Chapter 3: How It Spreads
When we forget our true nature, something tragic happens. Fearing loss of contact with our absolute goodness (which we could never actually lose…), we go out seeking it in the relative goodness. That is, at the expense of others.
That is the origin of the darkness (although the original forgetting / ignorance is causeless).
We are all trying to find our way home, not realizing that this cannot be done at another’s expense (by keeping them from it). The pattern is kept alive by the subtle fear that we don’t deserve home, because we secretly know what we’ve done, and thus what we must be.
This is why the only solution is to recognize (and actualize) our innate goodness. Everything else just leads to more harm (while we’re flawlessly convinced we’re helping). Trying to simply be a “good person” often recreates the idea of “bad people,” ensuring the dynamic continues.
Your darkness behaves like a parasite: it lives off its host and hides from it. I’ll call it one.
When you send that message to the “bad person,” your parasites are collaborating—reinforcing each other under your conscious awareness. The result is that each gets strengthened, while hiding themselves better from each of you.
In a sense, they all want the same thing: a darker world, in which they have more control.
Why should separate parasites want the same thing? Because they aren’t separate the way presences are. The darkness has no substance of its own. It is a turning away, and two turnings-away have nothing in them to differ by. That’s why looking into the eyes of two “evil” people can give the uncanny sense of looking at the same thing, and why every tradition that looked hard ended up naming one adversary. They were seeing something real. Their one error was granting it substance. So there’s a paradox to hold with both hands: it isn’t real, and it must be fought. Treat it as an essence and you get contempt. Treat it as harmless and you get complicity.
When we gather with allies to foster contempt for our shared enemy, the same thing happens. Our parasites are in control.
Now imagine a locker room. Ten men, gathered around. One makes an off-color joke, testing the water. If nobody opposes it, a “shadow space” opens up, where all the parasites come out and play. Each man is a little bolder than they might otherwise have been. The moment the “wrong person” enters the room, the space shuts down. Nobody retains a record of what just happened—the parasites empowering themselves.
Even if someone had opposed it, but with contempt (“you’re evil people!”), that too would have reinforced everyone’s (including the person’s who opposed it).
Notice how the parasite operates: one part of you doing your “dirty work” for you, while another part keeps its hands clean. Remind you of anything? Plausible deniability.
This is how the pattern scales. By treating people as identical with their darkness, we help produce and harden the very people we will later call “bad.” Everyone who remains caught in the same ignorance imports it into the structures they participate in: one part does the dirty work while another keeps its hands clean. The difference is one of degree, not kind.
These institutions then meet a hidden need in all of us. Their visible evil lets us establish our own relative goodness by contrast, while providing cover for our smaller betrayals: At least I’m not like them. I’m just sticking it to the man. At some level, we need them to remain—not because we consciously approve of them, but because they keep our own darkness located somewhere else.
So we help produce the “bad people” whose actions justify our contempt; all of us build that same division into institutions; and those institutions provide new objects against which our contempt can feel righteous. Everyone experiences themselves as fighting the darkness while the darkness reproduces itself through everyone.
This is the truth inside the “evil global conspiracy” archetype. No enlightened central conspiracy is required. What looks like coordination from above emerges from the same hidden state operating through everyone, while each conscious person experiences himself as opposing it.
Nice is worse than useless against evil. The only way to actually fight it is to remain turned toward the perpetrator while fighting the behavior. Refusing to see the darkness as them.
There are two kinds of judgment. One sees that a behavior is harmful and moves to stop it. The other adds a verdict about the person. We know the difference; at a deeper level it’s obvious. And we keep the two blurred on purpose, so that when we’re caught doing the second, we can retreat into the first: wait, are you saying I shouldn’t correct bad behavior? The objection sounds reasonable, and it is the mechanism itself, leaving by the door it kept open for exactly this moment. Once that door is closed, what’s left is correction with no self-deception in it. It can be fierce. It aims at the sickness in a person, never at the person, so it carries no malice.
You’ve been on the receiving end of this before. When someone corrected you in a way that was fierce, but didn’t communicate that this is all you are. It conveyed that you’re better than this, and it didn’t require them being soft. It weakened the grip of your parasite, by refusing to identify you with it so that you could look at it.
The person may have had different politics, religion, creed; and yet you still felt that something was deeply aligned. What is that thing we’re all aligned to, but that is hard to pin down?
It’s the opposite of the darkness. It is the light. We already know how to do this, because we are it.
One honest limit. Being free of self-deception makes you honest, not wise. What to do from that stance still has to be worked out, case by case, with everything you know. What the stance gives you is the one footing that doesn’t feed the thing.
Our “innate goodness” is the only part of us that’s oriented toward the light; sensing its way toward it. Our reasoning mind can be in service of it, but it cannot orient by itself. Yet it convinces us it can. That’s why we so easily fall for justifications: the part that knows cannot prove, while the part that proves does not know.
What this means is that all the darkness must do to “win” is to convince us to follow the part that proves. To try and pin down what goodness is; to formalize it. We can then obey the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit, and never suspect what’s happening. The very idea of that deeper part of us feels increasingly naive and superfluous. A vestige of our irrational past.
Fighting someone with contempt and fighting them with integrity can both “work” if you only take into account first-order effects: stopping them or shutting them up. A deeper part of you knows that in one case you’ve left the world a better place, and in the other, a worse one. But that knowing cannot be admitted into evidence.
The hardest part to convey is how this scales. We have projects, agendas, etc. that are motivated by the self-serving part of us, and they create apparent good but hollow out the caring in everything they touch. The harm is invisible to our rational minds, but a deeper part always knows.
Or, if the parasite could speak, it would be saying:
Look how easily I can take over even the “good people.” Genuine goodness is a myth—a name that “good people” use to get away with what they need to.
The darkness doesn’t win by head-on confrontation with the light. That’s a fight it cannot win. It wins by usurping it; convincing us that it is it. We never stop wanting to orient to it; we just progressively forget what “it” is.
This is closely connected to the meaning crisis. We have nothing to orient us by, because we’ve convinced ourselves that we are free to define what is “good.”
Turning toward / away isn’t binary. Every act of unkindness, every skirting of conscience, every self-serving behavior lives somewhere along the spectrum, and creates more turning away in the world.
Look behind any of the tragedies (toward people, animals, nature itself) and you will find turning away.
And the turning was never a choice. By the time you could choose, the seeing is already gone, and the deciding is done with equipment that has already turned. What is yours is how fast you catch it afterward: days, then hours, then sometimes in the moment. That is trainable, and it is the only part of this that improves with effort.
The only way to end it is by turning people back toward, and the only way to do that is by turning toward yourself.
And every act of integrity, every choice of care when nobody is watching, leaks out into the world, just as your flash did. Nothing is confined to your skull—and part of you already knows it.