The Picture I Use
This chapter: about 678 words, roughly 2 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.
A note before this one. Everything up to here came with a check you could run. This doesn’t. It’s the picture I use when I step back from one mind to all of them, and I hold it as a picture. None of the checks in this book depend on it, and if it doesn’t fit, leave it; the rest stands without it.
When you send that message to the “bad person,” it’s as though your parasites are collaborating—reinforcing each other under your conscious awareness. You attacked them in the first place because theirs resonated with yours. The result is that each gets strengthened, while hiding themselves better from each of you.
So in a sense, they all benefit from the same thing: a darker world, in which they become increasingly well hidden from their hosts, and thus have more control.
Why should separate parasites benefit from the same thing? Here is how I picture it. 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 more than one tradition that looked hard ended up naming an adversary. Mara. The Devil. I’ll borrow that name too when it helps, since it’s the one everybody knows. They were seeing something real. Where those pictures go wrong, when they do, is in granting it substance; the best of each tradition didn’t. 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.
And the old name comes with an old observation about how it gets in, which is the one from Chapter 2: never as darkness, always as the good kind.
And no wonder, for even Satan masquerades as an angel of light. So it is not strange that his ministers also masquerade as ministers of righteousness. —2 Corinthians 11:14–15
It doesn’t care who you hate, as long as you hate. Watch two of them go to war. Both grow. Every side comes out more certain the problem lives in the other. King’s line from Chapter 3, that darkness cannot drive out darkness, has a reason behind it: it was never trying to. Its purpose is to provoke the darkness on the other side.
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 where it finds its origin, in each of our minds.
It’s 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 (all of us, to varying degrees) imports that plausible deniability into the structures they participate in.
These institutions 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 outside ourselves.
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 behind the “evil global conspiracy.” No explicit central conspiracy is required. What looks like coordination from above emerges from the same hidden state operating through everyone. (This does not deny the existence of concrete conspiracies. But they feed on our collective contempt, and part of us knows it, and we need it to be that way.)