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. Read this page first, because reading it straight through isn’t the best way to start.
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.
Three lengths
The book exists at three lengths, and you can stop after any of them.
The short book is the Preface, Chapter 1, the interlude after it, and Chapters 2 to 5. It runs about 60 pages. Chapter 5 says everything the book claims, once, with less evidence than each claim deserves. If you read nothing else, read to the end of Chapter 5.
The map, called Where This Goes, is the rest of the book in outline, about 64 pages: the same claims, walked through with more of the reasoning and evidence behind each one, in the order the finished book will follow. It’s scaffolding, and it won’t be in the final version. It’s here so you can see where the argument goes before it’s been fully built.
The appendices are for readers who want the machinery of the argument, the thinkers who came closest to it, and the religious and contemplative traditions that got here first.
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 actually do the things it asks, including the one that sends you out the door. The interlude sorts what you found into what you saw, what I make of it, and what I’m asking you to take on trust for now. Chapter 5 lays the whole argument out in one place, so you can see whether it holds together. After that you’ll know whether you want to read the map.
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.