The Root of Evil: Believing That Light Can Be Possessed
- Philosophy -
The Root of Evil:
Believing That Light Can Be Possessed
Two scientists make the same discovery. The first holds it as something provisional: she received it from a tradition, produced it through her work, and it remains open to correction. She publishes it, teaches it, and moves on. The second begins to identify with it. He no longer has a theory: he is the theory. When a younger colleague replicates the work and finds a discrepancy, he does not see a contribution. He sees a threat, and begins looking for ways to discredit her.
Between the one and the other, the theory did not change. A belief about it did.
The root of evil is believing that light can be possessed.
That root is in everyone, because we all hold some meaning as our own: a name, a family, a nation. Yet seen coldly, none of these is a permanent state. They are discrete acts that reaffirm a belief. I am someone's family because others affirm it; I belong to this nation because others recognize me; even my name is mine because others call me by it, or because I call myself by it. What I call mine is upheld by others, and I uphold it by repeating it. None of that is possessing.
And if not even a name can be possessed, still less the light that reaches us. It comes from outside: from a tradition, from others, from the world. What I bring is the reading, like a performer before a work someone else composed. The same score sounds different in each performer, and no performance exhausts it. The score is not mine; my reading is. So stands a crystal before the light: it does not produce it; it gives it its color.
To see why this belief is the root of evil, we must know what this light is, what happens when it is missing, and what we do so as not to lose it.
✦The Light
Every life is bound to what precedes it and to what exceeds it by ties that reach farther than anyone knows. An egg on a plate carries a hen, a farm, the traces of evolution, even elements forged in the stars. These ties exist whether or not anyone notices them, and most are never seen. Gregory Bateson called them the pattern which connects: what binds the crab to the lobster, one species of flower to another, and all of them to us. The pattern reaches further still: down to the stone.
But a connection can be there without changing anything for anyone. Bateson also defined information as “a difference which makes a difference.” Light is the moment when a connection we were already part of, known or not, begins to make a difference for us: it ceases to be a fact of the world and comes to matter to us.
An astronomer may know the stellar origin of everything on his plate and see only breakfast. Someone who knows nothing of stars may see in that same breakfast a mother who cooked it every morning, or hear a grandmother's hens. The astronomer has more knowledge; the other has light. The connection exists whether or not anyone notices it, and knowing it sometimes leaves our way of seeing untouched. Light belongs to another order: it is the connection of the invisible. And what comes to matter can be false, and can wound: a humiliating belief, a phrase heard over and over, sometimes decides for years how someone sees themselves. There is, then, a clear light and a dark light: one that opens us to the universe, and one that closes us to other possibilities.
A subject stands before the light like a crystal. The crystal is not the source: light passes through it and, in passing, takes on a color. That color depends on the crystal's structure and its fractures, on what it absorbs, on what it lets through, and on where it has broken. Which connection comes to matter also depends on the crystal, though the crystal does not decide it. Two brothers hear the same song, and in both the same connection is kindled: the father who used to sing it. For one it has the color of gratitude; for the other, the color of an absence. The light is the same; the color is not. Different crystals give different colors to the same light, and that is what makes each one singular. Light is the connection mattering; color is what it means to the one who receives it.
Of the light that passes through us, little remains. What the crystal keeps is above all its fracture: the trace of a light so intense it could not be understood. These traces are not inert: they bend all the light that enters afterward. That is, in large part, the unconscious: not what we remember, but the laws by which we read whatever arrives.
Light does not come from a single source. It comes from many at once, and in the crystal it crosses and mingles. Mingling, the lights yield colors none of them had alone: a crystal's color belongs to no single source, nor is it only its own. It depends on the lights that pass through it, and on a structure and fractures it did not choose. What it can do is let them pass, filter them, or close itself to them.
What a crystal absorbs does not remain light: it turns into heat. The more it absorbs, the less it lets through. A crystal that lets no light through becomes opaque.
✦The Darkness
If light is the moment a connection comes to matter, darkness is the condition in which connections remain invisible, dwindle to a few, or cease to matter to us. They are still there, though unseen. The world appears in fragments, as things and lives that seem to exist alone, though none exists by itself.
It is our original condition, because every gaze is partial. To see one connection is to leave others unseen, and no gaze reveals all the connections of a life. Not even our own: we are composed of what others reflect back to us in our encounters. Even when something reaches us and matters deeply, we may not yet know what it means or what color to give it. Light can arrive before its understanding. Every life is lived in half-light. Darkness is the inevitable limit of our gaze, and no one is to blame for it.
But darkness is also felt: being disconnected, looking around and finding only absences or half-truths, believing that nothing holds anything up and that one is alone. The connections are still there, but they no longer reach us. Missing someone is still light: a connection that matters through its absence. Darkness begins when nothing seems to matter anymore, because nothing seems to connect.
In that darkness, being seeks unity, and guilt is the quickest way to find it. If what I feel is my fault, at least it has a cause, and the cause is me: the darkness makes sense. Guilt is light, but a very small light, because it reduces all connections to one and discards every other reason. It points at me, and that light finds no way out: it circles in the mind. The life that lay in pieces recovers a center, even an accused one: it unites against itself, as a people unites against an enemy. That light imprisons. What crosses the darkness is humbler than an explanation: knowing oneself part of something, even as its negative; feeling, even if now it seems no one cares what I feel. At least the one who feels is me.
✦Appropriating the Light
Faced with darkness, the temptation is to secure the light: to make it one's own. One can possess the object through which the light arrives, but not the connections it carries within, its layers: everything that produced it and everything it comes to represent. A car is owned by an agreement everyone recognizes; what it represents does not admit even that: freedom, arrival, status, being seen. Owning the thing is legitimate. The confusion begins when owning the thing is taken for owning its light: the car is mine, so the freedom it gives me is mine too.
And it can go further: believing that one's own way of seeing is the light itself: this is how I see the theory, so this is how the theory is. At the end of that road one no longer has a theory: one is the theory. The same happens with what dazzled or burned us: one no longer received the light or the harm; one is the enlightened, one is the victim. The first identity is usually chosen; the second is often suffered without ever having been chosen. Whoever believes they possess the light can still lose it and remain themselves. Whoever believes they are the light feels that any revision threatens their existence.
The confusion can also place the owner outside: mistaking another crystal for the source. An artist, a leader, a teacher: the light passes through them and seems to be born in them. We all need light, and it is easy to follow whoever seems to have it, even into the abyss. Whoever receives it that way no longer sees the light; they see the crystal, and obey it.
Why do we fall into this belief? Lack of meaning is among the hardest things for a human being to bear, and the fear of the unpredictable is older than any philosophy: for an organism, the unforeseen can mean danger. That is why we need stories. A story tells us which connections matter, who we are, and what we may hope for. Without stories we could scarcely live: story is what makes us human. But from within, a story looks like the world itself, and we all live inside one. Thus the part one sees is taken for the whole.
To see a connection is to recognize that one depends on something one does not control. Believing the light is one's own is a way of denying that dependence. The belief turns fear into a project: if the light were mine, it could not be lost.
Light is held back for fear of the dark.
Sometimes it is more than an error of perspective. The scientist from the beginning knows, somewhere, that his theory may fall, and precisely for that reason he needs to act as if he did not know. Then the belief becomes a defense, and no argument is enough to loosen it, because it protects something argument cannot reach: one's very identity.
But possessing feeds the fear it promised to calm. What once could change must now be defended against change, and what once could be lost begins to be lived as something taken from us. Grief risks turning into grievance. What is retained becomes heat, as in the crystal, and accumulated heat, resentment.
To say “mine” is to draw an edge. Every crystal has edges, and without them there would be no crystal; the difference lies between an edge that lets light through and one that holds it back. “Mine” is of the second kind. A connection arrives from what precedes us and extends toward what exceeds us; for it to be mine, it must be severed from all of that: from its sources, from the others who also see it, from what it may come to mean tomorrow. To appropriate the light is already to divide. That is why the root of evil is believing that light can be possessed.
✦Evil
Evil is that division carried into act: cutting the connections through which light might arrive, or reducing them to one, in oneself or in others. Darkness is a condition; evil produces it. A crystal can concentrate light on a single point until it burns, or shatter it into fragments that no longer show anything.
Good is the contrary movement: to include without separating. It makes visible connections that were out of sight and lets each arrive with its own color. There are unions that exclude: one people unites against another and makes the enemy its darkness, so that the light may seem entirely its own. Saying “ours” draws the same edge as saying “mine.” A union that includes can bear the light that arrives, even if it transforms or dissolves it; a union that excludes needs something to remain in the dark.
A loss leaves a life in shadow, and grief passes through it. A catastrophe wounds without anyone willing it. Refuting a fraud harms the one who committed it; so does closing the door on an aggressor; the surgeon cuts in order to heal. In all of these, the connections remain in view: the aggressor stays outside the house, and in full view of everyone.
Every crystal gives its color. Evil begins when someone makes theirs the only one possible and acts so that no one may see otherwise. It hides, intimidates, discredits, subjugates, destroys. It lies, manufactures enemies, uses one truth to cover others. One reading may be more accurate than another; evil attacks the very possibility of reading. Imposing a single color also divides: it severs the other from their own gaze.
There are employers who pay wages too low to live on. They know their workers have families, that they fall ill, that their profit comes out of their workers' exhaustion. They know it, but when they look at them they see only a cost. All the other connections are still there; they leave standing only one, the one that pays, and call their own a profit drawn from the exhaustion of others. Hannah Arendt saw something similar in Eichmann: a functionary with no motive beyond advancement, incapable of looking from another's place. Eichmann did not appropriate the light: he handed it over to an owner and obeyed. The root is the same: believing that light has an owner. Evil needs nothing more: a single connection, and no other in sight.
Evil is darkening: disconnecting what was joined, widening the dark.
✦Opacity and Shadow
An opaque crystal is dark within and casts a shadow without. Evil has these two directions, and often both at once.
Whoever says “the house defines me,” “the car defines me,” “she defines me” has placed the weight of a life on a single connection. While that connection holds, it can be lived as security. But it is a house of cards: when one card falls, everything threatens to fall, because nothing else held the whole together. A house can be lost, a theory refuted, a person can change. Whoever has placed the weight of their life on a single connection fears anything that might move it.
Inward, opacity. What the belief does first, it does to the one who holds it: a crystal that tries to retain the light stops letting it through. Whoever fears losing their only connection may stop looking: fail to see that their company is sinking, that their theory is failing, that the person they love is no longer the same. Thus they darken themselves.
Outward, shadow. The same fear can turn against others: silencing whoever points out what one does not want to see, controlling, forbidding, deciding from one end of the relationship what the other must go on being. There the darkness leaves the crystal and falls on others.
The subject shields itself from a future darkness by producing a present one.
Feeling fear or jealousy is human; evil begins when one acts to cut the other's connections. And the shadow turns against the one who casts it. A fracture is seen from outside, in the way it bends the light that reaches others, and the other was the one who could reveal it. Whoever silences the other harms them, and is left blind to their own fracture.
The same holds for the scientist's colleague. Refuting her with evidence both can examine leaves the door open. Silencing her so that she ceases to exist closes it.
✦Living Lightly
What is retained weighs. The resentment that finds no outlet, the guilt that circles, the theory that must be defended every day, the person who must be watched lest they change: all of it is carried. To retain is to pretend that the light will never abandon us and that darkness will always belong to someone else, and that pretense is never set down. Evil weighs on the soul, and first on the soul of the one who holds it.
The contrary movement is letting through. An open crystal receives the light, gives it its color, and returns it to the world in what it does; it does not carry it, and so it can receive again. What makes it impossible to possess the light is the very thing that lets it keep arriving.
The first scientist did just that: she published her discovery, taught it, and moved on. She did not necessarily know more than the second. She knew something else: that the discovery could be hers without the truth belonging to her.
The same holds for everything that comes to matter. Keeping knowledge to oneself and keeping wealth to oneself are two faces of the same retention. Letting through is teaching, giving, accompanying a search without deciding for another what they must discover or what color they must give it. A love lasts when neither needs to go on being who they were. It holds for the dark light too: a humiliating phrase can pass through the crystal without staying to define it.
Light cannot be retained, but one can make a habit of letting it through: being present, each day, before the connections one is already part of, without demanding that they confirm what one thinks one knows. Remaining before them as a disciple, never as an owner. Because the root is a belief, and not an instinct or a destiny, it can be seen and revised. But it is not revised once and for all: it returns, and so the gaze must return with it. The crystal keeps its fractures, but it is not condemned to repeat them.
What makes the crystal opaque is the light it tries to hold.
To live lightly is to learn not to turn the fear of darkness into a demand on the world and on others. A crystal that lets light through keeps nothing, and so there is always room for the light to come. Happiness resembles that lightness more than any possession: letting through, and going on receiving.
The light returns; it always returns. But never in the same form.
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