My Dear Mogslopper,

Some good news for both of us: it seems your man is a confirmed liar. Good. Never underestimate the power of lies to manipulate, to sting, to unseat kings and upset history. But we cannot rest on our laurels now. The act of telling lies is only the surface, the icing on a large cake of vice and distortion. If you want your work to have impact beyond your patient--and all of us Downhere expect it of you--then we must bring together elements of truth and lie for the greater evil. Sure, a bold-faced lie has potency. But it is usually limited to the liar and the one lied to. There will be great injury and hard feelings, but ultimately the damage is to only a few minor people. The half-life of a bold-faced lie is too short; it is soon discovered to be a lie. Children experiment with bold-faced lies at a young age. Their parents call these lies "stories" or "flights of fancy" or "exercising their imaginations" because they cannot believe their beastly, innocent children would or could conjure up a lie so easily. They are deceived, Mogslopper, thanks to millennia of our work, into seeing themselves as essentially guileless and unspoiled at the core. As they grow older, they begin to adopt a more sophisticated technique: the lie-within-truth. A lie cloaked in truth, like a barbed metal hook hidden under the surface of a sweet, red apple, is even more powerful because it asks the hearer of the lie to trust to the whole lie-within-truth based on the bit of covering truth they recognize. Lies-within-truths may be borne far afield, told again and again from believer to believer. Disentangled as it might become from the original generator of the lie, the lie-within-truth has much greater capacity for harm. When we mingle social power with the lie-within-truth, we obtain our true gold from lead. Granted, your patient's social standing and authority has too little to do with your tempting. Yet, if your man has a dishonest streak, a degree of real authority (even a schoolteacher has a large enough amount of authority to be useful to us), and believes himself to be an honorable, just, honest man (there is no need for you to point out the paradox evident in this statement to me--remember it is all about the reality of sin with the projection of righteousness), then we have potential. What we are attempting to create is the Noble Lie--the idea that the wise and powerful need to fool the weak and stupid for their own good. Once they create the feeling of superiority that makes them the "wise" and their neighbor the "stupid," many otherwise kindly, loving, and sickeningly compassionate people become filled with deceit. Who cares if the deceit is for the earnest betterment of their foolish neighbor? It will still come out twisted and to our benefit in the end. The lie-within-truth wielded by humans in positions of power can become a major molding force within whole societies. Note American political campaigns. Lying is rampant on all sides but it is justified by insinuating that the candidate supported will ultimately make things better, if only they are (re-)elected. The ends justify the means, as all devils say. So you see, once again it is by these smaller measures amplified rather than by the more showy sins that we tighten our grasp on the human vermin. For the short term, the "sin-content" of your patient's lies matter little. Have him get used to the feeling of small lies delivered convincingly, well-coated in truth of course, throughout the day. You should be constantly reminding him that he is in fact telling the truth and, beyond that, is a very honest person generally. His consistent church attendance may actually help us on this account--he will be very reluctant to see himself as "bad" or a "liar" given all of the "good" and "Christian" things he does and mentally believes in. The more he lies and the bigger his lies get the more you should insist to him that he is an honest, good, forgiving Christian. He has never murdered anyone or stolen anything after all. (If you're successful, the murdering and theft will come later, after he is really used to lying.) Over time, lie will become truth and vice versa. The change will be nearly imperceptible to him. And that, my dear Mogslopper, is how one roasts humans slowly, so they don't jump out of the pot. Affectionately, your Uncle