Chapter 1: Limbo
Have you ever done something you knew was wrong at the time, but couldn’t fully admit to yourself until later? Maybe you made a cruel comment, took credit for someone else’s work, or cheated on a test (or even a partner).
Recall what it was like to finally own up to it. The knowledge that it was wrong: did it feel like new information? Or like something you had always known, but somehow hadn’t let yourself know?
We like to call such knowledge “unconscious”—as if we had no way of knowing—but that’s not entirely accurate, is it? It was right there to see if you had looked; fully available to consciousness. You were just turned away from it. The knowledge existed in a strange kind of limbo, in which you simultaneously knew and yet somehow didn’t.
And it wasn’t just sitting there, idle: it influenced your behavior. Any time someone came close to exposing it, or you started getting close to it yourself, you found a way to deflect, right?
Looking back, can you sense that some part of you knew exactly what you were doing, even as you did it? That behavior took place in limbo, too. But again, we normally call it “unconscious.” Do you see what we gain from calling it that?
Try to recall how you knew it was wrong in the first place.
Whatever it was, it arrived before you’d done any calculations, right? The part of you that knew: it couldn’t say exactly how it knew. Meanwhile, another part of you was busy providing justifications. Everyone does it. It’s not a big deal. Just this once.
Why did one side have to argue, and the other not?
And which side did you listen to—the part that “just knew” or the part that could prove?
I mean, obviously. Why trust something that can’t even justify itself?
And yet, despite “losing” that battle, notice that it never budged an inch. It kept on quietly knowing exactly what it knew.
That’s why you needed limbo in the first place. If all you could hear was your own conscience—no justifications to hide behind—could you have even done what you did?
By its very nature, limbo isn’t the kind of state we easily recognize or willingly remember. And if you have to enter it for even small misbehaviors, how much the more so for the big ones? Would those be easier to recall, or harder?
How much of human behavior might be taking place from some degree of limbo?
The two strangers
Imagine that while you were in that state—doing wrong, justifying it, half-knowing—a stranger had caught you and publicly chastised you for it. Not just for doing something wrong, but for being the kind of person who does.
You’ve been in similar situations before. Really visualize it, and how it plays out. When you try to exonerate yourself—not your behavior, necessarily, but what kind of person you are—what happens? Does he just let you go?
And that behavior: does it make it easier or harder to confront what you already knew?
Harder, almost certainly. But why?
Because who the hell is he to judge, right? He’s obviously the kind of person who does this too—things he knows are wrong, while pretending they’re not.
You’d take that bet at any odds. But on what evidence? You’d never met him. You knew nothing about him. All you had to go on was the way he was standing there, doing what he was doing.
Now imagine a different stranger had caught you—but instead of treating you with contempt, this one treated you with dignity. To be clear: not more gently. Just that his anger was directed at what you did, and not what you are.
Would you have dug in? Vowed revenge?
The problem wasn’t being caught. In fact, he could have been harsher than the first person—said things that stung more, in front of more people, left you even less room to wriggle out—and it still wouldn’t have triggered the same reaction.
Why not? Again, try to put yourself back in those shoes.
It’s like he was reminding you of something: that you’re better than this. Meanwhile, the first stranger was claiming that this is all you are.
His behavior was clean, like there was nothing to hide. It’s almost as if he was giving voice to your own conscience. You knew you couldn’t win against it—and more importantly, you didn’t want to.
If you had to guess: is this the kind of person who sneaks around getting away with stuff?
Both people may have stopped your misbehavior, and so both will leave confident that what they did “worked.” But one of them made it easier to turn away from what you knew, and the other made it harder. And that change might be small, but it will long outlast this interaction.
It won’t feel like a change to who you are—it will feel like you’ve learned something about the world: whether it’s the kind of place where people look out for each other, or one where they pursue their own self-interested needs.
Later, you may face a small choice—say, whether to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt—and that change will inform your decision. And if you make the “wrong” choice, it won’t feel wrong. It will just feel like what you must do to protect yourself in this selfish world.
We never say “I’m going to ignore my conscience.” Instead, it feels like the world is forcing our hand. Our justifications simply feel more convincing, more obvious, more righteous—as though they are our conscience. The two become just a little harder to tell apart.
The Cause
But what exactly did the first stranger do to cause this? And did he know he was doing it?
Well, what does contempt license? Once you believe “this is all you are” about someone, how does that enable you to treat them? Is there any bottom to it?
But it’s worse than that. Recall what happens when you try to exonerate yourself in such situations. Deny it, and you’re exactly the kind of person who denies it. Get angry, and there it is—proof of what you are. Stay calm, and you don’t even care. Apologize, and it’s a little too convenient.
Every road funnels into the same conclusion.
Contempt doesn’t just permit harming someone who deserves it. It shapes them into the kind of person who does.
We all know this is how it works, on some level. But did he know that while he was doing it?
On one hand, what he was doing certainly felt intentional, didn’t it? Something about his tone and gaze gave it away instantly, even if his words didn’t.
And how could it be purely accidental? He has to track your reactions, navigate around obstacles, and prevent you from wriggling out and exonerating yourself.
It’s as if some part of him needed you to be exactly what he said you were, and was working hard at proving it. Could you feel that?
On the other hand, how could it actually be intentional? If he knew he was planning to use your reactions against you, how could he turn around and sincerely hold them against you? You can’t trust evidence that you know you yourself planted.
So he couldn’t be fully aware of his own need, let alone that he was working so hard at fulfilling it. To him, it didn’t feel like a need; it just felt obviously true.
And yet his behavior couldn’t have been purely unconscious either. Not only could it not be so precisely guided, but he’d be embarrassed or confused if you pointed it out. But this kind of behavior actually intensifies, in exactly the way needed to keep itself hidden.
What does that remind you of?
Limbo. He knew what he was doing, and he didn’t.
You weren’t just sensing that he’s the kind of person who deceives himself in general. You were sensing that he was doing it right then, in the act of judging you. He was judging you from the very state he was judging you for.
Nobody enters limbo because they’re doing something they feel is right. They do it because they sense it’s wrong. So you could sense that he was up to no good by his own lights.
But what was “wrong” about it? As far as he knows, he sees a genuinely bad person. What could be wrong with scolding them; making them feel how defective they are?
On the other hand, why is he working so hard to prove something he supposedly already knows?
There’s a contradiction there, and he can feel it. His conscience is warning him about something. He can’t hear what it’s saying, exactly, but he knows it must be wrong because reasons. So he has to quiet it.
At some level, he knows he can’t actually silence his conscience. But he can damn well try.
So he does what he must: “proves” to it that you are what he says you are.
But what tools does he have? Look how tight his constraints are.
He can’t do anything that will reveal that he’s doing anything wrong—crucially, even to himself. Otherwise, when he looks back on it, he’ll realize it was his fault. So he can’t be overtly cruel, even if he wants to.
That doesn’t give him much to work with. Nothing that can be audited. Which leaves… what, exactly? His tone; his gaze; his manner. Exactly the things you used to detect it.
And think back on exactly what it was that made you dig in. You felt both that it was intentional, and that there was no part of him you could appeal to, right? Both halves worked together to produce that maddening quality that made you dig in.
If it had looked unintentional, you might have forgiven or pitied him instead. That wouldn’t have given him what he (or this part of him) needed.
And if he had offered you something to appeal to or accuse in return, that would have taken the sting out of it: even if he denied your accusations out loud, you would at least have known that it registered somewhere. That would have felt satisfying, wouldn’t it? It would have relieved the tension.
So that precise combination: appearing intentional—as if there’s “someone behind the wheel”—and yet with no part of him to appeal to, was both necessary to accomplish the job, and as we saw, sufficient. You knew he was up to something, but couldn’t prove it. And you couldn’t let that stand.
In other words, in addition to being in limbo, he simply had to telegraph that he was.
But how the heck do you intentionally telegraph a state that, by definition, you cannot be fully aware you’re in?
The Agent
Let’s take a step back.
Whatever it is in him that’s doing this, it seems intentional; goal-driven. And it presents itself as such to you while hiding itself from him. In fact, not just while hiding itself from him. It reveals to you that it is hiding itself from him.
So it can’t exactly be him in the usual sense—and yet in another sense, it is.
It behaves like an agent, so I’ll refer to it as one. I’ll call it his “dark” part, or just his “darkness”—both because it’s hidden from him, and because of what we’re about to see.
So it’s counting on you to recognize it for what it is—and you do, instantly. But why?
Because you’ve been there yourself, haven’t you?
We all have. We all know what it’s like to hide from what we know. Haven’t you ever watched an enemy squirm under your “righteous” gaze—half-knowing that their reaction would convict them, not you? It didn’t feel wrong, because it was for good reasons.
But why half-knowing? Why the quotes around “righteous”? Because you couldn’t have done it while looking straight at it.
So something in you recognizes what he’s doing, instantly, without ever having had a word for it. You know that flavor from the inside.
But how does he know you know it? Remember, he must, for his “plan” to be coherent.
Because it is something we all know.
Think back to the opening, where I knew that you had to be in limbo to cause harm—despite not knowing anything about you. You weren’t surprised that I knew that, were you? Why not?
Because a deep part of you already knows this about everyone. I didn’t teach you that no one can cause harm without first turning away from a deep part of themselves. I just said out loud something you were already carrying—something that’s in limbo for most of us. (And if you’re wondering: what about psychopaths? Don’t worry, we’ll get to them later.)
He can count on you to know it because it is common knowledge. That’s why he can depend on his approach to work.
Watch where this leads.
If we all know this about each other (at some level), why do we act like we don’t?
Well, what would it be like to consciously recognize that your enemies aren’t fundamentally different from you—that they cause harm using essentially the same mechanism you do? That they have a conscience, and don’t want to turn away from it any more than you do? That they sometimes feel like they have no other choice—for essentially the same reasons you do?
It would mean that they’re redeemable, and that your contempt for them has only been making them worse—driving them further from their conscience—all for the “benefit” of proving that you’re nothing alike.
Hell no. That just can’t be.
And that reaction—that’s what drives this whole process.
But there’s still one missing link. He still has to evoke this common knowledge somehow—and it can’t be in words.
The Gaze
Here’s the cruel twist. The thing he’s turned away from—his conscience—is also the thing that warns him when he is turned away from it. That’s why it’s so hard to catch ourselves doing it.
And by turning away from his, he’s also turned away from yours. From his profound commonality with you; from your humanity. And what does that look like?
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a dehumanizing gaze? Doesn’t it feel like the person is somehow absent or “turned away” from themselves?
That’s what you’re looking at. The fact that turning away from himself and from his conscience are the same thing—that’s important, and we’ll return to it later.
Try this: go out in public, find a stranger, and shoot them a dehumanizing gaze. It’s hard to actually do, isn’t it? And ask what’s stopping you. Is it just how you’ll look? Or is it that you know exactly how it will land on them—something you don’t want another human to feel? You can only do it with a reason telling you this is okay.
Turning away from himself; from his humanity; from your humanity; from the knowledge of what it will do to you—it’s all a single move. And you recognize it even though he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t.
Which means that he doesn’t have to do anything extra to telegraph it. Simply by maintaining that turned-away state in which he needs you to be bad, something in him accomplishes what he needs.
It aims. It reads your reactions. It closes every road but one. It shows you a man with nobody home. It leaves no mark on any record.
And most importantly, it knows you will recognize all this for what it is.
It does all of that while he stands there certain he is doing you a favor.
His darkness is evoking this common knowledge in a way that renders it totally unmistakable, yet without giving you anything to grab onto to prove it.
It’s like a parallel layer of communication happening beneath the words—one that can’t be recorded on any ledger or in any transcript, and yet is louder than the stuff that can.
Could you have named what was happening out loud? What would you have said—you’re being mean? How would that have turned out?
You both knew that, too.
Let’s put it all together.
When he looked at you, he wasn’t actually seeing “bad person.” He was seeing someone struggling to follow their conscience. Someone ultimately just like him.
But whatever harm you were causing, he couldn’t bear that it was caused by something he has inside himself. So he had to see you as “bad person.” To turn away from the part of himself that saw the truth.
But that only makes the problem worse. Because now he isn’t just looking at someone whose behavior he himself is capable of; he’s watching himself do it to you while blaming you for it. Accusing you of being fundamentally different.
Which forces him to overlook your humanity even harder. Which his conscience registers and warns him about. Which increases the pressure to prove he’s nothing like you. Which is what reveals to you—and to part of him—that he is, because it’s his only way to make you bad. Which you clearly sense, threatening to expose the whole ruse.
Which forces him to overlook your humanity even harder…
The Taunt
There is no natural stopping point—because as much as he tries, he never stops hearing his conscience. And the more he suppresses it, the more he’s forced to see this plan all the way through. To push you all the way to the end, where (he believes) his conscience will finally see the “truth.”
The tragic irony is, he’s seeing genuine darkness in you—your own capacity to turn away. And he’s not wrong in his desire to end that capacity. Doing so would be genuinely beneficial—for you, for him, and for the world. But he doesn’t see his own need to externalize it; to view it as something foreign to him.
And that is what makes him forget there’s a better way. That he could do what the second stranger did. At some level, he registers that his way of dealing with it is underhanded.
But sometimes you have to get your hands a bit dirty to fight evil…
By turning away and remaining so, he effectively gives rise to an agent that does his “dirty work” for him. And it doesn’t merely act on you. It addresses you—without giving you anything to address in return.
It communicates something like this:
We both know exactly what I’m doing to you, and that nobody can prove it. Which means anything you try to do to wriggle out of it will be turned against you—because even “I” won’t know what I’ve done wrong.
I know exactly how maddening that is, and what it will drive you to do. And when you inevitably do it, I’ll be right here, waiting to do it again.
I am going to provoke you until you become the very thing I need you to be. Which means that when I’m finally forced to do to you what I must, nobody will feel sorry for you—because you’ll only have shown them what you really are.
I know you can see this, but you can’t prove it. Good luck.
Which you know but cannot prove, turning you into what he needs you to be.
Which is precisely the “what” that he was doing to you in the first place. But good luck proving it.
His darkness is seducing you to embrace yours. To listen to the part that can prove over the part that knows. To trust your reasons over your conscience.
And it can all be communicated through a single glance. We all know what it means on some level, even if we’ve never put it into words or felt the full weight of it before. And it works precisely because we all know it, but cannot prove it.
You may have felt this before, as a kind of “hall of mirrors” effect, where you both know exactly what’s happening, and that neither one of you can name it.
This is what is being communicated from inside it.
It feels like this on the receiving end: if this is the kind of world we live in—where people can be cruel and the world calls it “righteous”; where we all know exactly what’s happening but pretend not to—then fuck it. Game on.
That’s what teaches you to do it too. To demote that inner knowing—because what is it worth?
Again, you don’t tell yourself you’ll ignore your conscience. Your justifications—what you can “prove”—simply become more reasonable. More practical. As though they are your conscience. The two become just a little harder to tell apart. The very notion of a conscience—that one faculty you have to detect this corruption of your mind—starts to feel naive.
Remember how one side had to argue and the other didn’t? The arguments weren’t there to convince your conscience. That never works. They were there to convince you that it was just one more voice among the noise. That’s what’s happening now.
And the thing is, it doesn’t feel like a loss at all. It feels like you’ve gotten a bit wiser. A little more realistic about how this world operates.
His darkness has just taught you to embrace your own.
The reason it feels so good to him isn’t the harming—he’d never allow himself that. It’s being proven right, in real time, by you. And from the inside, being proven right and being right are the same experience. The only difference is who produced the evidence, and that’s the part he can’t see.
And look at what he thinks he’s been proven right about. Not that you’re careless, or rude. That the thing behind everything wrong with the world just surfaced in front of him—and he’s the one who caught it. Which is why it never mattered how small the thing you did was. It only had to be evidence.
Which is why he can’t see what he’s doing. Certainty, urgency, the sense that he must not let this go—those are what facing real evil actually calls for. What’s missing is his felt connection to what they were meant to serve. Life. The thing he’s overlooking in you right now. The thing he’s disconnected from in himself.
And watch what it does to him.
He just watched you get worse in response to his “righteous” behavior, convincing him that people really are as rotten as he feared. So he gives that part of himself more power; learns to trust it more.
A part that’s making his enemies more entrenched. Harder to fight. Creating more of the very thing he hates. If he were fully conscious of what it is creating: could he really want it?
So whose goals is it pursuing, exactly? His—or its own?
And yet it certainly looks like he wants it, doesn’t it?
And what do we call people who obviously want to cause harm—especially when pretending it’s good? How do we treat them?
We call them bad people, and treat them with contempt.
Which settles what he is. And once that’s settled, whatever we do to him isn’t harm anymore. It’s what he deserves.
That’s the license.
And treating him that way gives that part of him more power, because you’ll have done to him the very thing he did to you.
His dark part: it benefits from you seeing it as something he wants. As something he is.
That’s how it keeps itself alive: by convincing him it doesn’t exist in him, while ensuring you see it as him.
This is why none of us ever recognize it operating in ourselves. It hides itself perfectly from our own minds while revealing itself to others, compelling them to righteously attack us for it, thereby enabling ours to hide itself better from us.
That is its “job”—to keep itself hidden from us so that it can keep operating with impunity. To prevent us from looking in the one place where we could actually end it.
That’s what contempt for people is. And it only works because we all know this, at some level, but don’t let ourselves know it—both individually, and especially as a culture.
This part of us: it doesn’t “want” us to know this.
The world has gotten slightly worse as a result of this interaction, and yet there’s not a trace of objective evidence of anything wrong ever having happened. And the objective facts are what we have learned to trust more. So the very thing causing the problem has hidden itself better.
It’s not that the deeper part of you has been silenced. That’s not how it works.
It’s still there in you, quietly knowing what it knows, patiently waiting to be remembered.
Just as it is in him.
I cannot prove any of this to you, but I suspect some part of you already knows it. If you recognized it, that’s the evidence.
Chapter II: The Descent
How do I know that the chilling taunt from the last chapter is accurate? Because I’ve been on the delivering end more times than I’d like to admit.
Here’s what it feels like from the inside.
I know there’s evil in the world—almost like a force that’s completely alien to me. I know that, because I’ve seen what people are capable of. And I’m not capable of that.
So when I catch the faintest whiff of it in someone else—perhaps something as minor as littering—I’m not simply going to let it go. It’s evidence of something. I can feel it. And I’m going to expose it for what it really is.
What I’m doing is a public service. It’s the least I can do as a good person.
At some level, I know that my contemptuous tone isn’t going to help anything. That there’s something dark about it that I can’t quite place. But I don’t let myself know.
And anyway, my darkness isn’t real darkness—it’s the strategic kind. The kind that all good people must harbor to keep real evil in check.
But for some reason, my target isn’t taking it that way. He’s defiant.
Ugh. I didn’t want to believe this about him—but now what choice do I have? I was only trying to show him how much he should care, and look at how he went and took it.
Which means my contempt was justified.
If anything, I was too soft.
Let me now offer a much more dramatic experience from my own life—the first that showed me the full depth of what lives inside me. You might find that it works best when read at a meditative pace.
The trip
In this experience, I was taken back to a memory where I had ruthlessly mocked someone for having a different political opinion than me—an opinion that I knew was harmful. That’s how I knew it was okay to do this to him. My goal was to stop him, and also dissuade others from following. And if it didn’t do that, well, at least he’d be made to feel bad for being bad.
I was then shown how my behavior had impacted him. How my cruelty had only fed his cynicism about the world. And I somehow saw, clear as day, how it was this same cynicism that drove him to hold that harmful opinion in the first place.
I hadn’t made him better—I had made him worse.
Which meant that I couldn’t stop. If I let up and allowed him to reveal himself as fundamentally decent, then what would it say about how I’d been treating him? I couldn’t live with myself. So I had to do it more. I had to leave no doubt whatsoever that he really was as bad as I feared.
None of this knowledge was conscious, exactly. It occupied a bizarre state of mind, in which I knew yet somehow didn’t. I had somehow convinced myself that by holding it in limbo, I would never have to face it. That I could simply call it “unconscious” and forgive myself for it later.
I was then shown how foolish that was. Look, my mind commanded, the knowledge exists right here. It always has, and it always will.
It was pointing right at it. There was nothing I could do to deny it. The knowledge had been there all along. I saw the implication: just because I think I’ve gotten away with something doesn’t mean I have. It lives on in my psyche, influencing my behavior in ways I can’t quite see.
I felt profound guilt and shame. I realized I’m “that guy”—the one I’m sure is “what’s wrong with the world.” What kind of rotten person harms innocent others just to hide the fact that he is? Corrupts their minds, driving them toward more extreme beliefs, allowing me to judge them more? And what of all the harm he likely caused as a result?
I spent what felt like a lifetime in this hell, unable to forgive myself. Every instance of wrongdoing; every little thing I had been hiding from myself—and there were far more than I would have ever believed—came flooding back, forcing me to face my profound hypocrisy. The pain was unbearable.
Slowly it began to dawn on me: why do I feel so rotten? Why do I feel such profound guilt?
Why do I have to shield myself from my misbehavior in the first place? Produce justifications for it? Why don’t I have to do that with my good behavior?
The answer came in a flash: because I don’t actually want to cause harm. If I saw it clearly—fully, without any hiding—I simply could not do it. That’s why the hiding is necessary.
The revelation hit like lightning. Not as an idea or belief. Instead, the capacity to hide was simply stripped from me in that moment. Not by force, but by erasing all the pride, shame, fear… all that made me hide. And what remained—I can’t put it into words. The closest word I have is Love. Not as an emotion, or for any particular thing. But for all of it.
Every time I’ve felt the urge to act with full integrity—to be of service to all of Life; to act for the greatest good—it was but the faintest whiff of what I felt in that moment. It was self-evidently what exists beneath all the noise.
And that’s when it hit me: if a fundamentally decent person like me can cause malicious harm like this, how do I know that other people aren’t doing the same? That the people I consider “bad” aren’t just lost in a deeper version of the same trap?
I don’t.
But it was more than that. I revisited what felt like every act of bad behavior I had ever seen. Some of it I had long recognized as the result of people hiding from what they knew. But somehow, in this place, the hiding of even the worst people was laid bare. It wasn’t an inference, or something I was learning fresh. I had somehow always seen it—and yet chosen not to.
The motivation was obvious. It was the same reason I couldn’t see it in my political enemy, but magnified. Because if even the worst people of the world are ultimately just like me, what does that do to my worldview? If my behavior has been making the problem worse, what does that say about me? What leg does my arrogance have to stand on?
I saw clearly how the deeper a person was caught in this trap, the more it felt like they weren’t. Even as their behavior became more evil, and there was more knowledge of the harm it was causing, there was correspondingly more shielding—deeper limbo—making it feel increasingly righteous.
In the most extreme example—one that haunts me to this day—I was dropped into the experience of being maximally “turned away.” There was no perception at all of the decency of my victims. The life in them. They became objects—playthings. What remained was pure, unadulterated, predation. The malevolent joy of devouring innocence. And it was impossibly. Fucking. Delicious.
…
I next recalled looking into the eyes of “evil people.” That dehumanizing gaze. How it had always felt like they were absent or “turned away” from themselves. Now I finally recognized what I had been looking at. Why they had to “turn away” to do what they did.
The parallel with my earlier taunting of my enemy was impossible to miss. That terrifying predatory quality—it was identical in both cases, if vastly different in intensity. It carried the same flavor. That “righteous” enjoyment of causing harm.
Of course it had to feel righteous. Righteousness is what I actually wanted. The only way I was willing to turn away from it was if the counterfeit—the reasons I used to justify turning away—felt “righteous” too. The further I drifted, the more different the genuine and counterfeit felt—but only if I could compare them side-by-side. And yet the deeper I got lost, the less access I had to the real thing, so the less I could. No wonder it was so easy to lose one’s way.
The strangest thing is that none of this actually felt like new knowledge to me. I was simply remembering something I had always known—how all the horrors of the world were ultimately rooted in the same profound confusion. The same turning away. And it became obvious why I never let myself know it.
The knowledge that all the carnage of the world is caused by a mistake that I myself often make—and that my unkind behavior reinforces—is far too horrifying for my defended mind to handle. But as long as I avoid it, I have no choice but to treat evil as fundamentally alien to me—and to treat its perpetrators with contempt.
The lesson was clear: if I didn’t get back on the “right track,” I would continue adding to the burden of the world, even as I was flawlessly confident I was helping. And there was always the possibility that I would slip past the point of no return. A place where others would see me as irredeemably evil, and in their confusion, shove me deeper in while feeling righteous for it.
And what was this “right track”? It was astonishingly simple. All I had to do was stop hiding things from myself. Stop willfully overlooking the life in others—my profound commonality, equality with them.
Simple, perhaps, but far from easy. I knew it would be the work of a lifetime.
Now think back to what that second stranger did, and what it evoked in you.
He made it harder to run from what you already knew—and that reminded you that you didn’t want to.
But how?
Do you think he was running a mental story of what a good person he was? How virtuous? If he was, you would have detected it, right? And then would it have had the same effect?
He didn’t have to tell himself a story, unlike the first person. And it is the absence of a story that you detected. It’s how you knew he wasn’t running away himself. And he didn’t have to do anything to convey it—that absence conveyed itself too.
If either of the two people could be said to have “fought evil,” it’s clearly him. And yet where’s the evidence? There isn’t any. Nor does he even likely think of it that way, because he wasn’t looking at “evil.” He knows he was just seeing a form of confusion.
In the case of both strangers, something was transmitted—something difficult to pin down.
And this difficulty in pinning it down: it’s not an accident. It’s what allows the dark behavior to continue.
Think about what happens when we try to fight evil. We correctly identify that it requires being fierce—and then, almost without noticing, let it devolve into contempt. Almost.
And it’s not just a mistake that one particular “side” makes. It’s something we’ve collectively agreed isn’t a mistake at all. It’s righteous. Necessary.
That mistake—what might it be serving?
Chapter 3
There is nothing more primally, viscerally satisfying than violently punishing evil.
Pause and feel that—whether you’d consciously endorse the idea or recoil at it.
Now bring to mind someone who actually qualifies. Not a stranger who was rude to you, but someone whose harm was real. They could be from your own life, or maybe from the news.
Something in you wants them to know. Not just to be stopped—that isn’t enough. You want it to land on them, from the inside, what they are.
And how does it land on them? Do they back down—or do they treat it as a challenge and respond accordingly? You can see it strengthening their resolve, can’t you?
Why? Because they’re evil, obviously, and that’s just what evil does.
You were right about them. Which means you’re also right about whatever you (or perhaps someone less squeamish) must do to them.
You probably already know where this is going.
Look at what you’re actually showing them. I’ll use my own language for it, and you can see if you recognize yourself in any of it. You don’t have to admit it to anyone but yourself.
You think you know darkness? You think you’re the only one who can wield it?
*Let me show you real darkness. Watch how I—a good person—am going to get away with what I’m doing to you. How the whole world will cheer me on. I won’t even know I’ve done anything, and others will laud me as a hero—even though we both know that they, too, secretly know.
I’m only “fighting evil,” you see—and how could that ever be wrong?*
Sound familiar?
I haven’t “done anything.” Anything, that is, except license their darkness, so that I can taste that forbidden pleasure of violently punishing them for it. All so I can hide mine from myself.
How? By showing them that I am provoking theirs, while also hiding from myself that I am, so that I genuinely won’t have any idea that I was doing this.
The very idea will sound preposterous to me. Offensive even. Because, you see, I am a good person.
Of course, there’s one tiny problem: part of me knows.
In the moment, something in me registers my behavior as a bit underhanded. But so what, I tell myself, sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to fight evil.
But it’s not rules that I’m bending. My rules are what tell me not to be too harsh, or violent. But as we already saw, it wasn’t the harshness that was the problem. It was that “little something extra” I couldn’t help but inject into the interaction. The thing that revealed my darkness.
It’s my deep inner knowing that I’m violating. The one thing whose violation shows them that I am violating it. That’s what I’m counting on them to recognize—and I know they will, because at some level I know that’s how they got where they are in the first place.
How else would they recognize my darkness for what it is? Why else would it so reliably empower theirs?
I know all this. I just can’t afford to admit it.
On one level, I’m telling myself that I’m using my darkness to suppress theirs. Showing them what will happen if they don’t stop. Scaring them into abandoning theirs.
On a deeper level, I know I’m using mine to provoke theirs—but it’s still for a good cause. I’m not creating new evil, you see, just exposing what’s already there.
But deeper still, something far more insidious is happening. Mine is teaching theirs to ingratiate itself to them. Showing them that it’s controlling me; that even the so-called “good people” will embrace it when they can get away with it.
Proving to them that genuine goodness is a myth.
Something in me is doing everything in its power to prevent them from remembering that there’s another part of themselves that they might turn toward—a part they’ve long since forgotten about, at least at the conscious level.
Because if they did ever turn back toward it, then what would that make me?
So I cannot risk it.
This is how my darkness hides itself from me. By reminding me that the real problem exists “out there,” where it’s my righteous duty to viciously attack it.
We all know this is happening, on some level. It’s that common knowledge again. Which is also why we must never acknowledge that it is.
So the full message I’m communicating actually goes something like this:
You will be our sacrifice. The communal dumping ground for our collective shadow. I’m sorry to have to do this to you—but it’s the only way to keep our hands clean.
That certainly could convince someone to cozy up to their darkness, now couldn’t it?
None of this requires a decision. Nobody thinks: we will put the part of ourselves we can’t bear to see into this person. The arrangement depends on our not thinking it.
But check whether some part of you knows it anyway.
When the punishment feels a little too good. When you’re more interested in what they are than in what they did. When their getting worse feels strangely welcome.
You know. And then you turn away.
And when everyone turns away in the same direction, the knowledge doesn’t go anywhere. It just becomes the thing nobody can say.
Which means the person we’ve designated carries something for us. Not only their own harm, but ours. The part we couldn’t hold.
So consider what would happen if they changed.
Not surrendered. Not admitted anything. Just quietly became someone you could no longer see that way.
Something in you would resist it, wouldn’t it? Not because you’d doubt it. Because you’d suddenly have to confront something in yourself. Something we’d all really rather not ever have to face.
The most dangerous thing our enemies can do to us is not to attack.
It is to get better.
That is the one thing we must never allow.
Chapter 4
There’s a faculty we each have that lets us perceive the sacredness in each other and in our natural world. It’s what we’ve been calling “conscience”—and its job is so much subtler than just telling us “right” from “wrong.”
But this faculty can be obstructed, and in all of us it has been, to one degree or another. In its most extreme form we call this “evil.” It’s what’s behind all the devastation we see around us. Behind all the ways humans mistreat each other and our living planet.
Its true nature is a kind of absence, not a presence—and yet, as we saw, it still behaves as a presence. And this distinction isn’t just philosophical. It’s the reason fighting it is so difficult.
When we treat it as a mere absence, we don’t confront it with the directness or fierceness required of us. But when we see it as a real presence, we can’t help but treat its host with profound contempt—and we just saw where that leads. That is a trick it uses to license our own.
And notice what our darkness—this “presence”—benefits from. The darker the world as a whole gets, the more each of us feel justified in harboring a bit of our own. We tell ourselves it’s there to protect us; to help us fight the “real” darkness out there.
Which means that yours and mine ultimately want the same thing.
They’re not actually fighting each other. When I treat you with contempt, mine isn’t fighting yours. They are teaching each other how to gain deeper access to our minds. How to hide from us better. They are collaborating.
Now think of all the behavior that falls short of what we call “evil.” All the corruption, the self-serving agendas, all the self-deception people engage in to benefit themselves at the world’s expense.
Then think of how much we hate them for it. Not just their behaviors, but them. What does it enable in us?
I’ll tell you what it enables in me. I feel more justified in cheating the corporations and governments; in taking a bit more for myself because it’s nothing compared to what they’re doing.
It’s as if our dark parts are collaborating across vast distances.
So what to do about all this?
Here’s the secret: that faculty—the one that lets you perceive the life in others; your profound commonality with them—it’s not just a faculty you have. It’s what you most fundamentally are.
The darkness: it is a parasite. And like all parasites, it can be evicted.
The more I evict mine from myself, the more I recognize your behavior for what it is. The more I recognize you for what you are. The less I make the mistake of “righteously” empowering your parasite.
That’s what turns this whole thing around.
To whatever degree I don’t see this—to whatever degree I still believe that some people deserve my contempt—my darkness will continue to operate in my blind spots, creating more of itself in the world, even as I’m flawlessly convinced I’m fighting it.
That’s why everything comes down to seeing what I most fundamentally am.