Chapter 9: The Satisfaction

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."

Not that these others are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person. —Carl Jung

Now the delivering end, and I’ll ask you to be honest without being harsh with yourself.

There is nothing more primally, viscerally satisfying than violently punishing evil. Pause and feel that, whether you’d endorse the idea or recoil from it. Bring to mind someone who actually qualifies. Not a stranger who was rude to you, but someone whose harm was real. 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.

Here’s a question I sat with for years. Why would I want to stop corruption, when I feel so good judging it? The honest answer is that part of me doesn’t. If my enemy quietly got better tomorrow, something in me would feel robbed. If I were offered a choice between his complete reform and his eternal punishment, a small dark part of me would reach for the second, and that part is not far below the surface.

What is that part after? It needs there to be bad people. As long as some people are simply bad, there’s a line between them and me, and everything I do that I’d rather not look at falls on my side of it. My darkness isn’t real darkness. It’s the strategic kind, the kind that good people have to keep in order to hold real evil in check. That sentence is the whole trick in one line. I believed it for most of my life, and I can feel the pull of it now. And as long as I feel like a good person, I need there to be bad people, which is how the darkness keeps its foot in the door; trying to be a good person is itself the trap, because the idea needs bad people to define itself against.

So we make other people feel unsafe. That’s what contempt is for. It keeps them from ever looking closely enough to see that their darkness isn’t them, because if they saw that, they might get better, and then where would the line be? Bad people are where we put what we can’t bear to see in ourselves. They’re the ones everyone has agreed you can go completely dark on and still feel clean. Our need to look like good people is what produces the incentive to create bad people. And we deliver the message to them, underneath the words: somebody has to carry this, and it’s going to be you.

Think about how it feels when you’ve skirted your own conscience and somebody tries to shame you for it. You know they don’t have your best interests at heart. You know they’re using your all-too-human failure to throw you under the bus for their own benefit, and there’s no way you’d let them get away with it. We think it’s somehow different when we do it. That’s the privilege we grant ourselves: the privilege to treat others with contempt for falling victim to their darkness.

Of all the checks in this book, this is the one I’d keep. The next time you settle it that somebody is beyond reach, watch what happens in you as the verdict lands. In me, something eases. Something wanted that, and when I look at what wanted it, it has nothing to do with wanting the harm to stop. If the harm ended tomorrow, with nobody punished and nobody exposed, would you feel relieved, or robbed? The relief is fast, and it comes dressed as clarity, and the whole encounter is arranged so that you’re looking at him. The first several times you go looking you may find nothing. Then one day you’ll catch it.

The darkest idea this thing has ever produced is the one that sounds most like a solution: if we could just round up the bad people and be rid of them, the rest of us would live in peace. The turning away it takes to hold that thought guarantees that the darkness stays behind, in full force, changed only in shape. I can’t find an atrocity that didn’t begin there. And when I say contempt is evil, I don’t mean it’s very bad. I mean it’s the thing the word was pointing at all along.