Chapter 12: The People We Call Evil
This chapter is a first draft written entirely by Claude from Aditya's notes and key points, and he has not yet rewritten it in his own voice. If you only want his prose, skip to the section marked "Original material."
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? —Alexander Solzhenitsyn
So what about the people who really are evil? The ones you thought of at the start.
Evil is the result of turning away, not its cause. That’s the claim, and here’s the checkable version. Bring up the worst thing you know of, something done to people who couldn’t stop it. Now try to build it in your head without the part where whoever did it had stopped counting their victims as the same kind of creature as himself. You can’t. Take that away and there’s no version of the thing left standing. Turn away completely, so that no life is perceived in the other person at all, and what’s left doesn’t feel evil from inside. It feels like appetite. It feels like righteousness. It feels like the obvious thing to do. When you look at such a person and feel that they’re fundamentally different from you, you’re picking up something real and reading it wrong. What you’re reading is how far gone they are, not what they’re made of.
At the far end, something stranger happens. The deep part of a person is the only thing that could tell them they’ve drifted from it, so the further gone they are, the less of it they can hear. That much is obvious. What isn’t obvious is that the knowing itself doesn’t shrink. It grows, because there’s more harm for it to register. So the most lost person is carrying more of that knowledge than you are, not less, and holding it down harder, with more of themselves committed to the holding. They know the most and the least at once.
Now ask what you’re actually looking at when you look at such a person and feel that particular horror. On this account it isn’t an empty absence. It’s a conscience under crushing load, showing through. And the thing holding it down is using your contempt to help. Every time your hatred arrives, it presses down on the one part of them that could end this. You think you’re looking at a monster showing you what it is. You’re looking at a hostage, held up to a window. The old line has it right, once you hear the word properly: be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. Kind. Not nice. This is why “these are the people who need love the most” isn’t sentiment. It’s arithmetic. They’re carrying the most, under the most pressure, with the least access to relief, and every instinct we have adds to the load.
You cannot fathom the distortion a mind has to undergo to become someone who apparently chooses evil. If you saw all of it, your heart would break, and then break again. This isn’t a plea for softness. Mere softness, the kind that refuses necessary restraint, would make things worse, for them and for everyone. It’s only that if you really saw it, the urge to shove them deeper could never again feel like anything but what it is.
And from inside, there’s no captor. What’s holding him doesn’t present itself to him as a captor. It presents itself as his judgment, his seriousness about what’s wrong with the world. Ask him to put it down and you’re asking him to stop caring about evil. So here is the thing I hold at the center: all evil is innocent, in one exact sense. If wrong can only be done from the turned-away state, then turning away can’t itself be chosen, because choosing it would be a wrong done while still looking. There’s no moment where a person with a clear view of the harm decides to do it anyway. The view goes, then the reasons come, then it feels like wanting. Put an evil chooser back inside and you’ve explained nothing; you’ve just given the evil a new hiding place. And everyone is fully responsible, because responsibility never lived in a mythical instant of seeing the harm clearly and choosing it. It lives in how quickly you catch the blindness, in what you do when sight returns, which is repair, and in what you have done, or failed to do, to give the blindness less room next time.
Here is where I could be wrong, and I’d rather you knew it. The one who wants the suffering, and stays to watch it, looks like a person who sees his victim and harms anyway. If that’s what he is, my account fails. What I think is that he sees a subject and not a person of the same kind as himself, and that the sameness is held down, not gone. So there’s a test. If, at the moment somebody is inflicting suffering for its own sake, they can be seen looking at the victim with real kindness, not tenderness as coercion, not a flash of it and then the turning away again, then I’m wrong. I have never come across a case that meets those conditions. And psychopaths: I don’t know. Some people may have very little ordinary access to the deep part, or very little capacity to turn it into fellow-feeling and restraint. Nothing checkable here needs everyone to have equal access. It needs you to have it, and it needs the people who make you truly enraged to be, overwhelmingly, what I think they are: ordinary people in deep limbo. That’s what your rage was reacting to. That’s what it could see.
Original material, to recover
From quotes.md: the forum witness (the girl burned alive to clear land; “the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance”), already in map §14; the Duncan Trussell line, “it isn’t the victim of violence you have to pray for so much. It’s the perpetrator”; the near-death life review (reliving your acts from the other person’s side, and seeing their self-deceptions too, with the judgment coming from yourself and the comfort from something else). The Makransky passage on receiving love past one’s flaws belongs in Chapter 14.
None new otherwise. Chapter 2’s trip and the map’s Part C are the material; the far-end and hostage passages in the map are close to final prose.