A Drop of Ignorance Is Too Much

On stilling anger and letting compassion take its place

The other day, I saw a Reddit post asking how to stop feeling angry and wanting to punish people who do bad things — to make them suffer. The implicit question: how can there be morality without judgment, anger, and retribution?

Very few people would argue against the value of morality. No matter whether one is an atheist, a Christian, or a Jain, we all tend to see being good as, well, good. But we are also all likely aware that misplaced morality can lead to dark places: with morality comes moral judgment, and with moral judgment often comes anger, moral outrage, and the classification of people as inherently good or bad.

Once we get to that point, we’re at a dangerous precipice. If we continue down this route, we can end up constructing rationalizations and justifications that can lead us towards some of the most horrific and evil acts imaginable: dehumanization, torture, murder, and even genocide, which are all so often perversely justified as protection against or retribution for some perceived moral wrong. The road to hell is far too often paved with good intentions.

We are presented with a difficult task: we must preserve our morality so that we can live good and ethical lives, but we also have a responsibility to keep the anger that comes from moral judgment in check so that we can actually achieve that goal and not act contrary to it.

To uproot moralistic anger, we need to come to see the danger in it — the ways in which it runs contrary to the justice we desire.

I would wager that almost all of us can think of at least one time when we said something out of anger that we deeply regret, and chances are we said it because we felt morally justified in doing so — perhaps we were defending ourselves against a perceived insult and giving the other person what they “deserve”. But in hindsight, we see that we weren’t actually exacting moral justice. We were just being a jerk because we were mad.

As a result, many of us can see from our personal lives that anger doesn’t actually do what we want it to: in our furious attempts at bringing justice, we only bring more injustice.

But anyone who takes on the project of managing or uprooting their anger quickly comes to this apparent impasse: how can I get rid of anger while retaining my morality? How can I stop being angry when there are so many bad people in the world? Don’t they deserve my anger? Don’t they deserve pain and suffering? How can I acknowledge their evil and not harm and punish them? What would morality even look like without punishment and reward?

What I propose is this: stop focusing on whether people are evil, and focus instead on whether people are liable to being evil.¹ When we do this, we start to see our own liability to committing evil — that under the right circumstances, we might do the very same thing that infuriates us. And I don’t just mean that we might say some nasty words: I mean that we are capable of and liable to committing murder, torture, genocide — the whole gamut of evil actions.² We are all capable of and liable to committing these evil acts until we remove the conditions that support them. You are capable of and liable to committing these evil actions until you remove the conditions that enable them. And it’s your responsibility to do so.³

As Hannah Arendt put it, evil is banal, mundane — not something rare and unique. It is a capacity and liability that exists deep within every human, and we need to take responsibility for eradicating it, not resting on the pleasant assumption that we would never be evil like those evil people would be.

When we hold the mirror of judgment up to ourselves, we see that, fallible as we may be, we are nonetheless capable of goodness, and so is everyone else. The truest justice is not retributive, but restorative: an approach that takes everyone’s well-being into account. We see that the wrongdoer is not just harming others, but harming themselves, and we can take compassionate action to stop them or remove ourselves from the situation. When we do that, we acknowledge even the wrongdoer’s humanity, and the benefit that this affordance of human dignity brings to the world — if only the wrongdoer viewed things in this way, they would never have done wrong in the first place.

On the other hand, when we take an approach of anger and lust for retribution, we engage in dehumanization: a degradation of the value of the human spirit, the greatest of all injustices, and the very thing that leads people to do evil. If we truly want justice, whether for the most mild insults or the most grave crimes against humanity, we must realize that justice begins with our attitudes: with compassion towards all the beings in the world, no matter their transgressions. Not with anger and ill will.⁴

When we take this approach and see ourselves as liable to great evil, it not only maintains the importance of morality, but reinforces it: it motivates us to truly eliminate the danger in our latent, fallible human tendencies so that we don’t cause harm to others. At the same time, taking this stance weakens our anger, as we see a kinship between ourselves and those we are angry at, and this dissolution of anger and the love and compassion that take its place is a pleasant relief that we can enjoy here and now.

---

Before I go further, a quick disclaimer: I will be presenting some extreme scenarios here and drawing on Jeffrey Dahmer and Hitler as examples. Nothing I say here should be construed as an excuse or justification for any of the actions I will be discussing. Additionally, this should not be interpreted as an attempt to say that Jeffrey Dahmer should not have been imprisoned. I subscribe to the Quarantine Model of criminal justice, as developed by Pereboom and Caruso, in which dangerous people should be treated as patients who need to be quarantined with dignity away from society, not as evil people who need to be harmed and punished as retribution for their actions.

Finally, it may be helpful to read my articles Buddhism as Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy for All States of Being and The Negation of Self before continuing, as they provide more detail on what I mean by compulsion, which will help make this post clearer.

---

The Moralist’s Trick

The thing that turns our detached and useful moral judgments (e.g., “murder is wrong, and that person was wrong to commit murder”) into moral anger (e.g., “I hate that person and want to harm them for being a murderer”) is what I call the Moralist’s Trick. It’s not a magic trick, but a mental sleight of hand.

Here’s how it works. Let’s take an example of something that we can (hopefully) all agree is an evil deed: killing a large number of innocent people. If anything were deserving of anger and punishment, this would surely be it. Most of you reading can pat yourselves on the back for not being a serial killer (again, hopefully), and you can justify your anger towards serial killers based on the fact that you would never do such a horrible thing. You would never do what Jeffrey Dahmer did, for example.

But when you say something like that, you are likely making that prediction based on a few misconstruals. First, you probably take stock of your current and past inclinations: chances are that you don’t have any immediate desire to go on a killing spree, and you likely have never had that desire in the past either. So, you assume that your non-desire for murder won’t change at any time in the future, and on that basis, you come to the conclusion that you would never do such a thing. Then, you might project yourself back into the past and try to put yourself in Jeffrey Dahmer’s shoes, at which point you’d say something like, “I understand that Jeffrey Dahmer had urges, but if I were Jeffrey Dahmer, I would have made a different decision. I wouldn’t have killed”.

But here’s the Moralist’s Trick: your prediction is based on (1) your inclinations right now and (2) a simulation in which you superficially assume a few aspects of Jeffrey Dahmer’s life, such as his appearance and environment, all while retaining many other implicit details about yourself, such as your general disposition. In both cases, you overlook something important: the real question is not “if you were like Jeffrey Dahmer in some ways, would you kill?”, it’s “if you were Jeffrey Dahmer in all ways, would you kill?”. And to answer that question, you can’t just superficially project yourself into Jeffrey Dahmer’s situation and call yourself Jeffrey Dahmer. You need to imagine that you truly are Jeffrey Dahmer in every respect: that you share all his beliefs about the world, all his thoughts, rationalizations, feelings, weaknesses, and all other conceivable characteristics.⁵

If you were Jeffrey Dahmer, there would be nothing of you left over: you would be Jeffrey Dahmer. In other words, Jeffrey Dahmer would be Jeffrey Dahmer. To truly run this simulation, you need to ask: if Jeffrey Dahmer were Jeffrey Dahmer, would Jeffrey Dahmer kill? Or in other words, if one day you went to sleep, had all your memories wiped, and woke up in Jeffrey Dahmer’s body the next morning, taking on every aspect of his being and retaining none of your own, could you be sure you wouldn’t do the same thing?

If you answer with certainty that you wouldn’t — that something in you would still prevent you from committing those atrocities — then you may be right. But here’s a quick thought experiment to confirm. Imagine that you wake up in an empty room. There’s a TV screen on the wall, and it flickers on: a masked lunatic says he has abducted your young child. He tells you that he is going to kill them unless you kill 17 people. Another TV screen flickers on, showing a room with several people tied up around a bomb. There is a detonator on the table next to you. The abductor gives you 15 seconds to decide. Your child cries out to you for help. The clock begins ticking down.

So here’s the question: would you still be so sure that you wouldn’t murder under these circumstances? Or do you think you might crack under the pressure?

Your first reaction is likely that this is a ridiculous comparison — this is not the situation that Jeffrey Dahmer was in. And you would be right! But there are some structural similarities.

I think we could all agree that the key differentiator in the above scenario is that you would be pressured or compelled to kill by an external party, not by your own desire for sick pleasure. If you were to kill, you would do so because you feel that if you don’t commit an evil action, your child will experience horrific harm, and you will experience terrible harm (trauma, grief, loss, guilt, etc.) secondary to that.⁶ In other words, you engage in a sort of moral calculus: killing would be evil, but foregoing your responsibility to protect your child, letting them be harmed, and then experiencing the pain of that yourself is even worse.

However, there’s another sleight of hand here: the compulsion to kill isn’t external. It doesn’t originate with the abductor’s demands, it originates internally in your feeling and judgment that the harm must be avoided. If you press the detonator, then it likely means that you think that you must kill, that there is no other option. But in reality, it is entirely in your power to simply not kill. You take what someone might argue is a “should” (if they were to prioritize their responsibility to their child over the lives of others) as a “must”. You are under the power of your own self-generated compulsion, mistakenly placing it “out there” as a real facet of the external world instead of rightly seeing it as an internal judgment about your feelings.

In fact, your feeling and judgment in this situation would be woefully off base: what I didn’t tell you yet is that this was all a trick. Your child isn’t actually in danger — they’re safe at home. The video you saw was AI generated. You’ve just been duped. However, the bomb was real, and if you press the detonator, you really do kill those 17 people. We can see here more clearly that the compulsion isn’t truly based on the external circumstances, but rather on your feeling about them.

In this case, we can see that the the only real danger here is your mistaken feeling that you must harm to avoid another perceived harm. The true proximate cause of the compulsion is feeling, not the external events — the external events caused the feeling, but feeling serves a middle link that separates the compulsion from the external events. You don’t actually have to press the detonator, you just may have thought you did. And if you think that you might be driven to press the detonator in this scenario, this means that if you feel a certain way, you may be driven to kill.

According to Jeffrey Dahmer’s testimony, he had the same experience: he had overwhelming compulsions that drove him to kill 17 people. Although an abductor didn’t serve as a catalyst, he encountered certain feelings that he assumed needed to go away, and that he must do something to make them go away. Jeffrey Dahmer said that he was driven by the compulsion to kill, just like you would be in the thought experiment. He found the unmet desire to kill unbearable and wrongly believed that this meant he must take action to relieve it.

Here you see the Moralist’s Trick again: you know that these two situations are different because you have the luxury of viewing them from the outside. But compulsion is possible only when our perception is constricted — when we don’t have that luxury, and we are viewing our situation from the inside.

For Jeffrey Dahmer, the compulsion to kill clearly did feel so strong. He knew it was wrong, and felt disgusted by himself, but also felt that he had no other choice. Anyone who would press the detonator would likely also say the same thing.

When we understand that compulsion arises from feeling and not from external events, then the situation is not all that different: in both cases, someone presented with a feeling that leads to seemingly insurmountable compulsion ends up acting out of it and committing evil actions. If you were Jeffrey Dahmer, you might have the same level of feeling from simply existing without killing that you would have if someone threatened your child.

Importantly, in both cases, neither you nor Jeffrey Dahmer chooses to have the compulsion. It arises on its own based on uncontrollable and unownable conditions. The cause of the feeling that causes the compulsion is irrelevant: what is important is that, in both people, a feeling can create such a distortion — can put such blinders on you — that you feel compelled to do evil on account of it.

If you didn’t think you might feel compelled to press the detonator in the above situation, then do a quick check as to whether there is any situation you can imagine in which you would: what if you were being horrifically tortured non-stop for 40 years, and pressing the button was the only way to make it stop? What if the abductor told you he had the power to drop a nuke on New York City if you didn’t? What about on every major city in the world? What if you had a vision of God in which he told you to press it, and you truly believed it was God? It may be that there truly isn’t a situation in which you would press the button, but this is a good way of checking.

You can also test yourself with some other extreme scenarios: if one day you woke up as Hitler and truly believed that genocide was the right thing to do — the necessary thing to do — would you somehow know that it’s actually wrong, even though every thought you have tells you that it’s right and necessary? This is a particularly useful one to consider, as Hitler perversely viewed the genocide he enacted as a sort of retribution and punishment. It should make the danger of indulging in retributive punishment very apparent: we better hope that our judgment is completely infallible if we’re going to promote bringing intentional harm to others for any reason.

Now, this goes back to the earlier question: if compulsion arises on its own and you don’t choose it, how can you be so sure that tomorrow you won’t suddenly wake up with the unbearable compulsion to kill? If we already know that you might kill when compulsion is felt strongly enough, and that the arising of compulsion is not directly in your control, how do you know you wouldn’t kill if the compulsion did happen to arise one day?

In a scientific context, we can reframe the question like this: if a mad scientist plugged all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s murderous compulsions into your brain via a neural interface, and they were just as strong as your compulsion in our thought experiment, how do you know you would have the understanding to say no to them? In a Buddhist context, we can reframe the question in terms of rebirth: if one day you were reborn as someone with the compulsion to kill, are you sure you would have enough understanding to say no to it?⁷

Ultimately, it all boils down to this: if you haven’t understood compulsion, how do you know you won’t one day give in to it in a very bad way? The answer is that you don’t. The only way to ensure that we never do evil is to come to understand compulsion (or craving, in Buddhist terms) and uproot it entirely. Until then, our goodness and badness rely on luck, not some inherent quality of being a good or a bad person. Until then, we are all dangerous.

Our fellowship in ignorance

The thing that allows feeling to give rise to compulsion and then action is ignorance: ignorance of not-self, impermanence, and the true character of suffering. In other words, ignorance of compulsion and the suffering it leads to: what it is, how it functions, and how it ends. When ignorance is sufficiently removed, feeling is seen as feeling, and when that happens, it can’t take that next step into compulsion. We understand that feeling in itself isn’t a problem, and we don’t ever have to do anything to make it go away. But until then, we are always liable to the tyranny of compulsion.⁸

Under normal, everyday circumstances, the stakes of ignorance are not particularly high (at least from the standpoint of conventional morality). You might feel compelled to do certain bad things, like tell a white lie or take an extra free sample at the mall, but it would take an extremely contrived situation to get you to murder. But this is ultimately just reliance on luck, and your luck might go south one day. If your status as a “good person” is based entirely on luck, you are in a bad situation. Someone who relies on luck is a gambler, and a gambler loses to the house eventually.

The key point here is that we don’t need to rely on luck — there is a way to increase our moral skill, a way to remove our ignorance.

Imagine you are playing blackjack, and you win a hundred times due to some surprisingly good fortune. You build an identity around being a particularly good blackjack player, and you look down on the losers around you. But then you catastrophically lose on the 101st hand. And you keep losing until all your winnings are gone. What you thought was an inherent feature of your being is found to be incidental, dependent on the circumstances. If you simply keep playing like this, ignorant of the underlying dynamics of the game, you could go on forever in cycles of gain and loss — being good and then being bad. With every hand, your luck resets. You are liable to horrific loss.

But now imagine that one day you decide to learn about the game — to learn to count cards. You toil at it for a long while, paying attention to the patterns of the cards instead of focusing on the losses and gains, until suddenly you have an insight, and it clicks. From there on out, you’ll always know how to count cards.

Now, although you still won’t be fully in control of the outcomes, you’ve learned something about the underlying dynamics, and you can come out on top overall and prevent any particularly bad losses. While your luck still resets on each hand, you now have an understanding that transfers from hand to hand. You will be free from the subjugation of luck. And eventually, the house will take notice and throw you out of the casino — so you’ll be free from the casino and all of its stressors too.

Analogously, you could live for 100 years not wanting to murder, only to find you suddenly have an unbearable compulsion to do so on your 101st birthday. Or in terms of rebirth, you could live 100 lives without being a serial killer, only to become one on your 101st life. But this only depends on luck to the extent that we haven’t learned the dynamics of experience — to the extent that we are ignorant. If we focus on learning about the overarching structures and dynamics of our experience instead of the specific pleasures and pains (focusing on how the game works instead of what specific cards are drawn), we can have a similar insight that allows us to break free from the oppression of our conditions, so that our actions are no longer subject to the luck of the draw. That insight will stay with us even as the incidental circumstances change: it is an understanding that is broader than any specific experience, meaning that instead of being erased by the next experience, it contains the next experience. Similarly, before we learn to count cards, every hand basically erases the relevance of the last one, but after we learn, every hand is contained by or arises within the context of that knowledge.

Compulsion only has control over us to the extent that we are ignorant of it. And while a little bit of ignorance might not cause much issue in our every day lives, in certain circumstances, it can turn disastrous. In that sense, our moral status is the same as anyone else who has not sufficiently rid themselves of ignorance: when certain feelings are present, we are liable to commit horrendously evil actions. And since we don’t choose the external factors that lead to those feelings, we are not so far off from even the most archetypal faces of evil.

From this standpoint, we can come to see all beings as fellow blackjack players in the casino: cyclically delighting in the gains and lamenting the losses. As card counters, we would understand that the loser on any given hand isn’t inherently a loser, and the winner isn’t inherently a winner. It wouldn’t make any sense to berate the losers for their inherent flaws and praise the winners for their skill — that would be a gross misunderstanding, as we know the tables may turn on the very next hand. Thinking in those terms would simply be impossible when we understand how the game works. Instead, we would see that the winners and losers — the good and bad — both suffer from the same horrible condition of ignorance: of not knowing how to play the game, and therefore being trapped by it. When we see that, anger goes away and leaves room for compassion to take its place.

But this is not an absolution of responsibility, it is simply making more precise where our responsibility lies. We are not responsible for our external circumstances, thoughts, or feelings, but we are responsible for our ignorance, as that is what turns those things into evil action.⁹

To the extent that we haven’t reached that threshold of understanding,¹⁰ we are fundamentally the same as Jeffrey Dahmer, and the only difference is the luck of our circumstances — the luck of whatever compulsions arise, the gamble of leaving our fate to the whims of craving.

If we don’t strive to eliminate our ignorance, then we are still subject to compulsion, and we bear the guilt of putting others in danger. Seeing things this way naturally leads to the dissipation of anger, and the arousal of compassion and kindness for our fellow wanderers in existence. We should strive to understand our existential situation so that we never endanger them — even the ones who are dealt particularly bad hands. They are not fundamentally different than us, and we could very well end up just like them one day if we’re not careful. When we broaden our awareness in this way — beyond the specific circumstances and towards the broader field or context in which they exist — we give true goodness room to grow.

Instead of focusing on giving others their punishments and just deserts, we should focus on the danger of our own situation, constantly reminding ourselves that we are responsible for our ignorance, and even a drop of it is too much. When we approach the world in this way, we naturally let go of our anger, and that is the only way to the justice we so desire.

1. The idea of “liability” to suffering comes from the monastics at Hillside Hermitage and their interpretation of the Pali suttas.

2. For some evidence to support this, see the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Although both of these experiments have been criticized and their results disputed, it’s worth being aware of them and considering them in this context, at the very least.

3. While I approach this topic primarily from a Buddhist standpoint, I see a strong parallel here with the Christian idea of original sin: that there is a more foundational issue than the actual sins we commit, and that issue is our separation from the original holiness or righteousness.

4. This does not, however, mean that we can never take action against those who commit evil or that we should become a doormat. There are dangerous people in the world who cannot be trusted to live in society and nasty people that we should stay away from. The compassionate approach does not mean we should ignore them, but that whatever action we take against them, such as imprisoning them or ending a relationship with them, should be done with their well-being in mind too, not out of a desire to harm or punish. Instead, we should take the approach that we are not just protecting ourselves and others, but protecting the wrongdoer from further harming themselves through their wrong action.

5. For any Buddhists reading, it’s important to note that what’s really occurring when you engage in this type of simulation is that you are assuming the existence of an unconditioned self that you then impute to Jeffrey Dahmer. We can see here how self view leads to anger, and its dissolution to non-anger.

6. That said, the desire for pleasure is really a pressure to avoid the pain and perceived harm of unmet desire, so there is a subtle similarity there right at the outset.

7. In a Christian context, we could potentially reframe it like this: if you’re still separated from God via original sin, how do you know you wouldn’t sin?

8. Based on some recent reading into Christian mysticism, I think we could potentially say that there is a Christian version here, which would be something like distance from God or ignorance of his presence — being caught up in the material world instead of the spiritual world, so to speak. When we are not ignoring or turning away from God, we would come to see even torturous feeling as part of God’s plan or a test. But I’m not very well versed in Christianity, so take this with a grain of salt.

9. I’m being a bit poetic here, so I want to be clear: we are obviously also responsible for the actions themselves, but the key point is that wrong action is the more surface level result of the deeper problem of ignorance. If we take responsibility for our ignorance, we naturally take responsibility for our actions, as eliminating ignorance requires eliminating wrong action.

10. In Buddhist thought, that threshold is stream entry, the first stage of enlightenment, after which actions like murder and stealing are no longer possible.