The Root of All Evil
The mechanism behind every atrocity. Including the quiet ones.
Every dictator in history has used othering as a key methodology to gain and keep power.
Not as a side effect. As the method.
Think about that for a moment. Not one exception. Not a single case in the long, blood-soaked catalog of human cruelty where the machinery ran without it. Before the first law. Before the first camp. Before the first order was given that men with guns carried out without question.
There was always the story.
The story that made some people not quite people anymore.
Hendrik Verwoerd wore good suits.
He spoke quietly, with the measured confidence of a man who had thought carefully about difficult things and arrived at conclusions others lacked the rigor to reach. He had studied in Europe. He had read widely. He had a professor’s habit of treating his own certainty as a gift to the room.
In 1953 he stood before the South African parliament and explained, calmly, why it was pointless to educate Black children beyond what their destiny required.
Not cruel. Reasoned.
What was the use, he asked, of teaching mathematics to someone who would never be permitted to use it? What kindness was there in raising expectations that society — his society, the one he was building with such care — would never allow to be met? Better to train them for the life they would actually live. Better to be honest about what they were.
He said this in a suit. In a parliament. With footnotes.
The children in those schools were not yet born when he gave that speech. They would grow up in classrooms deliberately designed to produce incapacity. They would be taught, systematically, that the horizon was closer for them than for others. That this was natural. That this was right.
Verwoerd never raised his voice about any of it.
He didn’t need to. He had already done the only thing that mattered.
He had decided who was human enough to deserve a future.
Before he could consign millions to a diminished life, something else had to happen first.
He had to elevate himself.
To make someone less than fully human, you must first make yourself more than fully human.
The moment you appoint yourself judge of another’s humanity, you have already stepped outside your own.
The elevation and the diminishment are not two moves.
They are one move, made simultaneously.
Remember that. We’re coming back to it.
In 1958, in Santa Monica, California, a man named Charles Dederich started something remarkable.
He was a recovering alcoholic, broke, living on unemployment checks, and he had discovered something that the professional treatment establishment had missed — that addicts could help each other in ways that trained clinicians could not. That honesty, radical and uncomfortable honesty, in the presence of people who understood your particular darkness, could do what nothing else had done.
He started holding meetings in his apartment. People came. People got clean. Word spread.
They called it Synanon, a slip of the tongue that stuck, and within a few years it had become a genuine community. Members lived together, worked together, built something together. People who had lost everything — jobs, families, dignity, the basic sense that their life was worth continuing — found each other there and found themselves.
It was, by any honest account, beautiful.
You would have wanted to be there. The warmth of people who had stopped pretending. The relief of radical honesty after years of performance. The sense that here, finally, was a place where the whole of you was allowed to exist.
Dederich was at the center of it. Brilliant, charismatic, a man who could see into people and say the true thing at the right moment. Members adored him. Of course they did. He had, in some cases, saved their lives.
And then — slowly, so slowly that no single moment felt like the turning —
He began to other himself. To see himself as more than human.
He was the Founder. The one who understood. The one whose judgment about what the community needed, about what individual members needed, about what was true and what was weakness dressed up as principle — his judgment was simply different from everyone else’s. More reliable. Less contaminated by the ordinary confusions that clouded other people’s thinking.
Members deferred to him. Then deferred more.
He told couples they needed to divorce and swap partners — for the good of the community, for their own growth. They did it. He told parents their attachment to their children was a form of selfishness that was holding them back. Children were raised communally, away from their parents. Members accepted this. He told people who questioned him that their questioning was itself the disease — the old self trying to reassert itself, the addiction wearing a new mask.
Who were they to argue? He had saved their lives.
By the time a rattlesnake was placed in the mailbox of a lawyer who had sued the organization, Dederich had traveled so far above the human line that the ordinary rules — the ones that apply to people who are merely people — simply didn’t reach him anymore.
He had elevated himself beyond accountability.
And from that height, anything could be justified.
The community that had begun as a place of radical honesty had become a place where honesty itself was dangerous. Where the only truth that mattered was the one Dederich had already decided.
This is what othering does, given time and an absence of friction.
You are reading this and feeling something.
Maybe a cold anger. Maybe the particular nausea that comes from recognizing a pattern you’ve seen before, in different clothes. Maybe you are thinking of people you know, situations you’ve watched, moments when you saw the mechanism running and couldn’t find the words for what you were seeing.
You know this is real. You’ve always known it.
Good.
Hold that feeling.
Three thousand years ago, a king named David stood on his rooftop and saw a woman bathing.
He wanted her. He took her.
When she became pregnant, he tried first to cover his tracks.
He recalled her husband Uriah from the front lines, expecting a soldier’s natural instinct to do the rest. But Uriah was a man of extraordinary honor. While his brothers were still in the field, he refused to sleep in his own bed, refused comfort, refused the ordinary pleasures of a man home from war.
His loyalty became an inconvenience.
He sent Uriah back to the front with orders ensuring he would not return. The man whose honor had foiled the cover-up was placed where the battle was thickest and left there.
Uriah died. David took Bathsheba as his own.
He was the king. He had decided who was human enough to deserve their life.
The prophet Nathan came to him with a story.
Two men lived in the same city. One was rich, with flocks and herds beyond counting. One was poor, with nothing in the world except a single small lamb he had raised from birth. The lamb ate from his table. It slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.
When a traveler came to visit the rich man, he did not want to use one of his own animals for the meal. So he took the poor man’s lamb.
David’s response was instant. His face went dark. His voice, when it came, had the flat certainty of a man delivering a verdict he has no doubt about.
The man who did this deserves to die. He shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and had no pity.
Nathan looked at him.
You are the man.
Read that again.
David’s outrage was not proof of his innocence. It was proof of his understanding. He knew exactly what had been done. He felt the full weight of it — the violation, the cruelty, the casual destruction of something irreplaceable.
He simply had not recognized the one who had done it.
The emotion that felt like moral clarity was recognition wearing a mask.
And now Nathan’s trap has closed around you too.
Because you have been reading about Verwoerd and Dederich and feeling the clean, justified anger of someone who would never, ever...
Who would never, ever … what, exactly?
Here is the thing about the mechanism.
It does not require a parliament. It does not require a compound in California. It does not require ambition or ideology or even conscious intention.
It only requires this: that you decide some part of the human world — or some part of yourself — is not quite human enough to deserve full consideration.
You have done this.
So have I.
Think about the voice. The one living in your head.
You know the one. The one that speaks up when you’ve made a mistake, or when you’re about to try something that matters, or sometimes for no reason at all, in the small hours when defenses are down.
That voice does not just criticize. Criticism would be useful. Criticism would say that didn’t work, here’s why, here’s what might work instead.
The voice condemns.
It speaks from a position of authority it appointed itself to. It has elevated itself above the rest of your inner life — become a judge, a prosecutor, a voice that has placed itself above the human line before it ever says a word about you. And from that height, with that assumed authority, it can be cruel in ways you would never be to another person.
Because it has already completed the othering move.
It has decided that the part of you that failed, or wanted, or feared, or fell short — that part is not quite human enough to deserve compassion.
Verwoerd in a suit. Explaining calmly why some people don’t deserve a future because they’re not people. They’re things.
The root of all evil is othering.
Which means it is not only out there, in the parliaments and the compounds and the long catalog of history.
It is in here.
In the story you tell about the person you can’t forgive. In the category you’ve placed someone in so completely that you’ve stopped being curious about them. In the verdict you’ve rendered about yourself that you return to so often it has started to feel like fact.
The mechanism is identical. The scale is different. The damage is real.
Nathan didn’t come to David to destroy him.
He came because David was capable of more than what he had become. The trap was not punishment. It was an invitation - sudden, uncomfortable, impossible to refuse - to see himself clearly.
You are the man is not a condemnation.
It is the moment the mirror finally works.
The question is not: Am I guilty?
The question is: Who do I practice being when I do this?
When I elevate myself.
When I diminish another.
When I let that voice stand above the human line.
What kind of person do I become — repeatedly — by making that move?
And if I catch it early...
Who might I become instead?