Appendix 3: What Others Have Seen
This appendix was written mostly by Claude, an AI.
Most of what this book concludes is old. I want to say that plainly, because a reader who knows the territory will have spent the whole book waiting for me to admit it.
Evil as an absence of good rather than a substance: Augustine. Ignorance as its root: the Buddhists, and half of Greek philosophy. Nobody knowingly chooses the bad while seeing it clearly: Socrates. We push what we can’t stand about ourselves onto other people: Jung. Groups need their victims guilty: Girard. Attention is where the moral work happens: Murdoch. Terrible things get done by people who aren’t monsters: Arendt.
If those are the conclusions, I haven’t discovered anything.
What I think is new is smaller and lives underneath them: what actually passes between two people during a single act of contempt, and why that transaction reproduces itself. So the useful thing I can do here is go through the neighbours one at a time, say what each of them saw, and say exactly where each stops. The stopping places turn out to be interesting, because most of them stop at the same line.
One rule binds what follows, and the book’s own claim is what binds it. Each of them gets the strongest version of what they saw. An uncharitable reading of a predecessor is the thing this book is about, in its most respectable clothes, and I’ve caught myself at it in earlier drafts of this very appendix.
Jung got the disowning. We refuse a part of ourselves, and then we find it, vividly, in somebody else, and we hate it there with a heat that has nothing to do with them. Nothing in this book improves on that as a description of what’s happening inside one person.
Where it stops is on the other side of the exchange. The Jungians knew a projection needs a hook, something real in the other person for it to catch on; von Franz is clearest about it. But the hook only receives. It doesn’t say what the person on the receiving end is doing, or how they know. And the thing I keep running into is that the person on the receiving end knows. Instantly, and without being told. That’s not a fact about your unconscious. It’s a fact about what got transmitted.
Girard got the arrangement. The crowd needs its victim to be guilty; the violence is contagious; the peace afterward is real and is bought with somebody. He also saw that the participants cannot know what they’re doing and have it still work, which is close to the structural point I’ve been making about limbo, at the scale of a mob.
He had the pair, too, before the crowd. Mimetic rivalry starts with two people wanting the same thing, and as it escalates they become each other’s doubles, each seeing a monster in the other and blind to the likeness. That is very close to what this book describes. Where it stops is the knowing. Girard’s rivals don’t recognize their sameness; in what I’m describing, both know it, and the verdict works only because they do. And his scapegoat is guilty only in the crowd’s eyes; the finger could have landed on anyone who bore the right marks. In what I’m describing, the target isn’t arbitrary and isn’t only selected. He’s produced: provoked into supplying the evidence, so the verdict comes out true.
Arendt got the not-looking, and named it better than I have. “Thoughtlessness” is exactly right, and her insistence that this needn’t come with monstrous intent is what makes the whole subject approachable.
But she treats thoughtlessness as an absence, a failure to do something. She doesn’t ask what’s holding it in place, or why it shows up precisely where a person would otherwise have to see something unbearable. That’s the question this book is built on. Her material is also almost entirely the cold kind: bureaucratic, procedural, at a desk. The hot kind, a man in your face who needs you to be worthless, doesn’t appear.
Baumeister got the outside view, comprehensively. Perpetrators almost never see themselves as evil. Victims and perpetrators remember the same event differently, in the same directions, with great regularity. Revenge escalates. The “myth of pure evil” is his phrase and it’s the right one.
What he’s written is a catalogue of how people get there. What I’m after is what happens in the room: what one person shows another, without saying it, and what the other does with it. That’s a different question, and I don’t think his answers it.
Bandura got the machinery, in more detail than anyone: euphemism, displacement, diffusion, minimising, victim-blaming, dehumanisation. If you want the list of moves, it’s his.
His moves are described as techniques a person uses. Mine is a single act, not a list: a turning-away that requires and produces all of them. I think his catalogue is the shape that one act makes when you observe it from outside and write down what you see.
Braithwaite got the two people who caught you. Shaming that condemns the act while keeping the person inside the circle produces reform; shaming that converts the act into an identity produces recidivism and criminal subcultures. That is the two strangers, tested in the criminal justice system with encouraging and mixed results, and I should have found it years earlier than I did.
Where it stops is the why. He shows that stigmatising shaming makes people worse. He doesn’t say what stigmatising shaming is: what passes through it, why it’s the one form of harm that leaves no evidence, or why the person delivering it can’t see what he’s doing. That’s most of this book.
Murdoch is the ground, and the one I found last. For her the moral work is not in choosing. It’s in looking, in whether you can see another person as they actually are, rather than through the story your own self-regard is telling. She thought the fantasy comes first and corrupts perception, and that by the time you get to a choice, the important thing has already happened.
That is the ground this book stands on, laid fifty years earlier, by a better philosopher. It isn’t the book’s claim. The claim is what happens when two people are looking, or failing to, at each other.
Where it stops is that her looking is a private discipline. One person, attending. What I keep finding is that the failure to look is transacted: it’s shown to somebody, received by them, and reproduced in them. Murdoch tells you what seeing is and why it’s hard. She doesn’t describe two people making each other blind.
Fingarette got limbo, precisely. Self-deception, in his account, isn’t believing a falsehood; it’s declining to spell out what you’re already engaged in. I have not improved on that, and the word “limbo” is my name for his thing.
He, too, keeps it inside one skull.
Trivers got the leak. His argument is that self-deception evolved because it makes you a better deceiver of others: you sell it more convincingly when you believe it. And he noticed that the deception leaks: it shows.
For him the leak is a cost. A defect in an otherwise good system. The whole of my argument is that the leak is the point: that what leaks is precisely what the thing needs the other person to receive, because their receiving it is what makes them react, and their reaction is what completes the job. If I’m right about anything, it’s that inversion.
Projective identification is the closest of all. Klein, and Bion and Ogden after her, describe a person disowning something, locating it in another, and then, without knowing it, behaving so as to make the other feel or enact it, and meeting the result as confirmation. The relational analysts have spent decades inside the two-person transaction, so the pair has been entered before, and what’s mine is narrower. In projective identification the induction runs through pressure, and the not-knowing is a precondition. Here the concealment is itself the message. What the target reads is not a feeling that’s been pushed into them but the other man’s relation to what he himself knows. The deniability isn’t a side effect; the thing can’t work without it. Both parties’ dark parts gain from the exchange. And what gets taught is distrust of conscience as such. Those five are what I’m claiming, and no more.
Now the thing worth noticing, which I didn’t expect when I started making this list.
The transaction can only be seen by holding that he knew and didn’t know at once, and most of these accounts, at the crucial moment, pick a side. Jung’s projection is unconscious. Arendt’s thoughtlessness is an absence. Bandura’s disengagement is a technique. Girard’s rivals don’t recognize what they’ve become. Fingarette comes closest, with “declining to spell out,” and even he keeps it in one head. Pick a side and the two-person transaction disappears, because it lives exactly on the line between them. I only saw it because it was done to me, and I had, for once, no way of not noticing.
So: the conclusions in this book are ancient, and I’d rather stand with that company than pretend otherwise. What I’m claiming is one mechanism, in one room, between two people, and five features of it I can’t find in the account closest to mine. If it holds, it’s what I can add to them. If it doesn’t, most of what they said is still true, and I’ve added nothing.
What the research already half-holds
Three findings make the book’s asymmetry less strange than it sounds. People treat morally good actions and changes as more revealing of a person’s true self than bad ones, across cultures and even among misanthropes (Newman, Bloom and Knobe; De Freitas and colleagues). Partisans attribute their own side’s aggression to love and the other side’s to hate, and the asymmetry predicts unwillingness to compromise (Waytz, Young and Ginges). And ordinary life runs on a passive failure to represent other minds at all, which Waytz and Schroeder call dehumanization by omission and Harris and Fiske measured as a spontaneous failure to consider another’s mind. None of this is evidence for the metaphysics. It suggests that people already treat goodness as more fundamental than evil, and then act as if evil were a substance whenever they need somebody to be one.