Chapter 8: The Water

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."

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. —Hermann Hesse

This is the chapter the book exists for, and I’ll say it gently, because it isn’t an accusation.

Go back to the stranger’s eyes, and widen the look. Think of the moment you saw a child step toward a road and something in you moved before you did. Or the news that a river you’ve swum in was poisoned upstream, and the thing that rose in you wasn’t an opinion. Or a forest coming down, a dog being kicked, somebody you’ll never meet being humiliated on a screen, and the wanting that arrives, fast and hot, for it to stop, for all of it to be all right. That’s the same recognition you felt in one face, aimed at everything alive at once. It wants the whole of it to go well, and it would fight. It isn’t soft. It’s the fiercest thing in you.

Now a question, and answer it honestly rather than the way you think you should. When you decide what to work on, what to say to somebody, what to buy, what to do with this year, is the deciding done from that? Or from your thoughts about what will help, with that part somewhere out of the room?

For nearly all of us, nearly all the time, it’s the thoughts. That’s what turned away looks like at its most ordinary. No enemy, no heat, no verdict. Just a life steered by the part that argues, with the part that knows out of the room. If what you do isn’t rooted in that fierce wanting, you’re turned away while you do it, however good the plan. I am, most of the day.

Here is what it looks like, so you can recognize it as yours. The action that helps the world and also happens to help you, where you can even feel the balance, yes, this benefits me, but it also helps others, and a deeper part of you knows which half was the point. The small thrill of getting away with something: the little underreporting, the extra change kept, and notice that the thrill is itself the evidence, because some part of you registered exactly what you did. How easy it is to see all of this in your enemies and how hard in your allies, when the difference has nothing to do with who’s doing it more. Being unwilling to hear what somebody’s experience is like: that person is stupid for feeling that way. Looking at the people around you, on some days, as extras in your movie. The reading of your opponent’s words so that they’re stupid when the fair reading was right there and you knew it. And the look: not contempt, nothing said, just a slight hardening in a meeting about who gets what, which everyone in the room can read and nobody names. Each of these is a turning away from the life in someone, and each carries the same signature, however faint.

And here’s a move I made for years. I can see self-deception so clearly in other people. If I were doing it, I’d see it in myself. I don’t, so I’m not. The clarity about them became the proof about me. That’s the mechanism using its own detector as cover. Everybody believes they’re free of it, that it’s something only bad people do, because by its nature it isn’t something we can normally see in ourselves. It turns out that belief is the surest sign it’s running.

There’s a version of moral self-licensing that’s the reverse of the usual one. The usual one says that when we do good, we license ourselves to do a little bad. I think the reverse is more true: much of the good we do is to hide from ourselves the recognition of the dark. Look at your own good deeds with that in mind, once, and see what’s there.

I said this chapter is the reason the book exists, and here’s why. The devil, if you want to call it that, isn’t winning through the monsters. The monsters are rare, and we’re watching them. He’s winning through the default, through the water, through all of us most of the day, with none of us intending a thing. That’s the only reason he doesn’t need conspirators.

The point of this isn’t to make you feel rotten. It’s scope. Nothing about what happened between you and the stranger was a special event. And there is a turning point available in a life, when the whole storehouse of this is unveiled at once, and it’s impossibly painful, and after it you don’t become a good person. Your own self-deception just becomes painful to you, so that you can’t help acknowledging it when it arises, and you clean it up bit by bit. That’s what the rest of the book is for.