Chapter 1: Turning Away
Imagine looking into a stranger’s eyes long enough that their face stops being something you’re looking at and becomes a place somebody is looking out of.
Stay there until you feel what comes with it—not a conclusion, but a recognition:
This one is like me. I want them to be all right.
Call this being turned toward them. With it comes a sense of their innocence. Not that they’re incapable of causing harm—but the sense of something innocent underneath it.
Sometimes, if the looking deepens, something stranger happens: it can feel almost as though you are looking back at yourself through their eyes.
Now erase that meeting. Run it again—but imagine that this time, the person you’re meeting had just done something atrocious. Something deliberate, perhaps to someone innocent—maybe even to someone you love.
Keep looking into the same eyes. Can you still find that same recognition?
It’s much harder, isn’t it? Where before there was someone whose wellbeing mattered, now there is only something rotten. Not merely something they did. Something they are.
In that state, we don’t just feel anger. Not just “I will stop you.” There’s something darker in it, and it feels like:
You are less than human, and have forfeited the right to be treated like one.
Test that in your own experience. And when we believe that about someone, how does it license us to treat them? Is there any bottom to it? When we feel “this is all you are” about someone, harming them no longer registers as harm.
Something in you wants this verdict to land on them; to register deep inside. Can you feel that?
This overlooking of humanity is what I’ll call being turned away. It is not two departures: one from perceiving their innocence, and another from the benevolence in you that could see it. They are one event seen from opposite sides: their innocence disappears from your view as your benevolence ceases to meet them.
The need to make this verdict land is what I’ll call contempt. It is turning-away made into a message, accompanied by the sense that sending it is righteous.
What does that message do to them? Does it make it easier for them to turn back toward the people they harmed? Or does it make their own turning-away feel more necessary; more justified?
Now for a difficult question: couldn’t some part of you have predicted it would do that?
And if so, why did it still need to land?
Here’s the idea. They could only have done whatever they did by being turned away from the people they harmed—by overlooking their humanity. Check and see if that feels true to you. And they have the capacity to be turned-toward, too. That’s the innocence you originally saw.
What you’re doing is trying to make them turn back toward the life in others by turning away from theirs. What they receive is:
When you turn away, it proves that you’re rotten. When I turn away, it proves that I’m good—because I’m doing it to a rotten person.
This pressures them toward rage, defiance, retaliation—whatever will make them feel less exposed and powerless. It makes goodness itself look like a sham: just the name “good people” give their own turning-away when they have the power to get away with it. So why shouldn’t they do the same?
It doesn’t merely provoke their tendency to turn away. It licenses it. And what does that reaction give you?
Proof. There. See? Even when confronted with goodness, they embrace their darkness. It’s simply what they are.
But this is a little strange, isn’t it? You intentionally telegraphed something that you knew would pressure them to embrace their dark side, and then used it as a verdict of what they already are.
What’s going on here?
Common knowledge
You made their turning-away into an essence. What they fundamentally are. At some level, you know that’s not fair. How? Because you just turned away yourself without concluding that it’s your essence.
What you’re actually revealing to them is your own hypocrisy. That’s what makes it uniquely maddening, pressuring them to double down. But how do they recognize it as hypocrisy? You know that your accusation is disingenuous—but for them to register it as hypocrisy, they have to see that you know that. And how could they see anything about your private mental state?
The answer is that they don’t have to. It is something we all know about each other—that harm requires turning away, and that we only turn away to enable harm. It is common knowledge, even if it’s usually not explicit. And look what it means: they see that you know it. You know they see that you know it. They know that too, and so on.
There are two parallel channels operating at once: an implicit one saying we both know what I’m really doing here, and an explicit one saying I’m not doing anything wrong. Put them together and what do you get? An implicit message saying I’m going to get away with it, unlike you.
You both know that if they try to name it, you’ll use that against them too. It is a recursive, self-sealing trap, and it feels like a hall of mirrors. You’ve been on the receiving end before, so you know what it’s like. This is how it feels from the delivering end.
Part of your mind knows exactly what you’re doing, while another part is left in the dark so that you can unironically hold it against them. It must feel genuinely righteous to you.
But how can you so precisely telegraph something to someone else that you don’t fully register in yourself?
Limbo
Have you ever done something you knew was wrong at the time, but couldn’t fully admit to yourself until later? Maybe you made a cruel comment, took credit for someone else’s work, or cheated on a test (or even a partner).
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?
We like to call such knowledge “unconscious”—as if we had no way of knowing—but that’s not entirely accurate, is it? It was right there to see if you had looked; fully available to consciousness. You were just turned away from it. The knowledge existed in a strange kind of limbo, in which you simultaneously knew and yet somehow didn’t.
And it wasn’t just sitting there, idle: it affected your behavior. Any time someone came close to exposing the truth, or you started getting close to it yourself, you found a way to deflect, right? And that didn’t happen passively. The behavior took place in limbo, too.
Looking back, can you see how some part of you knew exactly what you were doing, even as you did it?
The same thing is going on with contempt. It takes place from limbo.
(Note: this section will be fleshed out more later, to connect turning away from knowledge of your wrongdoing to turning away from people. They’re essentially the same thing: turning away from ourselves; from our conscience; from the humanity in others; from the implications of our behavior—they’re all facets of the same move. For now, notice: when someone gives you a dehumanizing gaze, can you sense how they’re absent or “turned away” from themselves? That’s what you’re looking at.)
But was it really “you” doing this? This is where things get hard to describe.
Clearly it was you in the conventional sense, and you’re fully responsible for it. At the same time, if you’d been fully aware of it, you couldn’t have done it. Not just because you’re a good person, but because the structure of the trap depends on it—on the very thing revealed to them being hidden from you. And they must receive it as hidden from you, so that they know there’s no part of you that’s accessible to be appealed to or accused in return.
It’s not just hidden from you and revealed to them. What’s revealed to them is that it’s hidden from you. It reveals itself to them by hiding itself from you.
That is what limbo provides. It lets you be present enough to execute it, while being absent enough to genuinely believe that you’re not. It has to be that way: you can’t hold evidence against someone that you know you planted, so the planting can’t be fully aware.
Calling it a blind spot or “unconscious behavior” doesn’t account for the precision. This state does things, and protects itself. It aims the verdict. It reads reactions. It anticipates exposure, closes every exit, and turns each attempt to escape into further proof. And it leaves behind no record that you can see. (A genuine apology might break it, and sometimes does. But the state works to make one hard to give, and hard to hear as real when it comes.)
It behaves like an agent, so I’ll refer to it as one. I’ll call it your “dark” part, or simply your “darkness”—both because it’s hidden and because of what we’re about to see. But don’t mistake the grammar for the claim: I am not saying there is a literal thing inside you.
You’ve been on the receiving end before. You know how another person’s contempt recruits your own—how it makes you colder, more cynical, more likely to pass the injury onward. And if you look closely enough, you’ll find that that knowledge was present on the delivering end—that it would spread beyond this person. This knowledge is just deeper in limbo.
You do not want a darker world. Yet in this state, you are working to create one.
There is something in you creating a world you hate—and while it’s in control of you, it feels completely like you. But if you were ever to look back on this with full awareness—puncturing the limbo—you would see, with utter certainty, that you do not want it.
It is a parasite of sorts, and it was revealing itself to them in this interaction. It was showing them the thing with no bottom—knowing they would recognize it for what it was, because it was the same thing operating in them.
If it had a voice, it would be saying: genuine goodness is a myth. Just look at how easily I’ve taken over this “good person.” It powerfully invites them to cozy up to their own.
It is the cynicism at the heart of all evil. It is extinguishing light from the world. And it lives in every one of us.
Being under its control is the only way you could ever believe that extinguishing the light in others could produce good.
And look what happens when they dig in: you feel vindicated in your perception. Here’s someone who reacts to your goodness with darkness. The world is even shittier than you thought.
Both of you hand over even more control to your parasites, confident that they’re your goodness.
And not a trace of evidence gets left behind.
So what could you have done instead? Hold them fully accountable while remaining fully turned-toward. This doesn’t have to be remotely nice. It can be as fierce as the situation warrants. But this is the only way to end the evil in a way that doesn’t reproduce it.
You’ve been on the other end of that, too. Recall a time somebody caught you at something and was hard on you, and it didn’t make you dig in. They may have been harsher than the ones who did. But they were angry at what you’d done, and not what you are. They were turned toward you the whole time. That’s the look you started this piece with, held when it’s hardest to hold.