Melania Trump

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If you are honest with yourself about your own motives and intentions, and if you look closely at the human condition, you’ll notice that most of the time we are all trying to leverage the value we bring to the table in order to benefit from our dealings with others. In this masquerade there is not only the pursuit of basic biological needs—food, drink, and so on—there is also the pursuit of the esteem that is more vital to us than any desire for happiness. It is the egoistic nature of this activity that makes the world so devilish. Behind the scenes, human institutions, full of dark thoughts nobody would dare express to others, feature anxious, burdened animals, absolutely motivated by their own interests, absolutely committed to their own agendas, and hence, then, the universality of scandal and corruption.

But of course, people are adroit dissemblers, as honest as Iago and all smiles and nice to meet you. So it happens that their underlying wickedness commonly shocks those who have not been severely harmed by their fellow man, or who lack the discernment to see how things go in this world. What makes mankind so treacherous, and friends and family, in many instances, our greatest sources of pain and misery, is the fact that in most contexts people are essentially selfish. Therefore, whenever they are not deterred by an inherent fear of consequence—a virtue that makes the concept of a punishing God uniquely valuable to a well-ordered society—they are to be trusted only insofar as their well-being depends on our own. It will be seen here that one man’s egoism usefully allies him to another’s, but by no means to everyone: Most people are to be regarded with prudent distrust by definition.

In a world of unjust beings determined by and in many cases in bondage to their desire for esteem, navigating the social realm calls for the finest discrimination. This entails being skeptical of what people say—for how often they know not what they do, or don’t, want us to know—while paying close attention to their tone of voice, body language, and, above all, eyes. For ultimately truth and wisdom are all in perception, as is implied by the popular saying that the eyes are the window to the soul. Old masters such as Rembrandt and Vermeer were able to reveal so much through their representations not only because of their exquisite craftsmanship; they were also seers, they divined essences. Body language, though ambiguous, can be used to get a sense of actual intention and sincerity. Tone of voice, which even nonhuman animals understand, likewise indicates what a person is really up to: “Could you pass the salt, please?” if spoken in certain way, is not a polite interrogative, but in effect a harsh imperative. Of course, that example is deliberately much clearer than most examples in which tone—the sound of the inner man, as it were—belies the actual character of an interlocutor. We must rely on the eyes most of all, for they reveal who we are, what we have chosen to be, and what is most significant, the moral will, the essential disposition, the self in the deepest sense. A good person’s eyes are marked by simplicity and openness, like a child. A bad person’s eyes display deceitfulness, a refusal to do what is right and, much more, to be accountable. For evil is revealed less by evil itself than by the individual insistence on not being good, in which there is immense pleasure and pride.