Chapter 1: Limbo

This chapter: about 5,033 words, roughly 18 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.

Contempt is the claim that you’re a worse kind of thing than me. But it only works because you’re the same kind of thing, and both of us know it. I want to show you why.

I’ll make some claims before I’ve earned them. Hold them the way you’d hold puzzle pieces you haven’t placed, and if they don’t fit what you find in yourself, drop them.

Limbo

Have you ever done something you knew was wrong at the time, but couldn’t fully admit it to yourself until later? Maybe you took credit for someone else’s work, said something cruel to someone who’d done nothing to you, or cheated on a test (or even a partner). Something you did, not something that was done to you.

Recall what it was like to finally own up to it. The knowledge that it was wrong: did it feel like new information? Or like something you had always known, but somehow hadn’t let yourself know?

If it felt like something you’d always known, “unconscious” is the wrong word for it, though it’s the one we like to use. It was right there to see—fully available to consciousness—you were just turned away from it. It lived in a strange kind of limbo, in which you simultaneously knew and yet somehow didn’t.

Any time someone came close to exposing it, or you started getting close to it yourself, did you find a way to deflect? Did that happen passively? Looking back, did some part of you know you were doing that, even as you did it? If so, notice how intentional behavior can take place in limbo, too. You know you’re in limbo, and you don’t.

Now try to recall how you knew it was wrong in the first place. Did that knowledge arrive before or after you’d reasoned it through? The part that knew might not have been able to say how it knew. Meanwhile, another part was busy providing reasons. Everyone does it. It’s not a big deal. Just this once.

The part that knew may not have won the argument, but it never budged, either. It kept on quietly knowing what it knew.

Why did one side have to argue, and the other not?

Now imagine doing the same thing without any justifications. Could you have? If it’s too far back to tell, try it in imagination with something small: picture someone in front of you, fully in view, and see whether you can bring yourself to use them.

And the reverse. You know the feeling of remorse: that sickening sense of having gone against yourself. Have you ever felt it over something you did out of decency? Can you imagine anyone feeling it in reverse: a bad person who does secret acts of kindness, and then lies awake at night, wracked with remorse for having gone against his evil nature? When I thought I’d found one, it turned out to be something else: regret that it cost me, anger at being taken advantage of, guilt at breaking a rule I was raised on, or feeling foolish. If yours held up, I’d like to hear it.

One more thing about that memory. When you finally admitted it to yourself, how did you hold yourself? The most common contempt of all is the one we aim at ourselves: you are what you did. It feels like accountability, but it’s a verdict, this is all you are, pointed inward, and it does what that verdict always does: it makes the part of you that did wrong dig in and hide. Nobody ever looked honestly at something in themselves while being told they were worthless for having it.

So if, in what follows, you catch yourself thinking I’m a terrible person, treat that as one more instance of the thing we’re studying. It’s no truer of you than of anyone else, and no more useful.

The Two Strangers

Imagine that while you were in that state—doing wrong, justifying it, half-knowing—a stranger had caught you and publicly chastised you for it. Not just for doing something wrong, but for being the kind of person who does.

Does that make it easier or harder to confront what you already know?

For me, it’s harder, because who the hell is he to judge? I can tell he’s the kind of person who does this too—things he knows are wrong, while pretending they’re not.

I’d bet on it at any odds. But on what evidence? I’ve never met him. I know nothing about him. All I have to go on is that he’s standing there, doing what he’s doing.

Now imagine a different stranger had caught you—but instead of treating you with contempt, he treated you with dignity. Not more gently. Just that his anger was directed at what you did, and not what you are.

Would you have dug in?

The problem wasn’t being caught. In fact, he could have been harsher than the first person—said things that stung more, in front of more people, left you less room to wriggle out—and it still wouldn’t have triggered the digging-in response.

It’s like he was reminding you of something: that you’re better than this. The opposite of what the first stranger was doing: claiming that this is all you are.

I had one once. The person who corrected me best was a teacher who caught me stealing. His look was fierce, and I braced for the verdict, and it never came. He was searching my face for some sign that I knew, and that made me look for it in myself.

You might have disagreed with him on nearly everything—politics, religion, creed—and it wouldn’t have mattered. Whatever he was standing up for wasn’t his. It wasn’t a rule, or a side. It was something you were already on the side of, and he was only reminding you.

What is that thing whose side you are both on; that two people who agree on nothing can both be serving? And that the first stranger clearly wasn’t?

The Encounter

I’ve been the first stranger more times than I’d like to admit. I’ll narrate what happens in my mind when I am. My target has just been cruel to someone who didn’t deserve it. The threat is over, and now I’m calling him out.

I’ve decided he’s a bad person—not just someone who does bad things, but who is bad. My eyes are saying: I’m a better kind of thing than you. And I want him to feel the full weight of my judgment, almost as a kind of punishment.

Part of me senses something dark in the message. If I were on the receiving end, I’d recognize it instantly: this is all you are carries an implicit threat: And therefore your wellbeing has ceased to matter. What I do to you no longer qualifies as harm. There’s no bottom to what can be done to someone who doesn’t count.

I would defy a message like that too, and violently.

But if I admitted that, it would undermine the verdict I feel strangely attached to: he’s bad, dammit. So I push it out of mind. I’m only holding him to account, and if he reacts poorly, that only proves my point. It’s not like I’m actually threatening him. If anything it’s an invitation, to return to the realm of those who matter!

But there’s nothing inviting about my tone or gaze. How could there be, when I’m trying to convince him that this is all he is?

On the other hand, he can’t prove I’m doing this, can he? No. And neither can I. So if he accuses me of it, he can only be projecting.

And there he goes, accusing me of it anyway. Not in words. His eyes say: We both know what you’re really up to.

Shit. He’s onto me. But I can’t afford to admit it. I don’t even want to believe I have that kind of darkness in me—that would forsake a fellow being just to prove I’m nothing like him.

So I remind myself that what I’m doing is good. Sure, it may be a bit dark, but it’s the good kind of darkness—the kind that fights the real kind!

I double down: this really is what you are. Yet for some reason, that only makes him more defiant…

Part of me knew the whole time that I could have done what the second stranger did: served justice without injecting my own darkness. But fierce integrity and contempt can be made to look alike from the outside, so that when I look back later, even I won’t be sure which one I did. And I’ll have produced the result I needed: proof that my enemy is beyond help, because look how he reacted.

I wasn’t exposing his darkness, like I told myself. I was creating more of it.

My enemy was probably feeling something like this:

What a hypocrite. If this is the kind of world I live in—where people can act in a dark manner, call it “righteous,” and get away with it—then why the hell can’t I?

I’ve been in his shoes before. I don’t tell myself “I’m free to ignore my conscience”; my justifications simply feel more compelling, more righteous—as though they are my conscience. The two get just a little harder to tell apart.

Think back to the wrong you remembered at the start. Did some part of you feel you deserved something? That everyone does it, and only a fool plays it straight?

I’m overriding the part that knows (I’m causing harm) in favor of the part that can prove (I’m doing good), and by doing so, teaching him to make the same mistake: to demote his inner knowing, because what good is it in a world as rotten as this?

I sense his hardening, and feel a brief flicker of satisfaction, vindication, even relief at being proven right about him—just before I relabel it disgust or dismay:

Ugh, I knew it. Other people are the problem.

Any doubt I had about him is now erased. Who cares about my own minor misdeeds when there’s real evil out there to fight?

If I’d looked carefully, I’d have seen my role in causing it. So I didn’t—and that was my role in causing it.

Bring to mind your worst enemy. (If the one who comes to mind is someone who abused you, pick a different enemy for this; that face can wait, or never come.) Say you had two buttons in front of you. One delivers them the vengeance they so richly deserve. The other gives them a pill that instantly changes their heart. Imagine no one will ever know you were given this choice, let alone what you chose. Is some part of you itching to press that first button? I’ll be honest: there is in me.

And think of the last time you watched someone you despise get what was coming to him. Was the pleasure only in the harm stopping, or also in the punishment itself?

Something in me craves punishment, over and above any good it might do; beyond the justice it will serve. I tell myself it’s innocuous, just part of being human, and just confined to my skull. It’s not like I would ever act on it.

And that lie is exactly what lets it leak out my eyes, provoking my enemies into becoming more of what I need them to be.

The How

The reason I don’t have to argue myself into doing the right thing is that in the absence of justifications or fears, it’s what I naturally desire. I call that deepest part of myself my better nature. It follows no rules; it’s the part of me that sees myself in others, and that’s why I must turn away from it to cause harm. My excuses aren’t there to convince it; they’re there to convince me that it’s one more voice among the noise, and safe to ignore.

Part of what it sees in others is that they, too, can only cause harm by turning away. When I turn away from my better nature, other people look defective, as if they were just bad. But the perception of our similarity never truly disappears. It just goes into limbo.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a dehumanizing gaze, could you feel the sense in which the other person is somehow absent or “turned away” from himself? What were they turned away from? Why would they have to turn away from anything, if what they are is essentially bad? Might that be what I looked like to my enemy?

But part of me refuses to believe I’m anything like the bad people. I need their behavior to come from something I don’t have: some alien quality called “evil” that I could never hope to understand, only valiantly fight. But to me it just feels like truth: I can literally see the darkness in their eyes, and I believe it’s what they are. What I don’t see is that I can only believe this while turned away myself. In this state, that need is in control, though I don’t realize it.

Watch how it accomplishes its goal.

My enemy sees I’m turned away, even though I don’t. Because I don’t. And he sees it as evil, for the same reason I see him that way. My look shows him, through my tone and my gaze, that the darkness I see in him lives in me too, and that I can use it against him and get away with it. And it doesn’t look like an accident to him—because it isn’t.

Notice how my stories kept changing, but my conclusion never did. When he saw through one, the next was ready, and when he called me on it I wasn’t embarrassed or confused. Something tracked his reactions and steered around them, in the same way yours did, if you deflected when someone came close. But I couldn’t have held against him evidence I knew I’d planted. I had to be present enough to plant it, and absent enough not to recognize it as planted. It was intentional, but done in limbo.

If you’ve been on his end, you know how it closes around you. Deny it, and you’re the kind of person who does. Get angry, and that’s proof too. Stay calm, and you don’t even care. Apologize, and it’s too convenient. Plain malice would frighten you. This maddens, because it won’t admit what it is.

By revealing this need to my enemy while hiding it from myself, I’ve just nudged him one step closer to being the kind of person who can only be dealt with in one way—the way that part of me craves.

I desperately want to call this behavior unconscious (if I can admit I do it at all), because otherwise what would it make me? Evil behavior is unconscious in me, and fully aware in my enemies. That’s why I deserve understanding, and they deserve contempt.

The Mechanism

The steering was how I did it. But this trap wouldn’t work unless some part of me also recognized our similarity: that he has a better nature I could push him away from, and that he would recognize my tone and gaze as signs of me being turned away from mine. It’s as if I’m saying to him:

I know exactly how you cause harm, and I’m making you watch me do it to you right now. But I’ll get away with it—because I’m only “fighting evil,” and how could that ever be wrong?

He knows it’s true, and I know he knows it, and he knows that too. That was his accusation: we both know what you’re really up to. But we both also know he can’t say so without sounding unhinged, because it’s all plausibly deniable, even to myself. That’s part of the trap.

There is no specific wrong to point at. The look is the deed. And because what it means is already known to both of us, it needs no words. It can be carried entirely by gaze and tone, which have the benefit of being unquotable.

I am in limbo about provoking him, and revealing that I am in limbo is itself the provocation. The signal is the pretense that there is no signal. (Appendix 1 lays out the formal structure.)

My claim that I’m a better kind of thing is maddening precisely because some part of both of us knows it’s false. It works because we are the same kind of thing—beings who must turn away to cause harm.

And look at what the sameness means. Not that we agree about what’s good; we don’t. It’s that we both know how to orient toward it, and that no good comes from turning away from that part of ourselves.

I never think, he turned from his better nature, good. Whatever he does while turned toward it—as the second stranger was—I trust to be aimed at the good, even when it misses. His accusation of hypocrisy only stings because he’s extending me that trust, and watching me betray it.

Now notice where my signal lands.

Recall the last time someone’s contempt really got under your skin, and feel for where it was trying to reach. For me it was never just my pride; an insult to my pride is easier to shrug off. It reached further in, for the me that knows I count: the same one I’d have to turn away from to harm someone, and the same one the second stranger was speaking to.

Love and contempt are addressed to the same place. One says I know you’re in there. The other says there’s nobody in there, and they both say it to the somebody who is.

Not everyone defies it. A rival refuses it, and the refusal hardens him. A child can’t refuse it; he believes it, and carries it for years. It reaches the same place in both.

I am speaking directly to the part of my enemy that I claim doesn’t exist—his better nature—and trying to extinguish it.

What I’ve been hiding isn’t that I could do what the “bad people” do. It’s that I’m already doing it, by using them as a place to hide the fact that I am.

I’ve laid this all out as an argument, but for me it wasn’t one. I saw it in myself the way you found your wrong in the opening: as something I had always known, but hadn’t let myself know. And for me, it was revealed in layers—levels of increasingly subtle limbo.

On the surface, it felt entirely righteous: I was just putting a bad person in his place. Underneath that was something less pleasant: I was wielding my own darkness to do so—but at least it was still for the greater good. Another layer, and I saw that I felt good old-fashioned vengeance: I wanted him to suffer, but in a way that nobody could accuse me of.

And then, finally, the truth: I needed others to carry the darkness I was hiding from myself, and he was an ideal “victim” because of what he had done. And how better to make him carry it than to show him that I was doing it, while hiding it from myself?

I was knowingly smothering his innocent part—a part that, for all I knew, could still be rescued. And I felt a flash of satisfaction when I got away with it. There was nothing I could do to deny it. It had been there the whole time; I had just been turned away from it.

It’s hard to describe the pain when I first saw it clearly. Malevolent isn’t too strong a word for my state in the moment it happened—because, in a certain sense, it was. And yet, in another sense, it was utterly innocent. I was deeply confused, and in that confusion, allowed myself to take it out on him.

That in no way excuses me. I know I’m still fully responsible for all the harm I’ve caused from this confusion. But it did show me a new way to relate to others.

I now think that “pure evil” is this error at maximum intensity—where “othering” has reached its zenith, and feels maximally righteous. It looks intentional, just as mine did, because in an important sense, it is. The horror is right there for them to see, the way mine was for me and yours was for you, but they are turned away from it as far as a mind can turn. Innocent at the root, and fully responsible, the way I was.

It must be fought, with everything I have. But when I do it with contempt, I now see what I’m doing: using the other person as cover for my own darkness to seep into the world, undetected.

The problem is, it’s never truly undetected. The great lie we tell ourselves is that it is.

The Way Out

Go back to the memory at the start, to the knowledge you hadn’t let yourself know. Look at the grammar: you hid it from yourself, not from some part of you. So what was it hidden from? When you finally owned up, did it feel like losing something of yourself, or like getting something back? And if you could keep only one of the two parts—the one that knew without arguing, or the one that justified—which would you keep?

What you hid it from is what you call “I” when nothing is being hidden. I’ve called my better nature a part until now, but it’s what’s left when the hiding stops. I’m not claiming there’s a thing in there you could point to. Only that this is what the hiding was from, and what my contempt was aimed at in him. I never had to produce the care. It was there until I turned from it, and the turning was all I did.

When I’m sure someone was fully aware of what they were doing, I’ve made them a villain. When I’m sure they had no idea, I’ve made them a machine. Either way, they’re a different kind of thing from me.1 What I find hard to hold is what I found in my own memory: that they knew, but didn’t let themselves feel the weight of what they knew.

If darkness were an essence, I’d be right to be afraid of it, and ashamed, and I’d have to keep proving it’s in others and not in me. But if it’s something I do, then I can stop.

Badness is the result of turning away, not its cause. When I tell myself the bad people don’t have a conscience, or that they choose to turn away from it due to some “bad essence,” I’m turning it back into a cause. Or I tell myself that sure, sometimes I do wrong too, but my justifications are reasonable, or at least forgivable. One way or another, something in me needs there to be an essential difference between us.

But despite having no essence, evil isn’t just nothing. Call it that and I’ll underestimate it: I’ll stop looking at exactly the moment it’s crucial to look more closely. It tracks, it aims, it fights to stay hidden. It’s an absence that behaves like a presence: it has no substance of its own; everything it uses—my attention, my reasons, my eyes—is borrowed from me. When it’s operating, it looks and behaves exactly like you’d expect a “bad essence” to look. It’s what I saw in my enemy, and what I showed him in return.

When I feel a fundamental difference between me and my worst enemy, I ask which part of me needs there to be one.

The Spread

The harm doesn’t stop at him. It passes to the next stranger he won’t give the benefit of the doubt, and to the kid who watches him do it. What gets passed along is the turning away behind my look, and the permission it gives. And I send it about people, to my allies, with nobody’s face in view. Most of all, I do it on social media. Everyone in the conversation learns that the verdict is safe to hold, and leaves a little more practiced at it.

What I narrated was the hot kind of contempt. It can also run cold. I just write the person off: a quiet filing-away, a politeness with nothing behind it, and a small satisfaction at being done with them. It’s the same verdict, delivered by withdrawal, and it’s meant to be felt: by them, or by whoever’s watching.

Most contempt is quiet: a vague sense of well, I could never do that. It doesn’t feel like contempt at all, and it can happen a thousand times a day without my noticing. I send it to people I love. The what’s wrong with you? that needs them to know they’re broken. The sigh that tells them what I really think of them, dressed up to make me seem like the reasonable one. The look on their face that tells me it landed, which I pretend not to have seen. For one second the verdict flashes through my eyes, and I make sure they see it, and then I go back to loving them as if nothing had happened.

That wasn’t the real me can be used as an excuse, but I also think it’s true. I did it, and it’s mine to answer for. But I could only do it by turning away from myself.

Even this book can carry it: sometimes I’m writing it at people, instead of for them.

What I need in order to look at this is what my enemy needed from me, and what the second stranger gave: to be seen as more than what I do.

The Other Look

Have you ever been the second stranger? Think of a time you had to stop someone: a child about to hurt another child, a colleague cutting a corner, a friend being cruel about someone who wasn’t there. Look for one where you had to be a little fierce.

While you did it, were you focused on what they’d done, or what they were? Was the wish to stop them at full strength? Was anything riding on it, any need for them to come away smaller?

Now think of a time you felt the extra coming, the sigh loaded or the of course you did on its way out, and you didn’t send it. What did you do instead, and what happened in them? Was anything different in how you saw them?

What you said went to the same place my look went in my enemy, and it said the opposite: I know you’re in there. They were met by someone who hadn’t given up on them, which is what the teacher gave me. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. But what it probably didn’t do is give them license to embrace their darkness.

Contempt passes on something dark, and it doesn’t stop at them. Try and get a feel for what being met that way passes on, and whether that’s likely to stop with them either.

The Orientation

So what is it that two people who agree on nothing can both be serving? Not a definition of good. We may never agree on one, and we don’t need to. The first stranger’s allies would have called what he did good, and his enemies would have called it evil, and both would have recognized, in limbo, the badness woven into it. Which suggests there’s something we serve that transcends sides. It’s an orientation. The part that knew without arguing was pointed in it, and so was the second stranger when he pointed you back. Meanwhile, the part that proves can be pointed anywhere. Even when it’s pointed away from goodness, cut loose from the part that knows, it can prove that it isn’t.

If I had to name the orientation, I might call it being turned toward all of life. Not one person, and not my side: the second stranger wasn’t exactly serving you, and he wasn’t serving himself. I hesitate to name it at all, because watch what happens when I do: Goodness means serving life. This man isn’t serving it. So hating him is good. That’s what I did to my enemy. It’s the orientation turned into an idea, and it failed for the simplest reason: the man in front of me was part of the life I claimed to be serving.

This inability to define goodness isn’t a flaw. Any time I define it, I give myself something to follow instead of orienting, which is what I did to my enemy. It’s also why I can’t prove to you that such an orientation even exists. All I can do is invite you to remember the part of you that already knows it.

Underneath the argument, my enemy and I were never fighting over whether a shared ground exists. We were fighting over which of us still stood on it. That’s why the worst thing I can do for anyone is what I did to my enemy: teach them to forget it’s there, by forgetting it myself. And the best thing I can do, for them and through them for the world, is remember it.

  1. The case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged in the deaths of her three young children in 2023, split people along this line almost overnight. Much of what I read said monster, feed her to the woodchipper; much of the rest said illness, with nothing of her in it. I don’t know what happened in her, and this isn’t a verdict on it. The point is how fast each side knew, and how each needed the other’s answer to be the only alternative. ↩