Interlude: Two Tests
This chapter: about 918 words, roughly 3 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.
You may have come through the last two chapters thinking that a hypothetical stranger proves nothing about you. So here is something that isn’t hypothetical.
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.
There is nothing more primally, viscerally satisfying than 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, and we’ll come back to why. As long as punishing evil in the dark sense still has that draw, the darkness is operating in you. Not in the past, and not only in your enemies. Now, while you read this, waiting for its chance. And it doesn’t need you 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.
One more, and it’s a strong tell. Ask whether your contempt for that person leaves the world darker on net. Notice how fast the answer well, who can really say? arrives, and how reasonable it sounds. Something in you knows, and has known since Chapter 1. What you’re feeling is how easy it is to convince yourself that you can’t know. That shrug is what the person you hold in contempt hides behind, and you can feel it operating in your own mind.
If you find none of this, good. Check again on a day when the news is bad. 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: cut a line, took credit, made the cruel remark. Now imagine two different people catching you.
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, and you dig in, and you 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. You don’t dig in. You leave a little more yourself. It weakened the grip of your darkness, by refusing to identify you with it, so that you 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 in any record would show the difference. Only one of them knows better. Somewhere in the first, the flash you felt was felt by him too, on its way out, and he needed you to feel it, and he’ll never look at that. 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, and you couldn’t have defined it. It’s the same thing you were turned toward in the stranger at the start of Chapter 1, and it’s what the word good has been pointing at.
It’s the opposite of the darkness. It is the light. We already know how to do this, because we are it.