# Implicit Common Knowledge of Non-Dual Recognition and the Recursive Dynamics of Performative Contempt ### How denying our shared, already-seen Light causes every accusation of bad faith to bootstrap its own infinite hall-of-mirrors justification. --- The closer I get to my own Light—pre-egoic consciousness—the easier it is for me to see yours. Which means I also know that the closer you get to yours, the more you'll recognize mine. Curiously, I also discover that it was never actually absent from my experience. I see, in retrospect, that I'd *always* been able to see it—I'd just been hiding it from myself. Which means I know that some part of you sees it in me right now—even if you're still hiding it. And because the Light we're looking **with** is the same thing we're looking **at**, we each see that the other sees ours, that they see that we see theirs, etc. It's like two sets of eyes gazing into each other: both see the other seeing the other seeing the other... *ad infinitum.* This is what game theorists call *common knowledge*—a condition where everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows etc.[^common-knowledge] Now watch what it enables. The only way I can feel contempt for you is by shielding myself from our fundamental equality. It is common knowledge that I'm deceiving myself—but nobody can prove it. This is already maddening—but the real magic happens when I contemptuously accuse you of being a *bad person.* We both know I'm being a hypocrite—doing the very thing I'm accusing you of—but this knowledge lives in a hidden corner of my mind. So when I sense that implicit accusation from you, I’m forced to hide it harder. But now you (correctly) sense I'm pulling a ruse—so I have to hide that. And now you (correctly) sense that I'm covering up the ruse, so I have to hide _that_… The whole thing becomes a maddening hall of mirrors that makes you dig in your heels—which, conveniently, confirms you’re the bad person I said you were. After all, I was only trying to help! But now look back at step one: _“we both know I’m doing the thing I’m accusing you of doing.”_ What is that thing? Causing intentional harm. But where did the harm actually happen? Not in the accusation itself, and not even in the lie behind it. The harm comes from the entire **hall-of-mirrors** effect: a “good person” staging an elaborate performance of sincerity to make you look bad. That’s the part that hits hard. It scrambles your sense of what’s real, makes you doubt whether people mean what they say, and chips away at your faith in humanity. And _that_—that erosion of trust—is the real harm. In other words, the *base* of the recursion depends on the predictable *result* of the recursion. It is a **strange loop**—and it only works because we (at some level) know that this is how it works. Now that it's been made explicit, maybe we can stop. --- [^common-knowledge]: Normally this requires that a trusted party speak the knowledge out loud. For example, in the classic *Emperor's New Clothes* tale, once the young boy says the truth aloud, everyone not only knows it (which they already did), but knows that everyone knows that everyone knows... etc. But in our case, neither of us is trusted nor did we speak it aloud. This is *implicit* common knowledge.