Start here

This is a book in progress, and what you’re looking at is the working draft. It’s here so that people I trust can read it before it’s finished and tell me where it fails. If that’s you, thank you.

What it’s about

This is a book about contempt: what happens when you decide that a person isn’t just somebody who did a bad thing but a bad person, and what that decision does to them, to you, and to everyone who’s watching. The book claims three things. That this one move is what we’ve always meant by the word evil. That it depends on a state of mind you can catch yourself in. And that the one stance that doesn’t reproduce it is one most of us were taught to see as weakness. I don’t ask you to accept any of that up front. The first chapter asks you to look at your own memory, and everything after it is built from what you find there.

What’s here

The condensed book is the whole argument in five chapters, followed by the picture I use, an exercise for the far end, and an epilogue about what I saw. It runs about 72 pages. The full book, which I’m still writing, will be longer: it takes each step more slowly, with more cases, the finer distinctions, and the places where the account could fail.

The appendices are the machinery of the argument, the religious and contemplative traditions that got here first, and the thinkers who came closest to it.

One file, if you’d rather read away from a browser: download the condensed book and the appendices as an EPUB, a PDF, or plain text.

How to read it

Read it in order and stop whenever you like. Chapter 1 does most of the work: give it your full attention, and do the things it asks. The picture I use and the epilogue go past what you can check, and they say so.

The menu on the left follows this order.

Three kinds of claim

Some things in this book you can check against your own memory before you’ve finished reading the sentence. Some are conclusions I draw from what you checked. And some are things I believe, which I arrived at in ways I can’t pass on to you. The book says which is which, every time the kind of claim changes. Those markers say where the checking stops. They don’t say anything about who is allowed past that point.

If I’ve asked you for feedback

The most useful thing you can tell me is where you looked and didn’t find what I said you’d find. That’s a finding, and it counts against me. The second most useful is where you stopped reading, and why. Everything else is welcome, but those two I can’t get any other way.

A note on the writing

Parts of this draft, including this page, were written with an AI assistant working from my notes and under my direction, and those parts say so where they begin. The claims are mine, and so are the mistakes.