brief lives of misery and futility, and have done so for a long time. What they were in the past is something else, something merely hinted at by the accounts of the ages they lived in those long-ago years, things they see as mere stories and myths. They think they are ascending some kind of evolutionary ladder, when they would shatter in great despair if they could see how far they have fallen since their forefathers walked the earth. But, again, encourage their pride, let them think they are nearing the peaks of the mountain as they tumble even further into the pit.

Let them laugh now, so long as we are the ones who will laugh over them as they suffer the judgments they pile on themselves.