Introduction

The nature of the mind is compassion. Evil is nothing but a mind turned away from itself.

We’ve heard these ideas before (and maybe even have some personal familiarity with them), but what relevance do they have to our actual lives?

A mind turned toward itself knows these truths innately. So when we’re not seeing them clearly—such as when we perceive our enemies as less or other than ourselves—our mind is turned away from itself, and thus we are committing some form of evil.

This is not an attack on you. I only know it because I’m still caught in it myself. And it isn’t an abstract idea. It has profound, real-world consequences. I want to show you that you already know them, and how believing that you don’t is what enables “evil” to keep operating through your blind spots.

What’s new here is only the lens: an attempt to see something ancient more clearly, so that we have one more tool for it. With that in mind, feel free to read what I say as a kind of poetry.

The darkness in our minds operates through us; but more than that, it collaborates across us. The corrupt structures we see around us are merely its outward manifestations. Attempting to destroy them without fixing the error in ourselves can only recreate them, because it is rooted in the same fundamental mistake: that they are essentially other.

This is the origin of the archetype of the “evil global conspiracy,” or what might also be called the Devil. The collaboration of darkness across our minds is, by its very nature, hidden from the part of us that could see it—and yet we can never stop sensing it, which is why we retain the suspicion that there is something there, operating behind the scenes. There is. Awakening to one’s true nature can therefore be seen as finally stepping outside the conspiracy—the only vantage point from which one can actually take it down, rather than blindly participate in it.

Our attempts to define goodness are folly. No matter how carefully we try to define it, the dark aspect of our mind finds clever ways to subvert it: to obey the letter of the law while violating its spirit. We recognize this error in others easily, but in ourselves we can’t, because following definitions has been made to feel exactly like being turned toward our true nature. Thus, the folly of trying to pin down goodness is not an accident. Getting us to believe our thoughts and definitions—as though they could substitute for staying turned toward—is precisely what the darkness is.

As our civilization moves toward ever-greater abstraction, we feel a corresponding pull to abstract away our own nature, until “authentic goodness” can be filed away as superstition. Thus the pull toward pure abstraction can itself be seen as an operation of the darkness.

The main engine of this book is one familiar thing: moral contempt, the way we treat our enemies as though they were inherently defective. Traced carefully, it turns out to be the purest expression of evil: how the darkness spreads between us while masquerading as righteousness.

Now for the strange part, which this book exists to show. Contempt for our enemies is only coherent if both sender and receiver already know the things this introduction opened with: that the nature of mind is compassion, that darkness is nothing but being turned away, and—strangest of all—that these are both common knowledge¹. Contempt claims the opposite, but it can only operate by denying exactly what it presupposes.

I realize these are all very lofty ideas. Let me now pull them into the realm of our everyday experience.

1. For my analytical readers: yes, common knowledge in the game-theoretic sense—but with a wrinkle, as we’ll see. ↩