Chapter 4: The Darkness
Is it you?
Now we must confront a burning question: is your darkness you?
If it just is you, then it becomes very difficult to avoid shame—especially as you discover the full extent of harm you’ve caused from within it. That prevents you from seeing it clearly for what it is, and doing what you must to end it. That only gives it more power.
But if it’s not you—if it’s something else, or some unconscious process—then how can you bear full responsibility? That entails feeling the full weight of it. Seeing that yes, I did this—and I knew I was doing it. And as we’ve seen, we absolutely do know, in the sense that matters.
Our mind can’t help but collapse the paradox to one side or the other. That’s what keeps the whole thing going. In a sense, the darkness benefits from our inability to hold this paradox.
And look what happens when we apply it to our enemies.
If they fully knew and only knew, then they’re just bad. Fundamentally defective. Beyond help. In that case, contempt is fully deserved. And we’ve already seen exactly where that leads. It’s the mirror image of the shame case above: a way to prevent them from seeing it clearly and ending it.
But if they didn’t know, then why hold them accountable at all? Maybe we should just go easy on them. This is close to what the popular misconception of compassion is: being soft and nice, and non-confrontational.
But genuine compassion holds both halves at once. We (and our enemies) are fully responsible for the harm we’ve caused—and at the same time deserve the grace necessary to actually let us see it clearly enough to end it, rather than forsaking us to the abyss where we’re doomed to repeat it.
Is it real?
And another question: is the darkness real?
Look at what you already have. Everything the first stranger’s dark part did, it did with borrowed equipment. It aimed with his eyes. It read your reactions with his perception. It closed every road with his intelligence. It felt certain using his conscience’s own sense of what real evil calls for. Take away everything that is him and ask what’s left of the darkness. Nothing. No hidden something that was steering him. Only the fact that all of that equipment was pointed slightly away—from you, and from himself.
You saw it from the other side, too. When you tried to give a stranger that gaze and couldn’t, what stopped you wasn’t a good part winning a fight with a bad part. It was that you were looking. You can’t do it while looking. The darkness didn’t lose. There was no fight, because there was nothing there to fight with.
That’s its strange status. It isn’t a thing. It’s the not-looking. Which is why it’s not quite our “willingness” to turn away. Willingness makes it sound like a choice, an evil one, and that just pushes the problem one level down, where you’d need a darkness to explain the darkness. Nobody chooses to stop looking while they’re still looking. It happens because something isn’t being seen clearly. And the moment it is, it stops—as you found when you tried.
So: real enough to sink a ship, and made of nothing but a hole.
All of the above is needed to hold what comes next.
Where the checking stops
I should tell you plainly what changes here.
Everything up to this point, you could check against your own memory. What follows is different: some of it is inference, and some of it is simply how I’ve come to hold the whole picture. I’ll try to mark which is which. Nothing practical in this book depends on you agreeing with the second kind.
The handshake
Recall from the last chapter what happens when I treat my enemy with contempt: my darkness teaches theirs to ingratiate itself to them.
All of this takes place in deep limbo—a place so well hidden that I can hardly stop myself from calling it unconscious. But it is conscious and unconscious at once. Both me and not-me. What we learned to hold above.
And it is from there that I want to tell you what this feels like from the inside. Not a guess. My best attempt at a description of something I was present for—as we all are.
It feels like a secret handshake between my darkness and theirs.
For what purpose? To keep themselves better hidden. From both of us. From everyone.
Which is exactly what they accomplish. Both of us leave more certain than ever that we’re free of darkness ourselves, and that it exists only “out there” in others, where it’s our righteous duty to defeat it.
If that gives off “evil conspiracy” vibes, it’s not an accident. I offer this gingerly, because I know how it comes across.
But the archetype of the evil global conspiracy: it doesn’t come from nowhere. Some part of us senses that there’s more to the picture of what’s going wrong in our world than our usual stories can explain
Because there is.
The rooms
We’ve seen how two people, each flawlessly convinced they’re doing good, can between them increase the net evil in the world—and not entirely by accident. It is not incorrect to say that both knew what they were doing, even if it’s also true that they didn’t.
And it doesn’t just run between enemies.
Think of what happens when we get together and foster contempt for a shared enemy. On the surface, it feels like bonding. Harmless. But underneath that, what’s actually happening? How are we likely to treat our enemies after this? How are we likely to relate to our own principles, having just “reminded” one another how evil our enemies are, and how they must be stopped at any cost?
Is it likely to be with more integrity?
What happens in those rooms is very much that same handshake, at a larger scale. The darkness does not care whether we are friends or foes.
Or look at social media. The casual contempt we hurl at each other all day, most of it too small to notice. Does that make this thing stronger or weaker?
Would we consent to it if we could clearly see what we were doing?
When I take a look around, I find that most of the harm we cause has its root in some form of contempt. For each other. For animals. For nature herself.
I’m not waxing spiritual to slip my views past you. As best I can tell, none of us actually wants to destroy our biosphere—not if that “want” is interrogated deeply enough. Even the ones who’d claim otherwise simply aren’t looking closely.
And the way I’ve been relating to them—it’s only making it harder for them to look.
And it’s not by accident.
The conspiracy
There are countless “hidden channels of communication” taking place between all of us, nearly all the time. They account for far more of the harm we see in the world than the surface stuff—just as with the two strangers. And it is collectively nudging the world toward a state that none of us actually wants.
And the belief that some do want it—that at the very deepest level, there’s something broken in them that isn’t in us—exists only to create more of that very communication.
Every act of unkindness, every skirting of conscience, every bit of self-serving behavior that we tell ourselves we’ll get away with, or that it’s fine because of what they’re doing: we get away with none of it. It is feeding something. Something we all hate but dare not name.
There is a kind of “evil global conspiracy.” It just isn’t the kind we’ve trained ourselves to look for.
The belief that we’re the righteous ones standing outside it, valiantly fighting it?
That is the conspiracy. The “agent” you met in chapter 1—the one operating in your mind—is part of it.
That’s what the rest of this book exists to unfold.