Interlude: Two Tests
This chapter: about 1,089 words, roughly 4 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.
So far it’s been my case. Here are two tests you can run on one of yours.
Bring to mind someone whose harm was real. Not the stranger who was rude to you; someone who actually qualifies, from your life or from the news.
Say you could do one of two things. Deliver the vengeance they so richly deserve. Or give them a pill that ends the threat by making them see what they did, with no punishment at all. Forget the “right” answer. Is there a flicker in there just itching to mash that first button?
I know there is in me.
That flicker is after something justice doesn’t need. Stopping them doesn’t need it. Protecting their victims doesn’t need it. It wants them to hurt, and it wants that on its own account.
So it makes a litmus test, and it’s the best one I know. Here’s another one.
Few things are as primally, viscerally satisfying as punishing evil. Pause and check that in yourself, whether you’d endorse the idea or recoil from it.
By punishing I mean the dark sense, the one that needs them to hurt, not the one that stops the harm and costs them what they owe. The two get blurred on purpose. As long as punishing evil in the dark sense still has that draw for me, the darkness is operating in me. Not in the past, and not only in my enemies. And it doesn’t need me to have done anything terrible. It only needs the draw.
The same draw comes in smaller sizes, and those are the ones you’ll meet today. The urge to “put someone in their place.” To “teach them a lesson.” To have the last word. The I told you so, and the small wait, after you’ve said it, to watch it land. The takedown you reread after posting it. The some people never learn. Each one has a healthy twin that only wants the thing corrected. So the check is the same every time: would the correction be enough, or does something in you need them to feel it? The second is the draw, at a size you can catch.
And there’s one you don’t even have to do yourself. You hear that someone on your side has humiliated someone on theirs: the perfect comeback, the clip where he finally gets put in his place. What happens in you? In me it’s a hot little surge, something like fuck yeah. A fist closing. I want to watch it again, and send it to someone. Notice that nothing got better. No harm was stopped, and nobody changed their mind. The pleasure is in the landing itself, and I got it for free, without even having to be the one who sent it.
And it doesn’t need a wrongdoer at all. Someone asks a question that was answered five minutes ago. Someone ahead of you can’t work the ticket machine. Someone says, in all sincerity, a thing you find absurd. Watch what rises: the sigh, the look you trade with whoever’s standing next to you, the how do these people get through the day? Nobody did anything wrong, so there’s nothing to punish. In me the flavor is the same anyway: a small, pleasant lift. I’m not that.
One more, and it’s the one I trust most in myself. When I ask whether my contempt for someone leaves the world darker, the first answer that arrives is something like well, who can really say? It sounds reasonable. It took me years to see it as the shrug I hide behind, the same shrug I’d never accept from the person I’m despising. See what arrives for you. If it’s yes, and he’s earned it, that’s a different thing, and honest, and the next chapter is about it.
If you find none of this, good; I have no way to argue with that and won’t try. If you find some of it, don’t file it as a verdict on yourself; that would be the same move, aimed inward. It’s a reading.
The first test was for the darkness in you. The second is for the light, and you take it by remembering what it was like to be caught.
Think of two times you were caught doing something you shouldn’t have: you cut a line, took credit, made the cruel remark. If you can, pick two that went very differently. If you can’t, imagine the same offense caught by two different people.
The first person catches you and lets you know what you are. Not what you did; what you are. Nothing they say could be quoted against them, since the words are about the behavior. But you can feel it. What did you do? What I did was dig in, and leave a little worse: a little more certain that this is the kind of world where people look out for themselves.
The second person catches you and is, if anything, harsher. Says more, in front of more people, leaves you less room to wriggle. And it lands as something else entirely: as a reminder that you’re better than this. With that one I didn’t dig in. I left a little more myself. It weakened the grip of my darkness, by refusing to identify me with it, so that I could look at it.
Almost the same words. Opposite outcomes. And both of them walk away confident that what they did worked, because it did: you stopped. Nothing either of them could be quoted on would show the difference. But somewhere in the first, the flash you felt was felt by him too, on its way out, and, I’d guess, he needed you to feel it. That’s the channel the darkness rides into the world on, and the light rides the same one: nothing said, nothing recorded, and the world a little darker or a little lighter afterward, in a way that outlasts the encounter and that neither of them will be blamed or thanked for.
The second person may have had different politics, a different religion, a different creed from yours; and still you felt that something was deeply aligned. What were they serving? Not you, exactly; they weren’t being nice. Not themselves. Whatever it was, you recognized it at once. Could you have defined it? I can’t. But I think it’s the same thing you were turned toward in the stranger at the start of Chapter 1, and what the word good has been pointing at.