To start, I am a huge fan of epistemic humility, and I am well aware of how flawed my own thinking is. I am a mere layperson in every field, even the ones I love and adore. However, I believe that anyone would agree it is difficult to appreciate and comprehend your own blindspots without someone else nudging you towards them. You must be dragged out of Plato's cave by the collar.

The flaw I want to examine is fundamental in my previous writings: the evils I don't reckon with. I received a comment recently from a user on Medium named Brady regarding a previous essay of mine, What's the Misanthrope's Place in Community?, and I've been lingering with it for a while. Here's his full response:

Brady's Response

"I really like this post, but I disagree with the notion that there has to be worldviews that are inherently wrong, even from people who leave or aren't engaged in their communities. Reflecting on it, I don't even think they're particularly bad questions to pursue. However, they bring up a lot of additional questions before they're really helpful, in my opinion.

• What are important ways of contributing to a community? What does it mean to opt out of it?
• How does rest and burnout factor into this?
• How does the social system encourage/discourage a person to contribute to it? How much should a person contribute before it's socially acceptable for them to receive the rewards of the social system?
• What was the person's reason for becoming more asocial? Did they potentially have problems that were continually unaddressed?

I think your post does touch on the last one, with your example of an optimist who doesn't engage with systematic injustice. I agree that this outlook can perpetuate a lot of harm, even if the person seems benevolent on the surface.

Ironically, even people who leave a system are still contributing. Their past contributions still had impact, and their absence can sometimes be grounds for the community to reflect on how the person was treated. It can be a wake-up call if the person was taken for granted. It can also be a profound relief if they were actively causing harm or chaos, and also bring up the uncomfortable question, 'Why/how were they able to cause harm in the community for as long as they did?'"

It's true. My article (and worldview in general) take a naïve and simplified understanding: People and communities are inherently good. I do think that's true more often than not, but it isn't universal.

I want to take a step back and examine and define the broader concept of evil before getting into Brady's response.

The Problem of Evil (is the History of Philosophy)

Accounting for evil means to tally, define, and make evil legible. But account also means figuring out how we answer for it. How do we stand before it and explain ourselves?

Unsurprisingly, like nearly everything else, philosophers have argued about this for centuries. The argument typically finds a restructuring around the era's most unbearable event. I'm going to be using Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought as a cornerstone for my essay. For Neiman makes an interesting argument: the problem of evil is the history of philosophy. From Leibniz to Nietzsche, underneath everything philosophical really just lies the same question:

How do you live in a world where innocents suffer and the universe offers no apology?

Neiman organizes her thinking with an earthquake and World War II. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake killed tens of thousands of people on a Sunday morning, many were attending church and assumed to be good, moral people. Because of this, the natural disaster shattered the Enlightenment's assumption that natural order was fundamentally benevolent. There was no longer confidence that the world was, structurally, on humanity's side.

But even if we cannot rely on nature, we still can rely on our intellect, right? No. Auschwitz shattered the Enlightenment's faith that our reason would save us from ourselves. No matter how educated and rational man became, the worst of evil was not preventable.

Lisbon raised the problem of natural evil. Auschwitz raised the problem of moral evil. And the line between these (which we now take for granted) was only drawn in the aftermath of the earthquake. Before Lisbon, natural disasters were regarded as a response to sin. A city destroyed by earthquake was a city that, for whatever reason, deserved it. After Lisbon, that logic became impossible to sustain. The earthquake forced a divorce between what is and what ought to be. And that divide is a philosophical wound we've inherited. A wound we are now living in.

The Missing Stair

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that we do not have to look to the atrocities of world wars for moral evil. Even without doomscrolling current events, it shows up in our day-to-day life. Communities suffer the missing stair problem. Cliff Jerrison coined the term in 2012 at The Pervocracy, originally to describe a man in their BDSM social circle known to be a rapist. Horrifyingly, the community quietly normalized working around him, rather than confronting or excluding him.

This is an extreme example, but nearly every community eventually finds itself with people who worked around instead of confronted or excluded. These people are described as being the dangerous structural fault in a staircase, the unrepaired issue that everyone in the house knows to avoid, that newcomers are warned about in hushed corners, but an issue nobody actually assumes responsibility for fixing.

And it's sickening how the responsibility for not getting hurt shifts onto whoever didn't receive (or didn't heed) the warning. The missing stair becomes a normalcy of day-to-day life and is accommodated for. A permanent feature of the floor plan.

Missing stairs travel with communities that internationalize and expand. Typically given a clean slate in each new room. The whisper network attempting to keep people safe in one space has no jurisdiction in the next.

The issue here isn't merely individual (though they are an issue), but rather the tolerance of others. Highly cohesive groups will prioritize a sense of unity over naming the evil that occurs within them. Then, diffusion of responsibility does the rest. Everyone assumes someone else will, at some point, act. Nobody does.

And the problem compounds as good people with integrity leave, unable to stand the hypocrisy. When there is no channel open for repair or even dialogue, good people only have the option to leave, refusing to be complicit in further harm.

The person causing damage? Stays. Social infrastructure ends up being designed around their presence. Isn't that insidious? The missing stair is a systems failure made up entirely of individual choices to look away.

The Ones Who Mean It

Is the missing stair somebody simply confused and misunderstood? No. I'm not talking about those kind of people here. I am talking about those who are simply not good-faith actors. Not broken by a cruel system, not burned out or unheard. They're people given a genuine invitation to belong, but instead orient themselves, fundamentally, towards extraction instead of reciprocity.

I'm speaking about people who are intentionally malicious, callous, and manipulative. They're usually disproportionately drawn towards positions of power. These people are incredibly rare, but they do exist. And the few can do outsized damage, particularly in communities that have built their identity around assuming the best.

It is condescending and paternalistic to assume maligned people simply require realignment, or a reminder of their inherent morality. I'll stand by that. There are people who already know exactly what they're doing. Assuming they need gentle redirection is not compassionate. It is naive in a way that actively protects the predator and abandons the prey.

With this understood, let's finally get to addressing Brady's questions.

Brady's Four Questions

Now that I've established the context for evil, particularly what it looks like within a community setting, I'd like to directly address Brady's questions.

1. What does it mean to opt out of community?

Which direction is the harm flowing? A person who withdraws due to burnout or being underserved or who is quietly suffering is not the same as a person who withdraws because they were actively corroding the space they occupied and finally depart. The first absence is a wound in the commons, the second isn't. But both should prompt the same question: how did this happen, and what does the community's response to their absence reveal about its values?

Withdrawal can never be ethically neutral. Though, a person who has given everything they have and then needs to stop giving for a while has not betrayed anything. A person who exits in order to avoid accountability is doing something different entirely.

2. How does rest and burnout factor in?

The demand to be perpetually present and perpetually contributing is a form of structural violence. Those who can endure the most harm are the ones that will be harmed the most. Communities that cannot distinguish between withdrawal-as-rest and withdrawal-as-abandonment are communities that will exhaust their most conscientious members first.

There is something punitive in the assumption that one's value to a community is measured by their ongoing visibility. Rest is not laziness nor defection.

3. How much should a person contribute before opting out is acceptable?

I don't think this can be answered with a number. Be suspicious of frameworks that try. The question is corrosive assuming community is transactional.

The tragedy of the commons, as Garrett Hardin framed it in his famous 1968 essay in Science, states that shared resources will inevitably be depleted by individuals acting in (rational) self-interest. Each person benefits from taking and the cost is distributed among everyone. Left unregulated, the commons collapses.

It's important to note that Hardin himself was a eugenicist and a racist, and a lot of his policy conclusions were monstrous. His ecological observation here applies to social commons just as well as grazing fields. A community's trust, its goodwill, its capacity for care? These are finite resources that are depleted by bad-faith actors.

That said, Elinor Ostrom spent her Nobel Prize-winning career arguing that tragedy is not inevitable. In Governing the Commons (1990), Ostrom documented more than 800 cases of communities around the world successfully managing shared resources without descending into exploitation. Not through top-down regulation, not through privatization, but through self-governance. Through relationships. Through locally-designed rules built on trust, transparency, and graduated consequences. All of which follow a rather Indigenous paradigm, separate from Western imperial colonialism.

4. What was the person's reason for becoming more asocial?

This is the question I skipped in my original piece, and it's the most important one Brady asks.

A person withdrawing because their problems went continually unaddressed by the community is not an asocial person. They are a person the community failed. Departure is an indictment. Silence is feedback. If the community was paying attention, it would feel that absence as a question. What did we not see? What did we normalize? What did we not ask?

The Banality

Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, the idea that atrocity doesn't require monsters, just people who stop thinking and follow procedure, those who confuse bureaucratic compliance with moral neutrality. Arendt developed this concept while reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who organized the logistics of the Holocaust. When I think of my People's own history, there's the Indian Agent who processed the paperwork. The railway man who laid the tracks. The priest who filed the reports. There is always a long chain of ordinary people between political will and generational harm, and most of them probably thought they were doing their jobs.

Arendt has critics, Historian Deborah Lipstadt and others have argued that Eichmann was not nearly as thoughtless as Arendt claimed. His memoir did in fact reveal a man steeped in racial ideology who knew exactly what he was building. The banality frame, however useful, risks becoming a kind of alibi. If everyone is just following orders, if evil is always situational and never dispositional, then no one is ever actually responsible. And the missing stair never gets fixed, because no one made a choice.

Philip Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect is the psychological literature's version of this argument. Bad systems create bad situations create bad behaviour. The moral weight belongs on the structural level, not the individual.

Were it so easy.

The world we live in today required bad systems and bad choices. People who built the architecture, knowing it was architecture. And people who walked through it, choosing comfort over conscience. The difference matters for how we respond now, because if it's purely systemic, then accountability is a category error. And I don't believe that. Accountability is the only honest response to harm that was chosen.

Being Indigenous in a settler-colonial context means living inside this contradiction. The harm done to my family was systemic and it was personal. It had architects and it had operators. It had policy and it had faces. And the communities that absorbed or perpetuated that harm were not communities of monsters. It would be so easy and effortless to demonize them if that were the case. Rather, they were communities that chose not to ask the question. Over and over again. For generations.

Sometimes the missing stair doesn't get fixed for a hundred and fifty years. And the community keeps calling itself loving and just while the people who couldn't avoid the stair are quietly ruined.

What Good Governance Looks Like

How do we build communities with real safeguards? Ones that can identify and respond to bad-faith actors without metastasizing into paranoid, surveilled spaces where good-faith actors are treated as suspects?

Ostrom's eight design principles for governing the commons aren't just about fisheries and irrigation networks. Applied broadly, they're a blueprint for community accountability that isn't authoritarian.

Clear boundaries. A community needs to know who is in it and what the shared resource is. A community that cannot articulate what it's protecting cannot protect it. Definitional clarity as a precondition for care.

Rules made by the people they affect. Not handed down from leadership nor inherited from tradition. Made, revised, and consented to by the actual community. People follow rules they helped shape.

Graduated sanctions. This is what most progressive communities get wrong. Ostrom found that immediately expelling rule-violators creates resentment and fracture. Proportionality works. A warning, then a consequence, then escalation. Repair must be genuinely possible, while also making clear that the community will not simply absorb harm indefinitely.

Accessible conflict resolution. Cheap and fast. Not a tribunal. Not a months-long process exhausting the person who was harmed before anything is resolved. A mechanism for people to bring concerns and be heard.

Community monitoring. Lateral accountability. People watching out for each other and for the shared space out of their shared ownership of it. Not surveillance.

The through-line is the tragedy of the commons isn't inevitable. It becomes inevitable only when communities choose accommodation over accountability. When they would rather warn new members about the missing stair than fix it.

Cliff Jerrison, who coined the missing stair, wrote a follow-up piece about what it actually looks like to fix one. The answer is not elegant. There is no formula. It requires finding even one other person willing to name the problem openly. And a willingness to have the conversation that everyone has been dreading. It requires accepting that the community will feel destabilized and, importantly, the person being confronted will likely have defenders. Things will get worse before they get better.

And it requires believing that it is worth it despite all of that. For the person currently being protected by a community's silence will always matter less than the people who will be harmed by it.

Conclusion

I want community (and really, all of humanity) to be unconditionally beautiful. I write with the ideal in mind and forgo the rest. It is a form of the Leibnizian position, the one broken by the Earthquake. The position nullified by the atrocities committed by others. I've been writing, in my optimism, as though we inhabit the best of all possible worlds, and all we need is better tending.

In reality, a community can only endure ethically if it is honest about its worst members and its own patterns of protection. Otherwise, the commons will be poisoned. People will keep getting hurt by a community calling itself loving and safe.

If you read this all and think I'm talking about a specific community without naming them, or if you have a community in your own life that this resonates with, that's important to note and keep with you. Is there something you can do about that community yourself?

None of this helps us discern who means harm and who is just struggling. That is an issue that will require another 3,000 words on its own. But I do know we must make it harder for evil to not cause damage.

This is not done through paranoia or purity or litmus tests. This is not done through the infinite escalation of gatekeeping until no one new can enter. Rather, it is done by people willing to pick up the hammer and nails to fix a missing stair.