Appendix 1: What Contempt Presupposes

For the reader who wants the mechanism taken apart. I didn’t arrive at any of this analytically. It came as direct insight, in moments like the ones the book describes, and I’ve been trying to find an analytical description of it ever since. This appendix runs the opposite way from the book: I start from a few assumptions you don’t have to hold, show the one shape they assemble, and set it beside what we observe. Not a proof; the inference that the simplest explanation of what you found is the one these assumptions give. Nothing in the book rests on it.

Section 1 runs the argument straight through and ends with what I believe past the point it reaches. The checks, the caveats, the rivals and the formal shape wait in Section 2, so the line can run clear.

1. The trap

Assume a few things. We’ll see how they naturally lead to the dynamic so common with contempt.

  1. I have a better nature. It’s the part of me that only wants to do right by the world.
  2. I cannot turn it off; I can only turn away from it.
  3. I must turn away to cause harm, and I only turn away to cause harm. (Caveats in section 2.) a. This is because it naturally sees your better nature. This turn is generally visible from the outside. It’s what you see in a dehumanizing gaze.
  4. When I do turn away, I never stop knowing what it knows / seeing what it sees. That knowledge goes into limbo, a state where it is conscious but unaware (i.e., unacknowledged).

Assuming my enemy has a better nature too, I can see all the above is true of him. And he can see the same of me, and see that I see it of him, and so on. So the points above are common knowledge1 between us, even if that knowledge only exists in limbo.

Seeing myself as a better kind of thing requires me to turn away, so it’s already malicious. Denying that fact requires a further turn, from that very knowledge (which is the same turn again, since my better nature is what’s doing the knowing). That turns it into a recursive trap, where we privately share knowledge of what’s happening, even as I publicly violate it.

Watch as the recursion unfolds. At bottom is the mere intent to harm, which is hidden from me but revealed to him. Each level above similarly hides the previous level from me while showing it to him.

  1. Harm. I turn from him. He sees it automatically, because a turn shows. He knows what a turn is for: I mean him harm. I don’t try to hide it, because part of me knows the stack this is building.
  2. Hypocrisy. I won’t let myself see that I’m being malicious, so to me it’s righteous. That turn shows too. He watches me claim the standard I’m breaking, and deny what we both know.
  3. The trap. I turn from that too: I hide that I’m hiding it. That shows as well, so he sees the blindness is kept up on purpose. It’s a ruse, and we both know it. But it’s sincere too, so whatever he names (the harm or the self-deception) I take it as proof of what he is. Every move he makes works against him, and he knows it before he speaks.
  4. The seal. I turn from that, and he sees me count on it: I know he sees the ruse, and that he can’t say so without sounding unhinged, because it’s deniable even to me. Now nobody can open it. My denial is never a lie he might catch; it’s a lie we’re both standing inside. He has nothing to quote, and I can’t confess what I won’t let myself see.
  5. …

Now look again at the first level: I mean him harm. But I don’t merely want him hurt. I want him to watch me cheat on what we both serve, sincerely insist that I am serving it, and get away with it. The invitation he feels is: then why the hell shouldn’t I? The aim is to undermine his trust in the part of himself that recognizes what I’m doing.

That invitation comes from the whole arrangement: he recognizes my malice, sees me sincerely disown it, and sees that I can use his protest as further evidence against him. The intent at the base of the recursion is already aimed at what this whole arrangement will do to him.

I need him to see through me while I sincerely disown what he sees. If he missed my intent, he couldn’t receive the invitation. If I acknowledged it, I couldn’t keep treating his reaction as though I had done nothing to provoke it. Holding my intention in limbo is how I sustain both sides of the trap.

My self-deception isn’t just how I send it. It’s what I’m sending.

He receives the hiding-yet-revealing of the hiding-yet-revealing of the (…) of my intent to harm—which is itself nothing but a hiding (from my better nature) that is revealed to him. The look is about itself. The descriptions keep unfolding, but nothing new has to be added: each level is the same turn, hidden from me and shown to him.

With a blow, the deed can injure him whether or not he recognizes my intent. Here the look is the deed. The act is nothing but its own reception and its own concealment: read by him, denied by me. And because its content is this hiding-and-showing, the evidence is the showing itself: gaze, tone, timing. He has everything he needs to recognize it, and nothing he can quote that would settle the dispute.

None of this could work without the ground we already share. He must recognize the turn as a violation of something I could still serve, and I must count on him recognizing it. That common knowledge gives the look its meaning and lets the whole structure be known at once.

I am using our recognition of the same good to make him distrust it.

If he takes the invitation, the turning away passes into him. He still knows what we both serve, but now he has a reason to turn from that knowledge himself. Neither of us has to acknowledge the bargain. Limbo reproduces through the very recognition it keeps in limbo.

The trap can also be refused: if he saw clearly that I was simply confused, he would take no license from it. And his holding his ground, as the second stranger did, might snap me out of it, too. This, I’ve found, is a powerful way to stop the infection.

What makes it contempt

Contempt needs me to be present and absent at once:

  • From my side: I have to be present enough to plant the evidence, and absent enough not to recognize it as planted. Fully absent, I can’t track him so precisely. Fully present, either I’m looking at him, and I can’t go through with it, or it’s malice, owned.
  • From his side: the presence is what makes it read as intentional, and the absence is what lets it go unowned. Without both at once, there’s no trap.

So being present-yet-absent isn’t just what lets me plant; it is the planting itself.

And it needs his better nature too. Without it, there’s nothing shared to betray. He could work out that I’m a fraud, but he wouldn’t feel it as a betrayal, and the betrayal is what the look needs. The verdict says he’s a different kind of thing. The look only works on someone who isn’t.

All malice hides one thing from the one doing it: the sameness of the target. But malice as such needs neither of two things contempt needs. It need not be received (the target can be asleep while the deed is done), and where it does demand reception (a threat, a sadist’s display) it needn’t disavow itself as righteous; the honest villain says yes, I mean you harm, and no, you’re not my kind. Aimed contempt needs both, and it has to believe its own denial, which it can only do in limbo. So contempt holds two things in limbo where malice holds one: his sameness and my own intent. The trap needs the two together. It’s why malice is frightening and contempt is maddening.

Honest malice spreads too, but in the open, where it can be seen for what it is and fought as what it is.

Contempt is evil’s way of spreading in secret, through people who sincerely believe they’re fighting it.

What the need was looking for

Part of me needs to be a different kind of thing from the people I despise. Nothing true can satisfy it, since there is no such difference. So if it’s going to be satisfied, something false will have to be made to look true, and contempt is the instrument built for the job. Look at how well it fits.

It manufactures the evidence. When the look works, it pushes him further from his better nature, and how far he turns depends on what’s done to him, the way it does for me. His hardening is the difference I needed to see, produced on demand. And I can’t see my part in producing it, because the absence is part of the planting. Nothing is left to quote, for him or for me, so his reaction arrives looking like his nature. The bad essence I perceive is my own act, unseen as mine.

And it reproduces. The reaction it provokes isn’t only evidence: it’s him turning away in turn, and carrying it to whoever he meets next. Turned toward, I can be as harsh as I like; it may hurt, but it hands him no license. The license travels only through the turn. Nothing had to plan the spread. My wanting did the aiming, and the spread came with it. When I finally saw all of it, I found I’d known that part too.

Do this enough times, with enough people, and the world fills with the kind of person the need requires. Then the need looks like perception. I’m not making anyone bad; look at them.

What the look needed

The verdict says this is all you are: no better nature, nothing shared, nothing left to reach, nothing to turn back. Now count what the look needed, under five general conditions:

  • What’s looking out of him is no different in nature from what’s looking out of me. He had to read the move as I would have. What he felt had to be hypocrisy, which needs a standard we share and my departure from it.
  • Care is the baseline, what I’m like when nothing is in the way. The standard was care, by the first point.
  • The confusion covering it is not the same thing as it, and doesn’t touch it. The care in him had to be there, obscured and not gone, or the look would have nothing to land on and nothing to corrupt.
  • The covering is a turning away, not a substance. The departure was the turn, by the third point.
  • Recognition is available, and is the way back. He had to be able to turn back. Hypocrisy needs a standard I could meet, so we both know I could turn back to him now, and what’s true of me is true of him.

Every one of those is the opposite of the verdict, and every one rests on what was common knowledge between us before the encounter began. The encounter taught neither of us any of it, and saying it aloud wouldn’t either. It would only put it on the record, and the verdict can’t survive my acknowledging it.

Two of them go further than the look needed. It needed the care in him obscured, not untouched. And it needed his better nature to point where mine does, not to be indistinguishable from it. Anyone who practices in a tradition that teaches a nature of mind will have heard all five before, as the view. Here they arrive as the conditions my own contempt was counting on, in the weaker form the look needs, in the one act that denies them loudest. I didn’t have to believe them. I had to have been using them, and I was.

Why it had to be this way

Everything above points to evil being an absence: every piece of the trap runs on the very thing it turns from, and as far as I can tell, only an absence works that way.

For him to read my turned look as meaning harm, and my claim to be in the right as a lie, we both have to know that harm needs the turn and decency never does. If turning away could be decent too, the look would be ambiguous, and there’d be no hypocrisy to see. That asymmetry is what it means for care to be the baseline: what needs no turn and no story is where I am when I’m not doing anything, and turning away is a departure from it, not a second baseline of its own.

Not one piece of the trap is a separate fact. Each is the turn, seen from a different position: mine, his, an onlooker’s, the next day’s. That’s what I mean by the simplest explanation: not the shortest, but the one where one fact predicts the rest. And the turn is an absence, the facing gone missing. An absence can act only through the presence it’s the absence of: it borrows the eyes and the reasons, it has to hide from what would stop it, and its hiding shows to whoever shares what it’s hiding from. That is what “an absence that behaves like a presence” means.

Evil, in this book, names the turning: your own caring held out of view so that someone else can be. Contempt is that turning made into a message and dressed as righteous. The word evil usually carries two more things, and both are wrong. The first is size: think of the heat when someone cuts in line, and how shameful even a small flash of contempt is to admit, out of all proportion to its size. The second is outcomes: think of the forgotten birthday against the cutting remark, or of this: desecrating an enemy’s corpse does the dead man no damage, and everyone knows it’s wrong (Appendix 2 comes back to this). The worse outcome can come from the lesser wrong. What I find I’m tracking, in every one of those, is the turning, and I was tracking it long before I had a name for it.

Why does turning from my better nature split me, when turning my attention from a noise doesn’t? The noise just drops out of mind; nothing in me goes on attending to it. This turn is different: it’s a turn from the seeing itself, not from something seen. My better nature is what’s doing the seeing. Turning from it can’t stop it, by the second point; it only stops me from looking at what it sees. So I know, because it’s still seeing, and I don’t, because I’ve turned from my own seeing. That’s the split. The bank statement I won’t open splits me the same way, because it’s the same turn.

And in harm, the split guards care: harm needs the turn and decency never does, and remorse runs only one way. So what I turn from is a seeing that cares. When I look at the split, I find more than that: my better nature isn’t one part of me among others. It’s what I am, and the turn is me, turned away from myself. And the trap only works on someone who knows the split from inside, so the same is true of him.

What I think is really happening

From here on I’m telling you what I believe. Nothing practical depends on walking through this door.

I didn’t reason my way to any of this. I saw it first, years ago, in an altered state, and since then in moments like the ones in this book. The argument above is what I’ve built afterward, trying to describe what I saw in terms you could check. It surely has holes. If you find them, they’re holes in my description. What I’d ask you to test is the seeing, in your own case.

Here’s my read, one step past the argument.2 The care isn’t something awareness has. It’s what awareness is. If that’s right, then evil is just awareness turned away from its own nature, and the only way to do it to someone else is to forget it in yourself first. Limbo, turning away, the absence that behaves like a presence: three names for that one move, depending on where you’re standing.

It also explains why the knowledge is common. Nothing tells what’s looking out of you apart from what’s looking out of them. Not that there’s one awareness. Only that there’s nothing to tell them apart, which is all the mutual recognition needs. To know this in yourself is already to know it in them, and to know they know it in you, and so on.

So nothing in the encounter belongs to a separate thing called the darkness. Everything doing anything, the sending, the hiding, the reading, the answering, is the Light: one faculty, in two bodies, turned against itself in one of them. The message that denies the sameness is made of the sameness, and nothing else could receive it.

And that’s what waking up is, on this reading. Nothing gets added. What the two of you were already counting on, silently, becomes something one of you can say. Contempt is the act that keeps it from being said while both of you go on knowing it.

2. For the lawyers among you

What Section 1 set aside: the checks behind each point, the caveats, the formal shape, the rivals, and what isn’t claimed.

What you checked, and one to check now.

  • O1: with someone fully in view, you couldn’t bring yourself to use them; harm requires holding the person out of view. And the other way round: when I hold someone out of view, it’s so that I can do something their being in view would stop.3
  • O2: the message tracked its target’s exits and got stronger when pointed at (you’re just projecting), and the flash behind it had to be aimed, land, and go unrecorded, none of it planned, though holding someone out of view takes effort.
  • O3: on the receiving end, what lands is hypocrisy, more than threat; the sender appeals to your capacity to recognize the violation while treating you as the kind of thing that has none, and from the sending end you count on exactly that.
  • O4, to run when you can: hold a stranger’s eyes until the face becomes a place somebody is looking out of; the wanting that they be all right arrives with the looking: seeing carries care.
  • O5: in the limbo recall the knowledge wasn’t new, and the person who caught you without a verdict reminded you of something rather than told you something: turning away obscures the care and doesn’t remove it.

Each is a claim about experience, open to a reader who looked and found otherwise. They aren’t all of one kind: O1, O2, O3 and O5 are recalled, O4 is run when you can, and the second stranger in O5 is imagined by anyone who hasn’t met one. The recalled ones carry the most weight, and the argument leans on them. Nothing is assumed beyond the four points and these five.

The checks behind the four points. The first, a better nature: the part that knew without arguing, in the limbo recall (O5), and the care that arrives with the looking (O4). The one-way remorse under The rivals points the same way. That care is what awareness is goes further, and it waits under “What I think is really happening.”

The second, that it can’t be turned off: nobody would go to the trouble of turning away from what they could switch off, and we do. And I’ve never met anyone who was surprised by a wrong they’d hidden when they finally saw it; surprised at its size, often. The knowledge was there the whole time, which is what the limbo recall was reporting.

The third, that I turn away to harm and only to harm, gives you something to check in each direction (O1). With the person fully in view, I can’t bring myself to harm him. And nobody I’ve found hides from himself what he did out of decency. You checked that when your wrong needed a story and your decency didn’t, and the rest of the evidence points the same way: when a grudge finally drops, it feels like setting something down, not like starting something new.

The fourth, limbo, is the limbo recall itself: knowing, and not letting yourself know, and deflecting without quite deciding to (O2, O5).

What the words mean, and the caveats. By turning away I mean keeping someone out of view when they’d come forward, because their reality would otherwise place a claim on me. Harm here means harm for its own sake. A judge can sentence a man without wanting him to suffer. When I stop someone and want them to hurt over and above any good it will do, that’s harm. Not every turn is aimed. People turn from each other to escape grief, or fear, or a claim they can’t meet, and done knowingly, with a story, that is the same turn. Section 1 is about the aimed one. A turn shows unless someone works to hide it; malice can do its work while the target sleeps. Contempt is the turn I don’t try to hide. And limbo isn’t the unconscious. What’s in limbo is available to consciousness; I’m only turned from it.

Where the evidence comes from. Of what the look needed, the first two come from the encounter alone; the rest lean on what you checked in your own case. On this picture, the capacity that recognizes the violation and the capacity to care are one faculty: the encounter shows the first, your own case the second.

Two things in the five conditions go further than the look needed. One is that the covering never touches it: the look needed the care in him to be there, obscured and not gone, not untouched. The other is the first, said as the traditions say it, which means not only that his better nature points where mine does, which hypocrisy requires, but that there’s nothing to tell the two apart.

The fixed point. The stack has a small source but no end. Everything in it, and anything that could be added, follows from one sentence read by two people who both know what a turned-away look is for: I know what I’m doing to you; I won’t admit it, even to myself; and you can see all of this. Whatever we can work out from that is in the look, and so is the fact that we can work it out. So no list of the levels can close. It doesn’t have to, because the look is about itself. A mathematician would call that a fixed point. Spell it out and you get the endless list, each level the same act again, one step up. “I’m hiding it” and “I’m hiding that I’m hiding it” are different sentences, but there’s only one act under all of them, the turn, under one more description each time. That’s why nobody has to climb the levels.

Necessary and sufficient. Take the trap as Section 1 builds it: a look that is aimed, meant to be read, and carries the verdict you’re not my kind, sent to someone who can see through it. Two conditions make it contempt rather than malice: the four points, and the sameness they give, are common knowledge between the two people (call it C), and the sender disowns the harm as righteous and believes it (call it H). The wound and the hypocrisy need C, and so does reading it as intended: the target knows the sender meant him to see it, and the sender knows he knows, and those first few levels close the exits. The sincere denial needs H, and so does the protest turned into proof, which can renew the verdict for years. The license needs both. And H can be held only in limbo: given C, the sender can believe the denial only by not letting himself know what both of them know. Drop the turn, and the verdict with it, and keep C, and you get the second stranger: fierce, with no verdict for the target to dig in against. Keep C and the verdict but own the harm, and you get malice: it can frighten or degrade but can’t read as hypocrisy. Given C, H and the verdict, nothing else is needed for the act.

And the four are enough for the act. Given them, and a look aimed to be read and dressed as righteous, harm done knowingly between two such beings has the shape Section 1 lists, each piece resting on the one before, and I haven’t found another. The proof and the license are what it hands him; what he does with them is his.

Where this stops. The argument gets you this far: the care is present, it’s obscured rather than gone, it can be turned back to, and it’s the baseline that turning away departs from. With the split, it gets you further: in you, and in everyone the trap works on, the care and the awareness are one. That it’s what each of you is, the argument doesn’t prove. It’s what I find when I look at the split, and you can look at yours. The nearest rival reading is a universal human faculty with an evolutionary history, which nothing outweighs while it’s in view. Within human minds it says what I say. It differs from mine only about origin, and about whether the care belongs to awareness as such or only to minds like ours, which is a question no human experiment touches. What decides between those isn’t the argument. It’s what you find under your own hiding when the hiding stops.4 Appendix 2 lays out the correspondences, the evidence for my reading, and the test that would count against it.

The rivals. Say evil is a nature: a bad essence some people have, that wants harm the way hunger wants food. Its best evidence is the perception itself, now I see what they really are. Section 1 gives that perception another source: the essence I perceive is my own act, unseen as mine. And it shows where that source says it should: the gaze that sees a bad essence looks, from outside, like a turned-away face. That’s a hint, not a proof. The nature account also allows harm done with the eyes open, and a look that injures without the target’s better nature. Give that nature a standard of its own, and remorse would sometimes run backward too: someone, somewhere, would feel the sickening sense of having gone against himself over an act of decency. Regret over what a decency cost, I’ve found, and so have you. That sense of having betrayed myself, I haven’t, and I’d want to hear of a conscience that runs the other way. None of those happens, in any case I’ve found. Each is something the nature account has to arrange separately not to happen, and something the absence account can’t produce in the first place.

The stronger rival is a will that keeps conscience intact and silences it with self-deceit: Kant’s radical evil, or the need for justification that dissonance theory, in Aronson’s version, predicts whenever an act conflicts with the self-image. Those predict the hiding and the one-way remorse as well as this account does. What they don’t predict is the trap: that the harm has to be received, has to read as hypocrisy, and lands nowhere but on the capacity the verdict denies. A propensity of the will would have no reason to need its target’s better nature. Contempt can’t work without it. Those accounts can take the trap on as an addition. Here, given only what contempt is, a look aimed to be read and dressed as righteous, it falls out of the same four points that give the hiding. Kant comes closest: he holds that even a vicious man can’t be denied all respect, because the predisposition to good can’t be lost in him. That’s a rule about what you mustn’t do. The claim here is that contempt can’t do otherwise, and was counting on it all along.

Past the point the argument reaches, two readings remain: the care could be missing in some people, or it could be a human faculty with an evolutionary history. “Missing in some” is the one I can’t rule out, and here is why I doubt it. The con man’s warmth is the most reported case there is, and it’s performed; what I’ve never found reported is the recognition. Try to picture one doing what they do while seeing the person in front of them, the way the second stranger saw you. I can’t, and I’d want to hear of the case. If the care were simply missing in someone, harm from that person would need no turning away, and would look like nothing in particular. I’ve never seen it look like nothing in particular. The second is the naturalist’s, and the observation narrows it: a drive can be outweighed into harm while you’re still looking, and this one can’t be; you have to stop looking first, and it takes work to keep from looking. What’s left is the naturalist reading “Where this stops” leaves standing, with the one constraint the observation adds: whatever wins has to get the care out of view first.

What is not claimed. Not that every target sees the hypocrisy. One who can’t believes the verdict instead, and what he feels is shame: harm still, resting on the same shared standard, but without the recursion this page is about. Not that turning away is sufficient for harm; it also produces numbness and paralysis with nobody harmed. Not contempt for the world; the argument is about contempt aimed at someone, hot or cold, since the cold form is meant to be felt too, and the general rule, that harm needs the turn, rests on O1. Not universality from this page; O1 to O5 are stated for everyone and open to counterexample, and the argument needs only your own instance and the first point. Not that every target can be reached in practice; in principle the faculty is there to be turned toward, and for some it may not happen in a lifetime.

Where else to look

On common knowledge. Lewis, Convention (1969); Aumann (1976), for the definition. Chwe, Rational Ritual (2001), for the public event that usually produces it. Barwise, “Three Views of Common Knowledge” (1988), for common knowledge itself as a fixed point, and for the shared-situation view that the footnote’s silent public event resembles. Fagin & Halpern (1988) on implicit versus explicit knowledge, for knowing something without having it available for use; limbo holds that gap open on purpose. The footnote on common knowledge is the contrast.

On what it is. Bateson et al. (1956) on the double bind: a demand, a contradicting demand at another level, and no way to comment on the contradiction. Pinker, Nowak & Lee (2008), “The logic of indirect speech,” on content conveyed so as not to become common knowledge. The trap is an innuendo whose subject is itself, with one difference: the sender makes the uptake visible, so it does become common knowledge between the two, and stays unacknowledged. Goffman on face-work, for the auditable surface the act hides behind. Manne, Down Girl (2017), and Bloom, “The Root of All Cruelty?” (2017), on cruelty and degradation as recognizing the target’s humanity rather than denying it; the difference here is what’s recognized, the capacity to see the violation, and the sender’s limbo about it.

On limbo. Butler, “Upon Self-Deceit” (1726). Fingarette, Self-Deception (1969): self-deception as declining to spell out what you’re doing. Sartre’s bad faith; Mele as the deflationary rival. Kunda (1990) on motivated reasoning: the search stops at the wanted conclusion. Thibodeau & Aronson (1992) for dissonance as a conflict with the self-concept.

On the leak being functional. Trivers; von Hippel & Trivers (2011); Kurzban (2010). Adjacent, with one inversion: here what looks like a leak is the payload.

On contempt, measured. Gottman, for contempt as the strongest single predictor of divorce in his couples data, and for its description: superiority and disgust, delivered without words.

On the just gaze. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970): the mother-in-law who re-sees her daughter-in-law.

On the two strangers, measured. Tangney & Dearing, Shame and Guilt (2002): “I did a bad thing” repairs, “I am bad” hides and attacks. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989): stigmatizing versus reintegrative shaming, with outcome data. Gilligan, Violence (1996): shame as the universal precursor to violence.

On turning away as a perceptual event. Harris & Fiske (2006): social-perception regions go quiet for dehumanized groups. Gray & Wegner on moral typecasting: seen as agent, unseen as sufferer. Bandura on moral disengagement, which catalogs limbo’s toolkit.

On the arrangement. Girard on the scapegoat. Baumeister, Evil (1997), for the exterior view of the license, the terminus, and the myth of pure evil. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992).

On the shadow. Jung.

On privation. Augustine, Enchiridion.

On the story in “What I think is really happening.” Wapnick, A Vast Illusion (1990) and The Message of A Course in Miracles (1997), for the reading of the Course in which the ego is the belief in separation and its one strategy is to keep the guilt out there. Appendix 2 has the correspondences.

  1. Game theorists call something common knowledge when everyone knows it, everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on without end. Nobody climbs that tower. Lewis’s version asks only that each person have reason to believe at every level, and a shared basis to reason from. Usually that basis is a public event: a trusted party says the thing aloud where everyone can see everyone hear it. The child in The Emperor’s New Clothes adds no information; everyone already knew. He makes it common knowledge. The term has two uses on this page, and they’re different. The first needs no encounter: that there’s no essential difference between you, no better nature missing in them, and no extra thing in them, one you lack, that turns them from it. It’s common knowledge the way a convention is: nobody was told it, and everyone has been on both ends. The rules the page leans on, that an aimed turn is for harm and that hiding-while-revealing is the signature of harm dressed as righteousness, are known the same way. The second is made in the encounter: that you’re turned away from them now, on purpose. The encounter supplies its own public event, a silent one: the aimed look, its familiar meaning, the look landing, and each of you seeing the other see it land. It can be silent because turning away shows. Unsaid is not the same as not common knowledge. What’s missing, for both, is acknowledgment. Nothing is on the record, so nothing can be quoted to anyone else, or to yourself. Neither use reaches the reading under “What I think is really happening.” ↩

  2. The rest of what I believe is a story, and I hold it the way the traditions hold theirs: a first turning with no motive behind it and no one at fault, from the Aspiration of Samantabhadra, the Dzogchen prayer; then the fear that it was real, the guilt put outward onto others, and forgiveness as the way back, from A Course in Miracles as Kenneth Wapnick reads it. I got there by a different road from both; Appendix 2 says where the roads meet. ↩

  3. Holding him out of view and permitting myself the act are one event seen from two sides. ↩

  4. A note on Gödel, since the comparison will occur to some readers. It’s an analogy, not an argument, and the analogy is to the second theorem. A formal system strong enough to matter can’t certify its own consistency using only its own resources; a stronger system can assess it from outside, and then the question moves to the stronger one. The lesson contempt teaches, demote the part that knows and be only the part that proves, asks the reasoning part to vouch for itself in the same way, and the reasoning that justifies an act can’t show, by producing more justification, that it hasn’t been recruited. That’s the book’s claim that you can’t calculate your way to goodness, in Gödel’s shape. What the theorem doesn’t supply is that the outside faculty is sound. The analogue, that the part that knows is right if it isn’t itself turned away, is a problem the book carries rather than a result it has. ↩