Chapter 17: What This Book Is For

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."

For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. —The Gospel of Philip

Everything in this book has been one idea from different sides, and I’d rather say so than have you assemble it yourself.

There is one move: turning away from what you know, and from the person in front of you. It’s a single act, not two; you can’t do the second without the first. Everything we call wrongdoing is made of it. Not accompanied by it. Made of it: take the turning away out and there’s nothing left over that was the wrong part. Contempt is that move in its purest form, which is why the book is named for it. And so the only thing that doesn’t feed the trap is turning toward. Yours, first. Things done from turned-away sometimes help. What they can’t do is stop enacting the relation they’re aimed at ending.

If that’s right, then turning toward and turning away aren’t just related to right and wrong, help and harm, good and evil. They’re what those words have been pointing at the whole time.

The mutual knowing in the first stranger’s gaze was known on both sides and said by neither. That’s what let it work. Contempt is a kind of anti-ritual: it passes the recognition along while keeping it from ever being said between you. The man who treated you with dignity enacted it, between two people, once. This book is an attempt to make it sayable in public. If it becomes ordinary, sayable knowledge that contempt is the thing, that this is what we’ve been calling evil, then contempt loses its cover. A thing that can be named can’t do work that depended on being unnameable.

I should be honest about the limit. The word “contempt” already exists, and its existence hasn’t dissolved anything. What’s unnameable isn’t the word. It’s the act itself, in the moment it’s happening, named by the person it’s happening to, in a way the other person can’t wave off. That takes a shared understanding of what the act is, and that’s what I’m trying to give you. And this idea will be used as a weapon. Someone will accuse someone of doing the thing, with contempt. When that happens, it will carry the same tell it always has. You’ll know.

Nothing here asks you to soften what you see or pretend the harm isn’t real. If anything you’ll see more, and more clearly. The only thing being taken from you is the pleasure of certainty about what someone is. And I think, if you check, you’ll find that it was never yours to begin with.

And under the bet is the thing the bet is for. The name is a means. Go back to what you found on the street. You couldn’t give a stranger that look while you were looking at him, and nothing you’d decided or been taught was stopping you. Something already there was. Everything since has been an account of how much work it takes to hide from that something, and what the hiding does to the world. Take the hiding away, in yourself, and what’s left is what stopped you. It was never a quality you had. It was what was doing the looking.

I can’t take you further than suspecting that. If you come away suspecting it, from your own case, the book did its work, whatever else it got wrong.

When it is recognized, it is dissolved.