The Picture I Use

This chapter: about 2,538 words, roughly 9 pages at 280 words a page. Updated whenever the site is regenerated.

A note before this one. Almost 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.

So far I’ve talked about the darkness one mind at a time: the parasite in me, the one in my enemy, the one in you, each living off its own host. But when I step back and look at all of us at once, they don’t behave like billions of separate parasites. They behave like one coordinated thing.

Go back to the encounter in Chapter 1. When he was cruel, his darkness showed itself to me the way it always does: hidden from him, on display to everyone else. And it came with an offer: this is him. His parasite wants to be taken for him, because then nobody will ever speak to the part of him that could leave it, and after a while he won’t either. Mine wants me to take the offer too, because if he’s the bad one, I’m not, and I get a license.

I feel the offer as contempt rising in me. If I take it, if I see what I’m looking at as him, the deal is done. My look says this is all you are, and his parasite has just been told, by a witness, that it’s the real him.

Then the offer goes back the other way. My look shows him my darkness, and it makes him the same offer: this is me. When he takes it (what a hypocrite), he’s accepted too. And now we dance. Each verdict confirms the other, each of us nudges the other one step closer to what we already see, and both of us walk away more certain. My enemy and I are fighting. Our parasites aren’t; they’re collaborating.

That’s why I think of it as a secret handshake. It’s a deal struck in a glance, without a word, and both of us would swear it never happened. To each of us it feels like a fight, and some part of each of us knows exactly what was agreed.

A handshake can go around a whole room, too. Remember the locker room: one man tests the water with a joke, and every parasite in earshot recognizes the signal and answers it. For a few minutes they work together. Each man is a little bolder than he’d be alone, they cover for each other, and the moment the wrong person walks in it’s over, and nobody mentions it again. That’s a conspiracy in miniature, with a password and a code of silence. Nobody planned it, and not one of them would call it a conspiracy.

The subject hardly matters. It can be a woman at work, the cash somebody “forgot” to put on his taxes, or the new neighbors. The same men carry the handshake from one room to the next, and every time one of them ignores his conscience in one place, it gets easier everywhere else.

We all carry some of this to work: to the office, the county building, the boardroom. An institution does what all those small turns add up to, and nobody in it feels responsible. I called my look plausibly deniable, even to myself: part of me did the dirty work while another part kept its hands clean. An institution has the same shape. The one who decides doesn’t look, the one who looks doesn’t decide, and the harm happens in the gap between them, where no one has to know. A factory farm runs on that gap. So does a prison where the cruelty is routine, run by guards who were decent people the day they started. Nobody had to plan any of it. As far as I can tell, that’s the structure people produce whenever they work together without seeing their own shadows.

Now take the dance and multiply it. Two halves of a country drive each other to extremes over a generation, millions of tiny nudges each way, until the behavior on the far side is so grotesque that the only explanation left is an alien quality called “evil.”

Most of it is quieter than any of that. The darkness I inject just diffuses into the world, with no clear boundary. So each time, I’ve raised the baseline for everyone. Under all of it runs the low-grade infection, in billions of people at once and on every social media feed, each turn too small to notice: a background hum of darkness. The darker the world looks, the easier it is to stop listening to the part that knows, and every time I stop, I make the world a little more like the place I needed it to be.

Now widen it. What looked out of your enemy’s face was alive. So was what looked out of yours, and one refused the other. And the same refusal is in everything that is eating the world. A man held as a thing, a forest as nothing but lumber: each needs only a living thing held as stuff, by something alive that has turned from what it is. How can almost none of us be monsters, and the world still be tearing itself apart and eating the biosphere it stands on? It doesn’t take monsters. It takes the background hum. That’s how my contempt for a neighbor makes an atrocity on another continent a little more likely, by no line I could ever trace.

This doesn’t make us equally guilty. A man who orders a massacre is responsible for something I’m not. But my contempt still helps make him possible.

Corrupt leaders meet a hidden need in all of us. Their visible wrongdoing 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! If integrity were the norm, in our institutions and our leaders, our small self-deceptions would stand out, and we’d feel the pressure to look at them. Every time I claim they’re a different kind of thing, part of me is helping keep them there. 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.

It goes further than institutions. My enemy knew what I was doing and couldn’t prove it, and I taught him which of those two things mattered. What culture would we build if we all kept teaching that lesson to one another? One that raises the part that proves as high as it can go and quietly demotes the part that knows: across all of us, what the locker room built across ten men. That is what I see in the culture most of us were schooled in. The part that proves is honored from the first day of school, and it has earned the honor. The part that knows isn’t attacked; it just stops counting as knowledge. Our faith in metrics lives here: what can be counted is what counts.¹ Religion is no shelter: a creed can stand in for the part that knows as easily as a theory can. Nobody designed it. Everyone gets something from it, and that’s enough.

But something gets more out of it than any of us. Whatever he or I got out of the handshake, both our parasites came out ahead, each stronger and better hidden from its host. So the darkness in every one of us benefits from the same thing, a darker world in which each has more cover, and faces the same way: from the same light, toward the same end. Some part of me knew what my contempt would do, and wanted the world in which it could keep doing it. And there’s nothing else to tell one darkness from another. The darkness has no substance of its own; a turning away has no qualities. Two rooms differ in everything the light shows; the dark in one is the same as the dark in the other. Together they act like a single thing with a single, monstrous aim.

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. It has a bottomless appetite. And in this picture it is the coordinator: not a plan, not anyone, but the background hum seen as one thing, the same interest in every mind, building the same cover.

I think it was in your eyes too, the last time you held your enemy in contempt: only for a second, at its smallest, and the same thing all the way up.

The darkness can’t win a head-on fight with the light. With someone fully in view, I couldn’t even wish them harm. So it’s winning by slowly usurping the light, taking its place, and that’s the same thing as our forgetting there was ever a real light to steer by. We never stop wanting to orient to it; we just progressively forget what “it” is, until our own thoughts come to feel like the ones that decide what’s good. You can only choose the counterfeit once you’ve forgotten what the real one feels like, the way you can only choose junk food once you’ve forgotten real food.

Follow the counterfeit far enough and the real thing starts to look naive. Someone acts with plain integrity, and I don’t quite believe it: there must be an angle. At that point the darkness doesn’t have to hide each wrong on its own: the one orientation every one of us steers by has become the one thing none of us believes is there.

And the oldest stories of the Devil come with an observation about how it gets in: never as the bad kind of darkness, always as the good kind.

And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. —2 Corinthians 11:14–15 (NIV)

This is, I think, where the “evil global conspiracy” archetype comes from. People are sensing something genuine: coordination with nobody coordinating, the same hidden state operating through everyone. Real conspiracies also exist; people meet in rooms and plan harm and hide it, and those rooms have to be fought as what they are. What’s being sensed underneath them is the background hum, which supplies those rooms with people willing to sit in them, and supplies the rest of us with the certainty that we’d never be among them. And the archetype’s own history is the warning. It is right about the shape and wrong about where it lives. The moment it puts the coordination in a people, a cabal, a face, it has become the thing it was sensing, and that misplacement has filled graves.

The license from Chapter 3 comes at the scale of a team too. When the other party looks to me like a conspiracy, I’m half right: the same hidden state really is operating through them. What I feel then is the presence of evil in a whole group of people, and my side takes the license. What I don’t see is that the license goes to the same thing in us. When we use it, we become the coordination I was sensing in them. That’s my look at the size of a crowd: we’re only “fighting evil,” and how could that ever be wrong? The feeling of being the noble one fighting the evil conspiracy is the conspiracy.

It doesn’t care who you hate, as long as you hate. It can lose a leader, an institution, an entire regime, and remain in the eyes of the people celebrating its defeat. King’s line, that darkness cannot drive out darkness, has a reason behind it: it was never trying to. Provoking the darkness on the other side is how it stays hidden.

In this picture, every act of contempt, for anyone, feeds the Devil. It’s the thing I most wanted this book to deliver. I think anyone who watches their own contempt closely for long enough will find it too. The line between those who deserve our compassion and those who deserve our contempt exists only for the Devil to keep its foot in the door.

Where the old pictures of it go wrong, when they do, is in giving the evil a substance of its own. The careful ones didn’t. So there’s a paradox to hold with both hands: it has no being of its own, and it must be fought. Treat it as an essence and you get contempt. Treat it as harmless and you get complicity.

When you’re actually fighting it, it doesn’t feel like fighting. It feels like love, like pulling someone out of a darkness they didn’t know they were carrying, even if some part of them did. The second stranger caught me in the act and still wouldn’t let it have me. There’s another handshake on offer, between the parts underneath, and it’s what he did. It has no team. Whoever offers it isn’t on your side or the other side; their only allegiance is to the light.

The Cree have a word for the darkness: wetiko, the cannibal spirit, a hunger that eats life and is never full.² It is anti-life. Not a rival life with a plan of its own; it has no life of its own. It is life turned against itself, eating itself, and calling the meal good. Hunting for it in an enemy is one of the ways it hides. In those moments, look for the turn in your own eyes.

1. Charles Eisenstein tells the story of the Tehri Dam on India’s Bhagirathi River in Climate: A New Story (2018). Completed in 2006 and credited with cutting carbon, it met its measured goal. What went unmeasured: a hundred thousand villagers displaced from ancestral land, along with their traditions, their ties and their places; the submerged ecosystems; methane from the reservoir; sediment withheld from the river downstream. Counting those, the dam may have harmed the climate it was credited with helping, as well as the people. ↩

2. The word is theirs, and it carries more than I’m using it for. Jack Forbes, a Native American scholar, said wetiko was the disease the conquerors brought with them; he watched what it did to his people. Paul Levy, a writer who has spent his life on it, reads it as a mind-virus: it passes from person to person, hides inside its host, and gets its host to defend it. I know the word only through the two of them, and I borrow it because it names what this book’s parasite does. ↩