Chapter 4: The Water
This chapter: about 1,051 words, roughly 4 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.
Little of my contempt is for the “bad people” at all. It goes to people I’ve decided are stupid, or crazy, or weak, or slow: the coworker who doesn’t get it the third time, the relative who believes something ridiculous. They’ve harmed nobody. The verdict is the same one, this is all you are, and the cover is better. With a wrongdoer I tell myself I’m fighting evil. Here I tell myself I’m only being accurate, and I may be: they may really be wrong, or slow. But being right about what someone can’t do doesn’t call for the eye-roll, or the sigh, or the need to be above them. My parasite is constantly sensing who it’s safe to treat this way.
Here’s a check. Think of someone who can’t do a thing through no fault of theirs: a toddler who can’t add, a grandparent losing their words. Is the contempt there? For me it isn’t. It arrives once I’ve decided they should know better; that they could, and won’t. So even this contempt seems to carry a moral charge underneath. I’ve found them guilty of being what they are.
And it leaks the same way. A person treated as stupid stops asking questions. A person treated as crazy stops trying to make themselves understood, and I take that as proof.
When I speak contempt to my allies, or into a crowd, my parasite is looking for others to resonate with.
Remember two people you know tearing into someone who wasn’t there. Watch what happened between them: each a little bolder than they’d have been alone, each handing the other permission, and a warmth between them that had nothing to do with the person they were discussing. Now remember a time you were one of the two. What did it feel like when the other person agreed? What would have happened if someone had said, quietly, I don’t think that’s fair?
I call rooms like that “shadow spaces.” Someone tests the water, and part of you knows at once which signal to send back. I’m really worried about Lisa, and now two people can dig in, both of them only concerned. A friend after basketball “forgot” some cash on his taxes: the government wastes it anyway, right? A strategy meeting among allies takes one joke to turn into have you seen what they’re posting? Or imagine a locker room. Ten men, gathered around. One makes an off-color joke, testing the water. If nobody opposes it, the space opens up, and all their parasites come out and play. Each man is a little bolder than he would have been alone. The moment the “wrong person” enters the room, the space shuts down. Nobody speaks of what just happened.
Between allies, that signal and its answer feel like friendship. Between me and my enemy in Chapter 1, the same exchange felt like a fight.
If someone had opposed any of those rooms with contempt (“you’re all evil!”), that too would have fed everyone’s parasite, including the objector’s.
One more check, on the scenes in this chapter. Which of them made you feel contempt, not that’s wrong but contempt for the person? For me, the ones I could judge safely were the shadows that weren’t mine. The ones that made me wince were closer to home.
And much contempt isn’t performed at all. It’s consumed. Bring up a scene of somebody getting exactly what they had coming, delivered with relish. It feels good, and it wants more: a hot little fuck yeah. That’s the parasite, watching. It’s why this wrong, of all wrongs, spreads: it leaves no record, it comes dressed as duty, and it’s rewarded in public. Comment sections, the shared post, the outrage we pass around: each one negligible, and together they set how dark everyone assumes the world is.
It has catchphrases, too. Darwin award. FAFO. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Each one enjoys somebody’s harm and files it as deserved: they were stupid, so it doesn’t count. Which have you said this month, and what did saying it feel like?
Most of what we now recognize as evil was once respectable. Plenty of it still gets a pass: greed gets praised as ambition, and indifference as realism. But contempt is the one we still praise as goodness itself, as what a good person is supposed to feel toward bad people. And that’s why the others are so hard to stamp out: we fight every one of them with it.
Turning away isn’t binary, and most of it has no enemy in it at all. It’s the water we swim in: the ordinary day, the small self-serving move with nobody in front of you and nothing you’d call a wrong.
That’s where I live most of the time. I’m not holding anyone in contempt right now, and I’m nowhere near free of it either. Most of what I do is quietly self-serving, with justifications I never notice: the choice that helps me and, I tell myself, the world; the corner I cut with a company because it would do worse to me. And sticking it to the man: the padded claim, the return I wasn’t entitled to. The company is soulless, so it doesn’t feel like taking. It’s the same verdict aimed at something with no face, and it makes the thing more like what I said it was. The insurer that’s been gamed tightens the rules on everyone. I’m a hypocrite in small ways all day. I give the finger to the driver who cuts me off, and ten minutes later I cut someone off myself and don’t even register it, because I had somewhere to be. Call it a low-grade infection: no fever, nothing anyone would notice, and running the whole time.
This is what the buttons in Chapter 1 were measuring. Not whether you’ve done anything terrible, but how much contempt you’re still capable of, toward anyone, for any reason. To the degree it’s there, the road to the worst is open, and what’s left is time and conditions. The murderer didn’t start there, and nothing about you guarantees you’d have turned out differently. That isn’t said to frighten you. The road is open in both directions, and the way back is the same looking.