Interlude One
Before going any further I want to send you back over some of what you just did. Not to repeat it. To look at a few parts more closely than we could while they were happening.
Five things worth going back for
1. What you actually knew.
Go back to the thing you brought to mind at the start of the chapter, the one you did while not letting yourself know it. Earlier I asked how you knew it was wrong. Now I want the other half: what, exactly, was the wrong thing?
Try to answer, and notice how hard it is. If it was a test you cheated on, nobody was in front of you being hurt. You hadn’t worked out any consequences; there wasn’t time, and you weren’t calculating anyway. So what was in there?
I think it was this. You knew you’d made yourself an exception. That the thing held for everyone and you had quietly stepped outside it. Not someone will suffer. Just this doesn’t apply to me.
Check whether that’s the flavor of it.
And yet that’s not quite the whole of it, because making an exception of yourself isn’t always wrong. Take the last seat when your back is ruined. Say no to someone who needs you, on a day when you have nothing left. Feed your own child first. All exceptions, and your conscience doesn’t make a sound.
So try this instead of a definition. Picture taking that last seat while looking the other person in the eye. You can. It’s fine. Now picture cheating that way, with the people it costs standing right there in front of you, watching, while you do it.
You can’t get the picture to hold. Something has to be somewhere else.
That’s what your conscience registered. Not the exception.
One thing before this turns into a way of torturing yourself. You will not always know. Sometimes you take the seat and genuinely can’t tell whether you needed it more, and sometimes there’s nothing there at all and you’ll go hunting anyway. Not every self-interested act has a turning-away inside it. A book that leaves you interrogating whether you’re evil for staying seated on a bus has done you harm, not good.
So here’s the honest version. In the cases you’re likely to worry about, you won’t be squinting. When it’s there and you’re anywhere near yourself, you know, and you have never once needed help identifying it.
The dangerous cases are the opposite kind. They’re the ones where you feel nothing at all and are completely certain. Because the further you drift from that signal, the fainter it seems, and the thing that would notice how faint it’s gotten is the same thing you’re drifting from. It never actually goes quiet. It only comes to seem absent, more and more, while you take your bearings from something else and never register the swap.
If you’re anxious about whether you’re evil for staying seated on a bus, that anxiety is not the signal. The signal doesn’t feel like that.
2. Where you’d felt that before.
Now the stranger. You read him in about two seconds, on no evidence at all, and you’d have bet at any odds.
What did you read? Not that he was angry; you’d have forgiven angry. You read that he was doing the very thing he was condemning you for. He was making himself an exception.
Which is what you’d known about yourself minutes before, in the thing that got you caught, and couldn’t have put into words if you’d tried.
So you spotted it in him instantly, using the one faculty you had just spent that whole episode refusing to turn on yourself. Same recognition, pointed outward. This doesn’t apply to me and you’re not really one of us turn out to be one thing seen from two ends.
3. The harder version of the experiment.
Earlier I asked you to find a stranger and give them a dehumanizing look, and you found you couldn’t do it, not while actually looking at them.
You might think that’s about intensity. That the look was too extreme, and something milder would go through easily. So try the mild version. Not the worst thing you could do to that stranger. The smallest. A flicker of dismissal. A half-second of superiority. The most trivial unkindness you can imagine, with them fully in view.
Notice it doesn’t go through either.
Which tells you the block was never about size. It was about whether you were looking at them. While you were, nothing was available to you, large or small. Something had to go before anything could.
That’s what you found in your own case. I think it’s true of everyone, and of every harm there is, and I haven’t shown you that.
Now the other side of it, because so far this has all been about what you can’t do.
Think of a time you actually saw somebody. Not thought about them. Saw them. Maybe someone you love, in a completely ordinary moment, when it suddenly landed that there is a whole person in there, with a childhood, and a private fear, and their own particular way of being tired. Or a stranger, once, for no reason you could name.
Notice what was missing from that moment. Not just that you wouldn’t have harmed them. The option wasn’t in the room. And it didn’t feel like restraint, or like being good. It didn’t feel like anything, because there was nothing there to hold back.
Notice what was there instead. If they had objected to something, the objection would have landed on you. You’d have had to answer it, not manage it. If they had been hurt, it would have been bad, in the way your own hurt is bad, and not merely bad for them. And what was going on in them could have changed what you did next.
That doesn’t arrive as three separate facts. It arrives as one: somebody is there.
I want you to have touched it, so that when I say seeing, or say that somebody is in view, you know which thing I mean.
4. Where the verdict had to end up.
Look again at what the first stranger needed you to be. It couldn’t stop at you did something wrong. It couldn’t even stop at you’re careless or you’re a liar. It had to reach this is what you are.
Ask why nothing short of that would do.
I think it’s because anything short of that leaves you a person, and he can’t do what he’s doing to a person. A person’s objection would land on him; he’d have to answer it. So the verdict has to keep going until there’s nothing left in you that he’d feel obliged to answer.
5. What it was like from inside his eyes.
One more, and this one is about you.
Think of somebody you once despised and later came to see differently. Go back to when you despised them. Were you interpreting them as rotten? Or were you just seeing it?
Hold onto that. It’s going to matter more than it looks.
Where that leaves us
Most of that needs a chapter, and some of it needs the whole book. But you should know where you stand. So here is an honest accounting, in three piles: what you saw, what I make of it, and what I’m asking you to take on trust for now.
What you saw.
That you knew a thing was wrong before you’d worked anything out, and that what you knew was that you’d stepped outside something that held for everyone.
That you couldn’t give a stranger that look while you were looking at him, however small a version of it you tried.
That one man, in your imagination, made it easier to turn away from what you knew, and another made it harder, and you could feel the difference before either of them had finished a sentence.
What I make of it.
These are inferences. Chapter 1 argued for each of them, but you didn’t observe them. You observed the things above.
That the state you read in him matched the one you had just recalled in yourself. He was imagined, so what you actually did was build a man from the inside, and what came out matched what you had just caught yourself doing. That tells you the faculty knows what the state looks like from the outside because it has been on the inside. Whether the reading would be accurate in a real encounter is a further question, and one I owe you.
That nothing in what either man said accounts for the difference between them.
That his verdict couldn’t have stopped anywhere short of this is what you are.
That whatever was running the first man could not have gone on running if he’d turned and looked straight at it.
That it does better when you mistake it for him. He defends it as his own judgment, and you go after the man, because the man is what you can see.
That what you did when you cheated and what he did to you are one move from two ends. This doesn’t apply to me. You’re not really one of us.
The trap, in one piece.
Now put the inferences together, because assembled they’re more than a list.
He couldn’t have fully known what he was doing. If he’d admitted to himself that he was producing the evidence against you, the evidence would have been worthless to him. And he couldn’t have been completely blind to it either, because it tracked every attempt you made to expose it and got stronger in exactly the way it needed to stay hidden. So it had to be the third thing, the one you know from the inside: the knowledge available enough to steer and protect itself, and unadmitted enough that he could still feel innocent. And at the bottom of what he was holding down wasn’t what he was doing to you. It was the fact that you’re the same kind of thing he is. What he did to you is what holding that down made possible.
That state can’t be concealed, and not because it leaks around the edges. What he had to keep from himself is exactly what reached you.
And it reached you as a provocation. Your reaction wasn’t a side effect he’d have preferred to avoid. It was one of the things the whole performance was for, and what it needed above all was that nothing you did should be allowed to clear your name. So the one thing he couldn’t afford was for you to get better and have it count.
Take any link out and the whole thing stops. If he’d admitted his part there’d be no evidence; if it were blind, no tracking; if it could be hidden, no provocation; if your getting better could count, no verdict. That’s why I call it a trap and not a bad habit. A habit is something you could drop. This holds itself together, and the shape it makes is the one you met on the street.
I think it’s the same trap, at a different dose, in every act of contempt there is, yours and mine included. That’s the claim of this book, and I’m asking you to take it on trust for now. Chapter 1 worked out the mechanism of one encounter. It didn’t show that every encounter has it.
What people already know, and what I think is new.
None of the conclusions in this book are new: that we make other people out to be bad so that we can feel good, that a person can hide from himself, that shaming somebody makes them worse. People have known all of that for a long time, and some of them have measured it. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is, and I’d rather stand with that company than pretend otherwise.
What I don’t think anyone has said is what actually passes between two people in that moment. That the hiding is itself the message. That what you read in him wasn’t a mood but the way he was standing in relation to what he knew. That it has to be deniable or it doesn’t work at all. And that it teaches you something, which is the piece I most want you to hold onto: that the part of you which knew is not worth listening to. Everything larger in this book comes out of that last one.
And I think this is one reason it’s so hard to describe, and why the accounts that come closest stop where they stop. You can only see it while holding on to both halves at once: he knew, and he didn’t let himself know. Collapse that to “he simply knew” and you’ve got a villain, and contempt follows. Collapse it to “he had no way of knowing” and you’ve got an accident, and going easy on him follows. Both leave out half of what happened. It only stays in view while you hold both halves.
What I’m asking you to hold.
Four claims I can’t earn from one encounter, stated plainly so you know what you’re carrying. I’m not going to defend them here. Each of them gets its own part of the book. Hold them the way you’d hold a friend’s account of something you weren’t there for: provisionally, and with the right to put it down.
The people we call evil are further along this same road, not on a different one.
The dark part in him and the dark part in you are on the same side, and contempt is what they feed each other.
You are not it. And the shame you feel when you catch it at work is how it keeps you from looking.
The only stance that doesn’t feed the trap is the second stranger’s. Other things sometimes help. But anything that carries contempt is acting out the very thing it’s trying to end, and his stance is the only one that doesn’t.
There’s a fifth, about what’s underneath all of this, and I’m going to hold it until the end, because it isn’t something you can check from here.
The question that leads forward.
You can’t harm somebody you’re looking at, and you can’t argue anybody into looking. So what does it? What turns a person back toward what they already know?
You already have the answer, because it was done to you. The second stranger did it without making a single argument. The rest of this book is an attempt to say what he did.
What I haven’t shown you
You’re taking four claims on trust. Here is what I owe you on them, and two more debts besides.
I haven’t shown you that the people we call evil are further along this same road. You’ve seen one route to harm and no counterexample, which is suggestive and nothing more. There’s an obvious candidate for a counterexample, too: the one who wants the suffering and stays to watch it. I’ll take that case head on when we get to them, and I’ll say what would settle it against me.
How much rides on it is less than it looks. Suppose I never make that case. Suppose you finish this book unconvinced that the worst people are made of what you’re made of. There is still something you can check without me, and it’s the thing I actually care about. Next time you settle it that somebody is beyond reach, watch what happens in you when the verdict lands. In me, something eases. Something wanted that.
You may not catch it the first time. It’s quick, it doesn’t announce itself, and the whole encounter is arranged so that you’re looking at him. If you do catch it, look at whether it has anything to do with wanting the harm to stop.
I haven’t shown you anything about your own contempt for somebody who really hurt you. In this chapter you got caught doing something you actually did. Being hurt by someone when you’d done nothing at all is a different seat. The mechanism is the same. The seat isn’t, and it gets its own chapter.
I haven’t shown you that any of this survives past two people on a street.
And I haven’t told you what’s underneath the caring, beyond the fact that it’s there and that it’s enough.
And now the thing I owe you most, which is a real way to say no.
You may have gone back to those memories honestly and found something different from what I described. Not a failure to look. A different finding. Maybe the knowing you had was a rule after all, and it fired fast. Maybe the stranger’s tell was a manner you’d learned to read, and it didn’t feel to you like a verdict. Maybe you can, in fact, picture doing a small unkindness to somebody while looking straight at them, and you’d be telling the truth.
If so, then one of three things is true. The mechanism I’ve described is narrower than I’ve been claiming, and applies to some encounters and not others. Or your experience differs from mine in a way that matters, and I’ve been generalizing from too small a sample. Or I’m wrong.
I don’t know which. What I can promise is that none of those makes you the kind of reader who couldn’t see. A book about contempt that treated its doubters as turned-away would be doing the thing it’s about. So: if you looked and it isn’t there, that’s a finding, and it counts against me, and you should carry it forward as evidence rather than set it aside.
What I believe is that it’s there. That’s why I’m writing. But I’m going to try to earn that over the rest of the book rather than assume it now, and if you’re reading with the finding that it isn’t, you’re reading the way I’d want.