6 APRIL
6 APRIL
The Unselfishness Game
Screwtape’s gleeful tale of the unselfish family:
This game is best played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for example. Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of ‘Unselfishness’. The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their ‘Unselfishness’, but really because they don’t want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker practises petty altruisms. But he is not going to be done out of his debauch of Unselfishness either. He insists on doing ‘what the others want’. They insist on doing what he wants. Passions are roused. Soon someone is saying ‘Very well then, I won’t have any tea at all!’, and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides. You see how it is done? If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official ‘Unselfishness’ of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it. . . . . A sensible human once said, ‘If people knew how much ill-feeling Unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit’; and again, ‘She’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.’
—from The Screwtape Letters