Chapter 3: The Sacrifice
The satisfaction
There is nothing more primally, viscerally satisfying than violently punishing evil.
Pause and feel that—whether you’d consciously endorse the idea or recoil at it.
Now bring to mind someone who actually qualifies. Not a stranger who was rude to you, but someone whose harm was real. They could be from your own life, or maybe from the news.
Something in you wants them to know. Not just to be stopped—that isn’t enough. You want it to land on them, from the inside, what they are.
And how does it land on them? Do they back down—or do they treat it as a challenge and respond accordingly? You can almost see it strengthening their resolve.
Why? Because they’re evil, obviously, and that’s just what evil does.
You were right about them. Which means you’re also right about whatever you (or perhaps someone less squeamish) must do to them.
What you’re showing them
You probably already know where this is going.
Look at what you’re actually showing them. I’ll use my own language for it, and you can see if you recognize yourself in any of it. You don’t have to admit it to anyone but yourself.
You think you know darkness? You think you’re the only one who can wield it?
*Let me show you real darkness. Watch how I—a good person—am going to get away with what I’m doing to you. How the whole world will cheer me on. I won’t even know I’ve done anything, and others will laud me as a hero—even though we both know that they, too, secretly know.
I’m only “fighting evil,” you see—and how could that ever be wrong?*
Sound familiar?
I haven’t “done anything.” Anything, that is, except license their darkness, so that I can taste that forbidden pleasure of violently punishing them for it. All so I can hide mine from myself.
How? By showing them that I am provoking theirs, while also hiding from myself that I am, so that I genuinely won’t have any idea that I was doing this.
The very idea will sound preposterous to me. Offensive even. Because, you see, I am a good person.
Of course, there’s one tiny problem: part of me knows.
In the moment, something in me registers my behavior as a bit underhanded. But so what, I tell myself, sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to fight evil.
But it’s not rules that I’m bending. My rules are what tell me not to be too harsh, or violent. But as we already saw, it wasn’t the harshness that was the problem. It was that “little something extra” I couldn’t help but inject into the interaction. The thing that revealed my darkness.
It’s my deep inner knowing that I’m violating. The one thing whose violation shows them that I am violating it. That’s what I’m counting on them to recognize—and I know they will, because at some level I know that’s how they got where they are in the first place.
How else would they recognize my darkness for what it is? Why else would it so reliably empower theirs?
I know all this. I just can’t afford to admit it.
Suppress, or provoke
On one level, I’m telling myself that I’m using my darkness to suppress theirs. Showing them what will happen if they don’t stop. Scaring them into abandoning theirs.
On a deeper level, I know I’m using mine to provoke theirs—but it’s still for a good cause. I’m not creating new evil, you see, just exposing what’s already there.
But deeper still, something far more insidious is happening. Mine is teaching theirs to ingratiate itself to them. Showing them that it’s controlling me; that even the so-called “good people” will embrace it when they can get away with it.
Proving to them that genuine goodness is a myth.
Something in me is doing everything in its power to prevent them from remembering that there’s another part of themselves that they might turn toward—a part they’ve long since forgotten about, at least at the conscious level.
Because if they did ever turn back toward it, then what would that make me?
So I cannot risk it.
This is how my darkness hides itself from me. By reminding me that the real problem exists “out there,” where it’s my righteous duty to viciously attack it.
We all know this is happening, on some level. It’s the same thing he could count on in the street: you know, I know you know, and neither of us will ever say so. Which is also why we must never acknowledge that it is.
So the full message I’m communicating actually goes something like this:
You will be our sacrifice. The communal dumping ground for our collective shadow. I’m sorry to have to do this to you—but it’s the only way to keep our hands clean.
That certainly could convince someone to cozy up to their darkness, now couldn’t it?
The sacrifice
None of this requires a decision. Nobody thinks: we will put the part of ourselves we can’t bear to see into this person. The arrangement depends on our not thinking it.
But check whether some part of you knows it anyway.
In those times when the punishment feels a little too good. When you’re more interested in what they are than in what they did. When their getting worse feels strangely welcome.
You know. And then you turn away.
And when everyone turns away in the same direction, the knowledge doesn’t go anywhere. It just becomes the thing nobody can say.
Which means the person we’ve designated carries something for us. Not only their own harm, but ours. The part we couldn’t hold.
Now consider what would happen if they changed.
Not surrendered. Not admitted anything. Just quietly became someone you could no longer see that way.
Something in you would resist it, wouldn’t it? Not because you’d doubt it. Because you’d suddenly have to confront something in yourself. Something we’d all really rather not ever have to face.
The most dangerous thing our enemies can do to us is not to attack.
It is to get better.
That is the one thing we must never allow.
What that tells you
Now the part that matters most. We absolutely couldn’t do this if we clearly saw that we were.
What does that tell you? Why would you not want to do this to others—even to “evil” others?
There. That’s your humanity. The part that cannot want another person to hurt, when you can clearly see what that hurt entails.
Because you know that hurt from the inside. It’s the thing you want to banish from this world.
And that’s what the darkness relies on: our not seeing it for what it is. And it’s not just what the darkness needs: it’s what the darkness is.