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 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. The 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 affected your behavior. Any time someone came close to exposing the truth, or you started getting close to it yourself, you found a way to deflect, right? And that didn’t happen passively.
Looking back, can you see how some part of you knew exactly what you were doing, even as you did it? The behavior took place in limbo, too.
Again, we normally call it “unconscious.” Do you see what incentive we might have to call it that?
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? The part of you that knew: it couldn’t say exactly how it knew, because it wasn’t working from a rule. Meanwhile, another part of you was busy providing reasons. 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. Why trust something that can’t even justify itself?
And yet, despite “losing” that battle, notice that it never budged an inch. It kept on quietly knowing what it knew. And some part of you knew that wouldn’t go away.
That’s why you need limbo in the first place. If all you could hear was your own conscience—no justifications to hide behind—could you have even done what you did?
Limbo isn’t the kind of state we easily recognize or willingly remember, by its very nature. And if you have to enter it for even small misbehaviors, how much the more so for the big ones?
Would those be easier to recall, or harder?
Limbo exists in degrees. It’s not just black or white. And there’s one more thing to see.
To be in limbo entails knowing that you are in limbo—while also hiding it from yourself. In other words, limbo always contains itself.
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 similar situations before. Really visualize this one, and imagine it playing 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?
Think of how that affects you. Does it make it easier or harder to confront what you already know?
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? You’d never met him. You knew nothing about him. All you had to go on was the way he was standing there, doing what he was doing.
Now imagine a different stranger had caught you—but instead of treating you with contempt, he 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 less room to wriggle out—and it still wouldn’t have triggered the digging-in response.
Why not? Again, try to put yourself back in those shoes.
It’s like he was reminding you of something: that you’re better than this. Meanwhile, the first stranger was hinting that this is all you are.
This one’s behavior was clean, like there was nothing to hide. It’s almost as if he was giving voice to your own conscience. You knew you couldn’t win against it—and more importantly, you didn’t want to. He wasn’t imposing particular rules on you. He was reminding you of something you’d lost sight of.
If you had to guess: is this the kind of person who sneaks around trying to get away with stuff?
Both people may have stopped your misbehavior, and so both will leave confident 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.
And it won’t feel like a change to who you are—it will feel like something you’ve learned 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-serving needs. You don’t notice that something has been taken from you.
Later, you may face a small choice—say, whether to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt—and that change will inform your decision. And if you make the “wrong” choice, it won’t feel wrong. It will just feel like what you must do to protect yourself in this rotten world. What any sensible person would do.
We never say “I’m going to ignore my conscience.” It just 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 harder to tell apart.
Notice what this means. The two strangers could have said nearly identical things, and yet they produced opposite outcomes. One will have left the world a slightly better place, and the other, a worse one. And yet there will be no objective evidence of any difference. In fact, the evidence shows that the second stranger was harsher—and so he should have been the one that made it worse.
The Cause
So what exactly did the first stranger do to cause this?
Notice how there’s nothing you can point to and say “that’s it.” We intuitively know that being made to feel that this is all you are is harmful—but he never said those words, did he? And yet you could sense it immediately. Something else delivered it.
And it’s not just about how you felt. Notice what contempt licenses. Once he believes that this is all you are, how does that enable him to treat you? Is there any bottom to it?
But it’s worse than that. Recall how it would have played out had you tried to exonerate yourself. Deny it, and you’re the kind of person who does. Get angry, and that’s proof too. Stay calm, and you don’t even care. Apologize, and it’s too convenient.
Every road funnels into the same conclusion.
Contempt doesn’t just permit harming someone who “deserves” it. It actively shapes them into the kind of person who does.
We all know this is how it works, on some level. So he surely knew it too. But did he know it while he was doing it?
Before we answer that, notice where the two answers lead. If he did know, then he sounds like a mustache-twirling villain. If he didn’t, then what’s there to hold him responsible for? He was just doing his best.
There’s a third answer—and it’s what the book is about.
The Tell
On one hand, what he was doing certainly felt intentional, didn’t it? Something about his tone and gaze gave it away instantly, even if his words didn’t. And the longer it went on, the more obvious it was that wasn’t accidental. He had 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 what he said you were, and was working hard at proving it. Can you feel that?
On the other hand, how could it actually be intentional? If he knew he was planning to use your reactions against you, how could he then turn around and sincerely hold them against you? You can’t trust evidence that you know you yourself planted.
So he couldn’t be fully aware of his own need, let alone that he was doing something to fulfill it. To him, it didn’t feel like a need; it just felt obviously true.
But his behavior couldn’t have been purely unconscious either. Not only could it not be so precisely guided, but he’d be embarrassed or confused if you pointed it out. Instead, it intensified in exactly the way needed to keep itself hidden.
What does that remind you of?
Limbo. He knew what he was doing, and he didn’t.
You weren’t just sensing that he’s the kind of person who deceives himself in general. You were sensing that he was doing it right then, in the act of judging you. He was judging you from the very state he was judging you for.
But what was he deceiving himself about? Whatever it was, it clearly had moral implications. That’s what limbo is for. So some part of him sensed that he was doing something wrong. But what, exactly?
He “knows” you’re a bad person—irredeemable—so to him, his behavior is good. What’s wrong with treating an irredeemable person with contempt? It’s not like you could make them worse. And you can’t fix them. All you can do is shame them into stopping, right?
On the other hand, why is he working so hard to prove something he supposedly already knows? You don’t do that unless some part of you suspects it isn’t true.
He doesn’t know why he suspects it. But here’s what he does know.
He knows that he’s in limbo. Remember: it always contains itself. Which means he knows he’s overriding his conscience. He doesn’t hear what it’s saying, exactly, but he feels it—no matter how hard he tries to suppress that feeling. And look at what that entails.
It means he knows, from the inside, how a “good person”—himself—can act against that signal, while convincing themselves they’re not. By pretending they can’t hear it.
How does he know you’re not doing the same thing? He doesn’t. And that’s a big problem. Because if it’s true, then what he’s doing might actually be harming you. Driving you further away from your conscience. And he knows, from firsthand experience, what that does. How it makes the world a slightly worse place.
So that cannot be what he’s doing. Must not be. You’re just bad, dammit—and it’s his duty to prove it, for all the world to see.
That’s what he’s in limbo about: the fact that you’re in limbo.
The Motive
Let’s inhabit his perspective for a moment.
What would it be like to discover that your enemies—the bad people—aren’t inherently different from you? That they cause harm for essentially the same reason you do—not because they’re inherently bad, but because we all struggle to do what’s right, for different reasons.
It would mean they’re redeemable after all—and so your contempt has only been making them worse. All for the “benefit” of proving that you’re nothing alike.
And you did it while knowing there was a better way: what the second stranger did. A way that might actually help, but require you to give up the feeling of being morally superior.
What would it be like to learn that not only were you doing this, but that some part of you knew exactly what you were doing, even as you did it? That you were just hiding it, behind the label “unconscious”?
That would be pretty uncomfortable to learn, wouldn’t it?
So uncomfortable, in fact, that you might never allow it into full conscious awareness. At least, not without the proper safeguards in place. Something to show you, unequivocally, why even profoundly malicious behavior like that wouldn’t mean you’re a “bad person.”
Exactly what he was robbing you of in that moment. The same thing this book exists to provide you.
The Constraints
Look at the bind he’s in. He needs you to be bad because at some level he knows you’re not. Which means he must do something that will “prove” that you are, beyond any doubt. But what tools does he have?
He can’t be openly cruel, because that would make him bad. In fact, he can’t do anything that will leave a trace, even within his own mind. When he looks back on it later, he cannot sense anything amiss. That’s a pretty tight constraint.
All he can do is somehow provoke you into a nasty response, and it has to come in answer to his objectively good behavior. Because what kind of person reacts like that?
And look what he has to work with. His tone; his gaze; his manner. Exactly the things you used to detect it. Anything else could be audited.
And what does he need to convey through those channels?
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? That’s what made it so maddening. You knew he was up to no good, but couldn’t prove it—and you couldn’t let that stand. So together, these two were sufficient.
And both were also necessary. If it had looked unintentional, you might have forgiven or pitied him instead. And if he had offered you something to appeal to or accuse in return, that would have taken out the sting: even if he denied it out loud, you would at least have known that it registered somewhere.
So what he had to communicate was something like: part of me knows exactly what I’m doing to you—judging you for the very thing I’m doing—but you don’t have access to it, because I myself don’t.
In other words: all he had to show you was that he was in limbo. Not limbo in general—the one he was in right then, about you. About your limbo. Nothing additional was required.
But how the hell do you reveal something to someone else that’s hidden from you? And moreover, reveal that it is hidden from you?
How do you send that in a glance, before a word is said, when you can’t even know you’re sending it—and moreover, know that they’ll receive it?
What He Could Count On
This can only work if he can count on you to recognize it. Nobody has ever said it out loud. Nobody needs to.
He can count on you because you’ve been there.
We know what it is to hide from our own conscience. What it’s like to pretend that we’re not. And to pretend that others can’t see it, even though part of us needs them to.
Haven’t you ever watched an enemy squirm under your “righteous” gaze—half-knowing that they would recognize it for what it is, and how their reaction would convict them, not you?
Pause and recall an instance of this. Maybe it wasn’t even an enemy. Sometimes we do it to loved ones “for their own good.” The sigh that lets them know what we really think of them in that moment, dressed up to make us seem like the reasonable one. The look on their face that tells us it landed, which we’ll pretend not to have seen.
You had to be present enough to actually do it, while also absent enough to give yourself plausible deniability—so that when you looked back on it later, your hands would be clean.
And for it to sting the way you needed it to, you had to know they would recognize it for what it was. Which they do, because they’ve been on the receiving end too.
But still what, exactly, gives it away?
The Mechanism
Recall what limbo is: being turned away from your conscience. But your conscience is also the one thing that warns you that you are turned away from it. That’s why we don’t recognize when we’re in it. We’re avoiding hearing the one thing that can warn us.
And that state has a certain “tell.”
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a dehumanizing gaze? Doesn’t it feel like the person is somehow absent or “turned away” from themselves? That’s what you’re looking at. They’re absent from the part of them that would have seen you. (The fact that turning away from oneself and from one’s conscience are the same thing—that’s important, and we’ll return to it later.)
Pause and ask yourself what that state is for. What does not-seeing someone enable you to do, that seeing them wouldn’t?
Try this: go out in public, find a stranger, and shoot them a dehumanizing gaze. It’s hard to do, isn’t it? And ask what’s stopping you. Is it just how you’ll look? Or is it that you know exactly how it will land on them—something you don’t want another human to feel, because you know what it’s like to be them? You can’t do it while fully looking at it.
That’s what we call malice. And contempt is just malice plus the pretense that it’s not. That’s what makes malice frightening, but contempt maddening.
So turning away from himself; from his humanity; from your humanity; from the knowledge of what it would accomplish—it’s all a single move. And you recognize it even though he doesn’t. Because he doesn’t.
Which means he doesn’t have to do anything extra to telegraph it. Simply by remaining in that state, it telegraphs itself. That’s why you suspected it even before the encounter fully unfolded.
And look what it accomplishes.
It aims. It reads your reactions. It closes every road but one. It shows you a man with nobody home. It leaves no mark on any record. And it does all of that while he stands there certain he is doing you a favor.
And it knows you will recognize it for what it is. Which you did—instantly, even before the funneling. Not just that something was off, but what was off.
We don’t have to reveal that we are hiding. The hiding is the revealing.
The Loop
So that’s what he’s doing to you. But it creates a problem—because the more he does this, the more some part of him realizes that he’s the bad guy.
Which increases the pressure to prove he’s nothing like you. Which he can only do by revealing to you that he is. Which makes you increasingly sense the whole thing as a ruse, threatening to expose it. Which forces him to hide it from himself even harder, by overlooking your humanity even more. Which his conscience registers and warns him about.
Which increases the pressure to prove he’s nothing like you…
There is no natural stopping point—because as much as he tries, he never stops hearing his conscience. And the more he suppresses it, the more he’s forced to see this plan all the way through. To push you all the way to the end, where (he believes) his conscience will finally see the “truth.”
The tragic irony is, he’s seeing genuine darkness in you—your own capacity to turn away. And he’s not wrong in his desire to end that capacity. Doing so would be genuinely beneficial—for you, for him, and for the world. But he doesn’t see his own need to externalize it; to view it as something foreign to him.
And that is what makes him forget there’s a better way. That he could do what the second stranger did. At some level, he registers that his way of dealing with it is underhanded.
But sometimes you have to get your hands a bit dirty to fight evil…
The Agent
Now we come to the strangest part: what, exactly, is it in him that’s doing all this?
Remember that it seems intentional; calculating; goal-driven. And it presents itself as such to you while hiding itself from him. In fact, not just while hiding itself from him, but by hiding from him. It reveals to you that it is hiding itself from him.
So it can’t exactly be him in the usual sense. He cannot be aware of its operation. And yet in another sense, it clearly is him. It’s not as though he’s unconscious or in a haze. He feels fully lucid, entirely like himself.
Everything it’s doing, it is doing through him—as though he is its vehicle.
So what the hell is it?
It behaves like an agent, so I’ll refer to it as one. I’ll call it his “dark” part, or just his “darkness”—both because it’s hidden from him, and because of what we’re about to see.
The Taunt
It’s showing you what it is doing in a way that renders it totally unmistakable, 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 louder than the stuff that can.
Could you have named what was happening out loud? What would you have said—you’re being mean? How would that have turned out?
You both knew that, too.
So his dark part is doing his “dirty work” for him. And it doesn’t merely act on you. It addresses you—without giving you anything to address in return.
It communicates something like this:
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 to do it again.
I am going to provoke you until you become the very thing I need you to be. Which means that when I’m finally forced to do to you 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 you can’t prove it. Good luck.
Which you know but cannot prove, turning you into what he needs you to be.
Which is precisely the “what” that he was doing to you in the first place. But good luck proving it.
His darkness is seducing you to embrace yours. To listen to the part that can prove over the part that knows. To 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 or felt the full weight of it before. And it works precisely because we all know it, but cannot prove it.
You may have felt this before, as a kind of “hall of mirrors” effect, where you both know what’s happening, and that neither one of you can name it.
This is what is being communicated from inside it.
It feels 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 what’s happening but pretend not to—then fuck it. Game on.
That’s what teaches you to do it too. To demote that inner knowing—because what is it worth?
In fact, the very notion of a conscience—that one faculty you have to detect this corruption of your mind—starts to feel naive. It’s the same faculty that let you see him. That sees anyone. Demote it, and you see a little less of everyone.
Remember how one side had to argue and the other didn’t? The arguments weren’t there to convince your conscience. That never works. They were there to convince you that it was just one more voice among the noise. That’s what’s happening now.
And the thing is, it doesn’t feel like a loss at all. It feels like you’ve gotten a bit wiser. A little more realistic about how this world operates.
His darkness has just taught you to embrace your own.
He feels good 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 showed itself 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. The thing he’s disconnected from in himself.
And watch what it does 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?
And what do we call people who obviously want to cause harm—especially when pretending it’s good? How do we treat them?
We call them bad people, and 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.
That’s the license.
And 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. And the more power it gets, the more convincingly it looks like it is him.
This is why none of us ever recognize it operating in ourselves. It hides itself perfectly from our own minds while revealing itself to others, compelling them to righteously attack us for it, thereby enabling ours to hide itself better from us.
That is its “job”—to keep itself hidden from us so that it can keep operating with impunity. To prevent us from looking in the one place where we could actually end it.
That’s what contempt for people is: a way to make our targets feel unsafe, so they can’t actually look at the thing blocking them from the part that cares. So that they feel they need it, keeping them trapped in the dark, so that we never have to confront the same thing blocking us.
And it only works because some part of us already know this, at some level, but we don’t let ourselves know it—both individually, and at the collective level.
The dark part of us: it doesn’t “want” us to know this.
The world has gotten slightly worse as a result of this interaction, and yet there’s not a trace of objective evidence of anything wrong ever having happened. And the objective facts are what we have learned to trust more. So the very thing causing the problem has hidden itself better.
It’s not that the deeper part of you has been silenced. That’s not how it works.
It’s still there in you, 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 some part of you already knows it. If you recognized it, that’s the evidence.