Chapter 2: The Descent
The part that cares
Something inside you cares. Profoundly. About other people, about other beings, about the world around you.
It’s what we’ve been calling your “conscience.” But it does so much more than just tell you right from wrong. It’s the part of you that senses its way toward what matters; what’s good, even if it can’t quite pin it down.
Our belief that it can be pinned down: that’s what the “dark part” exploits. Any which way you try to define “goodness,” it will find a way to obey the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit.
If violence is always wrong, what do you do when it’s actually necessary? If harming bad people is right, then watch how quickly “bad” and “harm” expand to cover exactly who you need them to cover.
Which means that the easiest way for it to win is to make us focus only on what we can define. To disconnect the part that reasons from the part that cares.
We never notice this disconnection taking place. Not because we can’t—the part that cares can always see it happening—but because the tool we use to detect this disconnection is the very one that has been disconnected. That has been hijacked by the darkness.
It’s why “bad people” can never tell they’re the bad guys. And it’s why we can never tell that treating them with contempt is the wrong solution.
I can’t promise there’s a way to bring them back. But I can promise you that the belief that there isn’t—it doesn’t originate from the part of you that cares.
This is how the broken systems get built. Not by bad people designing them, but by ordinary people, each of us slightly disconnected from the part that cares, each of us certain we’re the ones who aren’t. That’s what the rest of this book has to show.
From the delivering end
Let’s go back to the chilling taunt from the last chapter. How do I know it’s accurate? Because I’ve been on the delivering end more times than I’d like to admit.
Here’s what it feels like from the inside.
I know there’s evil in the world—almost like a force that’s completely alien to me. I know that, because I’ve seen what people are capable of. And I’m not capable of that.
So when I catch the faintest whiff of it in someone else—perhaps something as minor as littering—I’m not simply going to let it go. It’s evidence of something. I can feel it. And I’m going to expose it for what it really is.
What I’m doing is a public service. It’s the least I can do as a good person.
At some level, I know that my contemptuous tone isn’t going to help anything. That there’s something dark about it that I can’t quite place. But I don’t let myself know.
And anyway, my darkness isn’t real darkness—it’s the strategic kind. The kind that all good people must harbor to keep real evil in check.
But for some reason, my target isn’t taking it that way. He’s defiant. Recalcitrant.
Ugh. I didn’t want to believe this about him—but what choice has he left me? I was only trying to show him how much he should care, and look at how he went and took it.
Which means my contempt was justified.
This world is even shittier than I thought.
Now a much more dramatic experience from my own life—the first that showed me the full depth of what lives inside me. You might find that it works best when read at a meditative pace.
The trip
In this experience, I was taken back to a memory where I had ruthlessly mocked someone for having a different political opinion than me—an opinion that I knew was harmful. That’s how I knew it was okay to do this to him. My goal was to stop him, and also dissuade others from following. And if it didn’t do that, well, at least he’d be made to feel bad for being bad.
I was then shown how my behavior had impacted him. How my cruelty had only fed his cynicism about the world. And I somehow saw, clear as day, how it was this same cynicism that drove him to hold that harmful opinion in the first place.
I hadn’t made him better—I had made him worse.
Which meant that I couldn’t stop. If I let up and allowed him to reveal himself as fundamentally decent, then what would it say about how I’d been treating him? I couldn’t live with myself. So I had to do it more. I had to leave no doubt whatsoever that he really was as bad as I feared.
None of this knowledge was conscious, exactly. It occupied a bizarre state of mind, in which I knew yet somehow didn’t. I had somehow convinced myself that by holding it in limbo, I would never have to face it. That I could simply call it “unconscious” and forgive myself for it later.
I was then shown how foolish that was. Look, my mind commanded, the knowledge exists right here. It always has, and it always will.
It was pointing right at it. There was nothing I could do to deny it. The knowledge had been there all along. I saw the implication: just because I think I’ve gotten away with something doesn’t mean I have. It lives on in my psyche, influencing my behavior in ways I can’t quite see.
I felt profound guilt and shame. I realized I’m “that guy”—the one I’m sure is “what’s wrong with the world.” What kind of rotten person harms innocent others just to hide the fact that he is? Corrupts their minds, driving them toward more extreme beliefs, allowing me to judge them more? And what of all the harm he likely caused as a result?
I spent what felt like a lifetime in this hell, unable to forgive myself. Every instance of wrongdoing; every little thing I had been hiding from myself—and there were far more than I would have ever believed—came flooding back, forcing me to face my profound hypocrisy. The pain was unbearable.
Slowly it began to dawn on me: why do I feel so rotten? Why do I feel such profound guilt?
Why do I have to shield myself from my misbehavior in the first place? Produce justifications for it? Why don’t I have to do that with my good behavior?
The answer came in a flash: because I don’t actually want to cause harm. If I saw it clearly—fully, without any hiding—I simply could not do it. That’s why the hiding is necessary.
The revelation hit like lightning. Not as an idea or belief. Instead, the capacity to hide was simply stripped from me in that moment. Not by force, but by erasing all the pride, shame, fear… all that made me hide. And what remained—I can’t put it into words. The closest word I have is Love. Not as an emotion, or for any particular thing. But for all of it.
Every time I’ve felt the urge to act with full integrity—to be of service to all of Life; to act for the greatest good—it was but the faintest whiff of what I felt in that moment. It was self-evidently what exists beneath all the noise.
And that’s when it hit me: if a fundamentally decent person like me can cause malicious harm like this, how do I know that other people aren’t doing the same? That the people I consider “bad” aren’t just lost in a deeper version of the same trap?
I don’t.
But it was more than that. I revisited what felt like every act of bad behavior I had ever seen. Some of it I had long recognized as the result of people hiding from what they knew. But somehow, in this place, the hiding of even the worst people was laid bare. It wasn’t an inference, or something I was learning fresh. I had somehow always seen it—and yet chosen not to.
The motivation was obvious. It was the same reason I couldn’t see it in my political enemy, but magnified. Because if even the worst people of the world are ultimately just like me, what does that do to my worldview? If my behavior has been making the problem worse, what does that say about me? What leg does my arrogance have to stand on?
I saw clearly how the deeper a person was caught in this trap, the more it felt like they weren’t. Even as their behavior became more evil, and there was more knowledge of the harm it was causing, there was correspondingly more shielding—deeper limbo—making it feel increasingly righteous.
In the most extreme example—one that haunts me to this day—I was dropped into the experience of being maximally “turned away.” There was no perception at all of the decency of my victims. The life in them. They became objects—playthings. What remained was pure, unadulterated, predation. The malevolent joy of devouring innocence. And it was impossibly. Fucking. Delicious.
…
I next recalled looking into the eyes of “evil people.” That dehumanizing gaze. How it had always felt like they were absent or “turned away” from themselves. Now I finally recognized what I had been looking at. Why they had to “turn away” to do what they did.
The parallel with my earlier taunting of my enemy was impossible to miss. That terrifying predatory quality—it was identical in both cases, if vastly different in intensity. It carried the same flavor. That “righteous” enjoyment of causing harm.
Of course it had to feel righteous. Righteousness is what I actually wanted. The only way I was willing to turn away from it was if the counterfeit—the reasons I used to justify turning away—felt “righteous” too. The further I drifted, the more different the genuine and counterfeit felt—but only if I could compare them side-by-side. And yet the deeper I got lost, the less access I had to the real thing, so the less I could. No wonder it was so easy to lose one’s way.
The strangest thing is that none of this actually felt like new knowledge to me. I was simply remembering something I had always known—how all the horrors of the world were ultimately rooted in the same profound confusion. The same turning away. And it became obvious why I never let myself know it.
The knowledge that all the carnage of the world is caused by a mistake that I myself often make—and that my unkind behavior reinforces—is far too horrifying for my defended mind to handle. But as long as I avoid it, I have no choice but to treat evil as fundamentally alien to me—and to treat its perpetrators with contempt.
The lesson was clear: if I didn’t get back on the “right track,” I would continue adding to the burden of the world, even as I was flawlessly confident I was helping. And there was always the possibility that I would slip past the point of no return. A place where others would see me as irredeemably evil, and in their confusion, shove me deeper in while feeling righteous for it.
And what was this “right track”? It was astonishingly simple. All I had to do was stop hiding things from myself. Stop willfully overlooking the life in others—my profound commonality, equality with them.
Simple, perhaps, but far from easy. I knew it would be the work of a lifetime.
What the second stranger didn’t do
Now think back to what that second stranger did, and what it evoked in you.
He made it harder to run from what you already knew—and that reminded you that you didn’t want to.
But how?
Do you think he was running a mental story of what a good person he was? How virtuous? If he was, you would have detected it, right? And then would it have had the same effect?
He didn’t have to tell himself a story, unlike the first person. And it is the absence of a story that you detected. It’s how you knew he wasn’t running away himself. And he didn’t have to do anything to convey it—that absence conveyed itself too.
If either of the two people could be said to have “fought evil,” it’s clearly him. And yet where’s the evidence? There isn’t any. Nor does he even likely think of it that way, because he wasn’t looking at “evil.” He knows he was just seeing a form of confusion.
In the case of both strangers, something was transmitted—something difficult to pin down.
And this difficulty in pinning it down: it’s not an accident. It’s what allows the dark behavior to continue.
The mistake we agreed on
Think about what happens when we try to fight evil. We correctly identify that it requires being fierce—and then, almost without noticing, let it devolve into contempt. Almost.
And it’s not just a mistake that one particular “side” makes. It’s something we’ve collectively agreed isn’t a mistake at all. It’s righteous. Necessary.
That mistake—what might it be serving?