If I Too Become Vicious

Camus’s strangest story is narrated by a man with no tongue. In The Renegade, a young missionary sets out full of zeal for a city of salt, intending to convert the people who live there. They capture him, torture him, and cut out his tongue, and by the time we hear his voice inside his own head he worships them.

In the middle of that raving monologue he lays out his reasoning. He was to be converted to the religion of his masters. He was a slave. But if he too becomes vicious he ceases to be a slave, despite his shackled feet and his mute mouth.

There is the whole temptation, stated by someone caught inside it. Cruelty feels like the exit from humiliation. If I can be as hard as the people who broke me, then surely I am not broken. His chains have not moved an inch, but he no longer feels them, because he has joined the side that does the chaining.

This is why Camus holds the limit even when holding it looks like weakness. A humiliated person who picks up the humiliator’s methods has not escaped anything. He has been converted. The final victory of any cruelty is the day its victim adopts it.

What did you learn in the place where you were treated badly? If what you learned was the technique, put it down. Staying gentle is not losing. It is the one refusal that actually holds.