On the red world I’d been a coward — complicit, head down, going along. Here, on the clever world, I graduated to something worse. Here I was a believer.
I’ve started this one four times. I keep wanting to explain it so it lands soft. There’s no soft. Here it is.
I took a side. There were sides by then — there always are; give clever frightened people enough power and they’ll sort themselves into us and them inside a generation — and I picked one, and I went all in. And I’d love to tell you I picked it for love, to protect somebody, and maybe that’s even how it started, a thimbleful of something decent at the very bottom of it. But that’s not what it became. What it became was: I was right, and they were wrong, and being right felt so good that I stopped checking whether the things I was doing to the wrong people were things a decent being does.
That’s the trick of it. That’s the whole machine, and I want you to watch it work, because I’m fairly sure it’s the same machine running down here right now, on this blue one. You don’t fall by deciding to be evil. Nobody does that. You fall by deciding you’re right, and letting “right” buy you out of ever having to be kind. The material’s got a phrase for the exact thing that hooks you, and it’s so plain it’s almost funny — it says you get tangled by acting “in a consciously unloving manner.” That’s it. That’s the whole sin. Not a horns-and-pitchfork business. Just: you knew the loving thing, you saw it sitting right there in front of you, and you did the other thing instead, because the other thing won.
I did the other thing. Over and over. With a clear conscience, which is the worst part — I slept like a baby. I was helping, I told myself. We were the good ones. We had to be hard because the stakes were so high. You’ve heard the speech. You’ve maybe even given it. I gave it for lifetimes.
And the deep veil stayed down the whole time, so I never once felt the gold at my back, going quiet, going far away. A volunteer for the light, forgetting — exactly the way they warned me, right on schedule.