Misinformation
If I were Satan (and I must assure my readers that I am not), I would go about my task of corrupting the human race by working on their supply of information.
First, I would practise on the animals, during the leisure time before the humans were created. I would observe their innocent trust, then teach the smarter ones how to exploit it, by leaping out of the shadows to slay them for food. Their appetites would, of course, have to be corrupted, too, so that they hungered for flesh. This is how I would scheme to subvert God’s plan, and bring death into the world. (How the world flourished, before the invention of death, I cannot remember. This happened too long before my time.)
By now, food ingestion through animal-eating is so well established, that in order to cut a figure, the apprentice devils are all vegetarians. (This is why they are so smug.)
But the question is, how to corrupt the human, who was designed, at least “in theory,” to be capable of conscious good, and endowed with smarts greater than a cat’s, although we have reflexes much slower. (Wisdom does not work at greater speed.) Where the animals could be fooled with simple conjuring tricks, people might see through these, and prepare to defeat them. But remember, if you are Satan, the “father of lies,” you are not a pathetic novice.
I gave my method away (misleadingly) at the start. It is “misinformation.” Genius requires that the main source of misinformation (or, lies) should be government programmes to correct misinformation. How better to launch the cleverest lies? But how to spread them? For after all, government can’t be everywhere, and do everything: not even Satan can rely on socialism.
Women, it is said, have the oldest profession, but this is not true. Rather it is “the media,” which began with malicious gossip in the ancestral cave. Women may have been the first “debate moderators,” but the significance of lying had already been demonstrated. The mass-media is merely its latest (and most effective) institutional framework. I think even the announcement of the End Time will begin, “This is the BBC News.”