Preface
For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes. … It is powerful because we have not recognized it. — The Gospel of Philip
Much of what we do to fight evil only makes it stronger.
The mistake behind this is one each of us is making, almost constantly, in ways that don’t feel harmful at all. Usually it feels like the opposite—like decency, or clarity, or being right. That confusion accumulates into the mess we call “what’s wrong with the world,” which we’re then forced to fight even harder.
This isn’t just about individual behavior. It’s about how this mistake creeps into everything we do, including the systems we build—which then reproduce what we were sure we were fighting.
Do we know we’re making this mistake? Yes and no. On some level we all know it—but bringing it into full awareness would threaten something deep within, so we refuse it.
If I’m right, then everything I’m about to say is something you already know. Which means I can’t argue you into it—and you should be suspicious of anyone who tries. All I can do is ask that you check it against your own experience. If you recognize it, that’s the evidence.
It’s easier to get a sense of this at the individual level, so let’s start there.
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.
So that 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 revealing 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?
Now 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? It couldn’t say exactly how it knew, but 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.
And yet, despite “losing” that battle, notice that it never budged an inch. It quietly kept 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 it?
How much of our behavior might be taking place from limbo? By its very nature, it’s not the kind of thing we’d easily recognize or willingly remember.
And if you had to enter it for even small misbehaviors, how much the more so for the big ones?
Would those be easier to recall, or harder?
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 this situation 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 kind of 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?
Now imagine a different stranger had caught you—but instead of treating you with contempt, this one treated you with dignity. 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?
So 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?
It’s like he was reminding you of something: that you’re better than this. You didn’t have to vindicate your character. Meanwhile, the first stranger was claiming that this is all you are.
It’s almost as if this one was giving voice to your own conscience. You knew you couldn’t win against it—and more importantly, you didn’t want to.
And that doesn’t feel like harm.
Both people may have stopped your misbehavior, and so both can claim 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. 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 in perspective will inform your decision. Maybe you make the “wrong” choice. But it won’t feel wrong. It will just feel like what you must do to protect yourself in this 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
So what exactly was the first stranger doing, and why did it cause harm?
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?
And it’s worse than that. Contempt doesn’t just permit harm against someone who already deserves it. It actively turns them into the kind of person who does.
Could you sense it happening? Go back and try. Deny it, and you’re exactly the kind of person who denies it. Get angry, and there it is—proof. Stay calm, and you don’t even care. Apologize, and it’s a little too convenient.
Every road funnels into one conclusion.
We all know this is how it works, on some level. But did he know that while he was doing it?
On one hand, it certainly felt intentional, didn’t it? Something about his tone and gaze gave it away instantly, even if his words didn’t. And it did that without you knowing anything else about him.
How can he so precisely use your behavior against you accidentally? 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.
On the other hand, how could it be fully conscious? 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 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 couldn’t feel like a need; it just felt obviously true.
And yet his behavior couldn’t have been fully unconscious either. Not only does that make it hard to do, but he’d be embarrassed or confused if you pointed it out. And yet that’s not what would have happened. It would have intensified, in exactly the way needed to keep itself hidden.
What does that sound like to you?
Limbo. He knew, and he didn’t.
He was judging you from the very state he was judging you for—and you could sense that.
Which is why you could sense he was up to no good by his own lights. Nobody enters limbo because they’re doing something they feel is right. They do it because they sense it’s wrong.
But what was “wrong” about it to him? 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.
At the same time, why is he working so hard to prove something he supposedly already knows? Because something in him isn’t buying it. He can’t hear what it’s saying, exactly. He just knows he has to quiet it.
At some level, he knows he can’t actually silence his conscience—the part warning him it’s wrong somehow. But he can damn well try.
So he does what he must: tries to prove 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 wanted to.
He doesn’t have much left to work with. Nothing that can be audited. That leaves… what? His tone; his gaze; his mannerisms. 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 were critical. Together they’re what made it so maddening.
If it had looked unintentional, you might have forgiven or pitied him instead. That wouldn’t have given him what he (or at least 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? Relieved the tension.
So that precise combination: appearing intentional—as though 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.
In other words, in addition to being in limbo, he had to telegraph to you that he was.
But how the heck do you intentionally telegraph a state that, by definition, you cannot be fully aware that you’re in?
Let’s zoom out.
Whatever it is, it seems intentional; goal-driven. And it presents itself as such to you while hiding itself from him. And even stranger than that: not just while hiding itself from him. It must reveal 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 clearly must be.
We can call it a part of him. I’ll call it his “dark” part, or just his “darkness”—both because it’s hidden from him, and because of what you’re about to see.
This part of him is counting on you to recognize it for what it is—and you do, instantly.
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. We’ve watched our enemies squirm under our “righteous” gaze, half-knowing that their reaction to it will convict them, not us.
Which tells you something. 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.
And he knows you know it. Again: why?
Because we all know it. And we all know that everyone knows that. And we all know that…
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.
It is common knowledge. His whole approach depends on it. He doesn’t have to communicate it in words—he only has to point.
And yet we act as if we don’t know it. That, too, is required.
Why might we want to do that?
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, don’t actually want to turn away from it, but sometimes feel like there’s no better choice?
It would mean that they’re redeemable, and that your contempt for them has only been making them worse—all for the “benefit” of proving that you’re nothing alike.
Hell no. That just can’t be.
And that’s what this whole process relies on.
His darkness is evoking this common knowledge in a way that renders it totally unmistakable, and 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 more important than anything that can.
Could you have named it out loud? What would have happened if you tried?
And you both knew that, too.
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 to face 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 engage in that very behavior right now.
Which forces him to overlook your commonality 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. Which you clearly sense, threatening to expose the whole ruse.
Which forces him to overlook your commonality even harder…
The Taunt
There is no natural stopping point—because as much as he tries, he never stops hearing his conscience. And the worse you become, the more he’s forced to see this plan all the way through. To push you all the way to the end, where no doubt is left. Where (he believes) his conscience will finally bend itself to his perception.
Or, to see it from the other side: he’s sure he sees darkness in you—and he knows how evasive the darkness is, because he has firsthand knowledge of it. And he’s not going to simply let it get away. At some level, he registers that what he’s doing is underhanded. But sometimes you have to get your hands a bit dirty to fight evil…
Which is why it feels so good. Not the harming—he’d never allow himself that. But 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.
By turning away from his conscience and remaining so, it’s as if he 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.
Here’s what it communicates:
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.
I am going to provoke you until you become the very thing I need you to be. And when I’m finally forced to do 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 good luck proving it.
Which you know but cannot prove. Which turns you into what he needs you to be.
Which is the “what I’m doing to you” that he was doing to you. But good luck proving it.
His darkness: it is seducing you—turning you away from what you know and toward what you can prove. Making you 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. Even if we’ve never felt the full weight of it before. And it works precisely because we all know it, but cannot prove it. The glance only has to point at 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 something 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 we don’t—then fuck it. Game on.
That’s how you learn to do it too. How 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.
Your conscience slowly becomes just another voice among the noise.
The one faculty you have to detect this corruption of your mind—it has just been demoted. But the thing is, it doesn’t feel like a loss at all. It feels like you’ve gotten a bit wiser. A little less naive about how this world really operates.
Which happens to be exactly what your dark part needs to justify itself.
And watch what happens 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?
What do we call people who obviously want to cause harm—especially when pretending it’s good? How do we 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.
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.
Which is why we never recognize it operating in ourselves. It hides itself perfectly from our own minds while revealing itself to others, provoking them into attacking us for it so that ours can hide itself better.
That’s what our contempt is. And it only works because we all know this, at some level, but cannot name it.
We each benefit from keeping this knowledge hidden. Or rather, part of us benefits.
The world has gotten slightly worse as a result of this interaction, and yet there’s not a trace of evidence of anything wrong ever having happened.
It’s not that the deeper part of you has been silenced. That’s not how it works.
It’s still there, 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 you already know 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 reveal it for what it really is.
It’s a public service. The least I can do.
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.
Now the kid gloves must come off.
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.
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. It had always felt like they were somehow 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 may have been a million times weaker there, but it was unmistakably the same thing. 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—you just knew.
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.
In both cases, 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.
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.
What do you think that mistake is serving?