What Is Spite

Contents

1. The picture under the word
2. Three cases the picture cannot hold
3. The neighbours
4. What the foundation holds
5. What the maker is paid in
6. The one it was aimed at
7. Spite is not the reaching
8. What it costs
9. An ordinary Tuesday

Lena shares a Saturday rota with Cal at the garden centre where they both work. It is the end of a month in which he has twice swapped a shift without asking her. On the last Friday the rota comes round for each of them to confirm, and she confirms it with her own Saturday filled in and his left blank, so that he will find out on the morning. She has not spoken to him about it and she does not plan to. She is calm about it.

On Saturday he rings at ten past eight. He says, in nearly the words she had half composed in advance, that this is typical, that she could have said something, that he has plans. She says she is sorry, which is untrue, and puts the phone on the counter and looks at it. What she feels is not what she had pictured. It is less like winning than like checking a sum. She had expected to feel that he was upset. She does not know whether he is. She knows what he said.

That small flat moment is the subject of this piece. I do not say that spite is wrong, that Lena is unkind, or that anyone owes anyone. The question is narrower: when a person acts at a cost to herself to hurt someone, what can she be shown afterwards, and by what?

The picture under the word

The ordinary picture of spite is clear, and I do not think it is stupid. Spite is the wish to hurt someone, acted on out of ill will and usually at a price to the person acting. It is the plate broken so that the other cannot have the set, the house sold below its value so that a sibling does not get it, the group chat left so that the others see the name go. What marks it is the willingness to pay. A person who does the same thing for gain is not being spiteful. A person who does it at a loss, for the sake of the other’s loss, is. The pleasure is taken to be in the other’s pain, which is why we call it petty when the pain is small and vile when it is large.

Underneath is a picture of where the hurt sits. It sits in the act, the way a colour sits in a door, and the act carries it to the other person, who receives it. The spiteful person then sees it land, or at least knows that it has. The wish is paid out by the landing.

That last step is where the picture does its work, and it is the step I want to test.

Three cases the picture cannot hold

The three cases share a seam with Lena’s morning. The picture put the hurt in the act and the pleasure in its landing. In the first case the hurt, if there was any, was out of the maker’s sight. In the second it was absent, and the absence hurt. In the third the act was an answer to no occasion. And Lena, at the start, had the whole of what the picture asks for, an act, a reaction and a clear aim, and was left checking a sum.

The neighbours

Several earlier pieces stand close, and a reader could think I am repeating one of them. I will say which, and what is different.

What Is Revenge is the nearest. It owns the point that an act has two readings, one for its maker and a larger one for the person it reaches, and that two people who each aim at even cannot read what they aim at. It owns the wish that a wrong be met as the reaching for the event. At the end of its third construction it sets aside an avenger who, asked what the return is for, names the other person’s next mark and not the event, and it says its construction is silent on that. This piece takes that aim at one clause only: the maker’s aim at a reading in another host, with no wrong needed behind it. I take the maker’s smaller reading as that piece states it and do not re-derive it.

What Is Gossip is the nearest in machinery. There, a host makes a mark out of a departure from her own prediction of another person, and the person talked about meets other marks. I use the prediction as the maker’s own, which that piece uses. What differs is the question. That piece asks what a host makes a mark about. This one asks what a host who has made a costly act aimed at one person can be shown afterwards.

What Is a Dare owns the giver’s prediction of the hearer’s next mark, handed to the hearer, and silence made readable. I use neither. What Is a Reputation owns a reputation as present marks that each reader holds in her denominator, and the reader’s prior as what sets a mark’s value; I take both as stated. What Is Blame owns who answers for a mark, and this piece leaves it as it was. What Is Unmoved owns the point that a small felt surprise is a report of a quotient and is silent on whether the person was changed; I lean on it once, in words, for Cal.

No earlier essay takes the word as its subject, so no piece is superseded. The one older piece I found that mentions it does so once and in passing, in a myth about the first distance between two people.

What the foundation holds

Five statements do the work, and I use them as the foundation states them. First, the human experiences only the quotient, not the Actual and not the Expectation but their ratio, R = A / E (R8). Second, the Expectation is the host’s own, and it holds subconscious prediction and ideas (P4). Third, by the foundation’s locked definition, surprise is the logarithm of the quotient’s magnitude, signed, and negative when the actual falls short. A reading close to the prediction therefore carries surprise near zero. Fourth, records are write-protected and update expectation going forward, and a new mark is added beside the old one and does not reopen it (R2). Fifth, the Past is inaccessible, which is why a reaching toward an event cannot succeed (R9).

One caution, which earlier pieces have recorded and which this one depends on without closing. The foundation has no expression for comparing two hosts’ quotients, and no size for an update. So when I say that one reading is smaller than another, I am giving a direction, and only inside one host. I do not say that one person feels more than another, and I give no amount.

What the maker is paid in

Go back to Lena at ten past eight. She held a prediction of Cal, built from three years of Saturdays: that if his name was left off, he would ring, that he would say it was typical, that he would say she could have said something. The prediction was good. When the call came, what she met was the call against that prediction, a quotient near one, and surprise near zero.

Now ask what else she could have met. She did not meet Cal’s quotient. By R8 she could not: each host has her own and no place to read another’s. She has his words, which are in the record, and she can read them. She has her own prediction of him, which is what she read them against. That is the whole of what the act can deliver to her. If what she felt as payment was the reading of his reaction, it was a reading against her own prediction, and the better that prediction, the smaller the reading.

The same arithmetic gives three outcomes. If he reacts as she predicted, the reading is near one and the surprise is small, which is Lena. If he reacts with more hurt than she had predicted, the reading is above one and the surprise is large and positive. If he reacts with less, the reading is below one and the surprise is large and negative, which is Odile. Her friend’s message was a quotient well under one: the prediction held a wounded ex and the world supplied a shrug. That is why it stung more than the loss of the playlist. The failure was read against a prediction that had been built to hold the success.

Figure 01

One kind of act, four hosts, and the quotient each one meets

Person	What the prediction held	What the host meets	How the quotient reads
Lena, who left the rota blank	A call, and the words “this is typical”.	The call, in those words.	Near one. Surprise near zero.
Odile, who deleted the playlist	A hurt ex, and some sign of it.	“Good reminder to back things up.”	Well under one. Surprise large and negative.
A maker who knew the person little	A mild reaction, or no reaction.	A reaction far stronger than she guessed.	Above one. Surprise large and positive.
Cal, who found the blank	His own Saturdays, and Lena’s habits.	A blank where his name should be.	Not readable from the other three rows. It is his own, and the foundation gives no way to set it beside hers.

Notice what the arithmetic says about aim. The better Lena knows Cal, the smaller the reading she is paid in, so the spite that is best aimed pays least. It pays most to the person who knew the other least, and its failures read large. I will say what that costs further on.

The one it was aimed at

Now Cal. He has a prediction too, of the rota, of Lena, of his Saturday. On the Saturday morning he meets a blank where his name should have been, read against that prediction. What that is to him, Lena cannot read. It might be a large quotient, and he rings her because of it. It might be small, and he rings her because it is what a person does. He might ring her composed and furious.

What Lena can read is what Cal does. A reply, a tone, a silence, a post, a face held still. Those are things he makes, and he can make them to be read in a particular way, so that a hurt can be held and a shrug can be put on. There are also things in a person that only occur, a flush or a clench, and whether those are marks is an open matter, on marks that no host made, which the wink piece left alone and which I do not settle. The argument here needs only the first kind. A hurt held back and no hurt leave the same thing for Lena to read. The unmoved piece says that “it didn’t affect me” can be an accurate report of a quotient and silent on whether the person was changed. The point carries over to Cal in the other direction. A small reading in him, or a composed one, leaves Lena without a reading of whether his expectation of her has moved.

And it may have. The blank is a mark, and a new mark is added beside the old and does not reopen it (R2). If Cal reads it, his expectation of Lena is different from that morning on, and the later things she does are read against it. So the act can succeed. Cal’s quotient can have departed from what his prediction held, and his prediction of her can have been moved. The act cannot be confirmed. The one person who cannot take delivery is the person who paid for it.

Wes is the same case with the signal cut. He made the cancellation and the family met the notice. Whatever came of it in the room, he was not placed to read it, and his phone told him less than a glance would have.

Spite is not the reaching

Gil’s case has no wrong in it, and that matters for the word. The revenge piece reads the wish that a wrong be met as the reaching for the event, the wish that the first review had not been written, which no return can touch because the Past is inaccessible and the old mark stays (R9, R2). Where there is a wrong behind a spiteful act, the person may well have both aims in her at once. One is the reaching, which cannot succeed, and the revenge piece has it. The other is an aim at what the other person will be, or feel, or do next. That is a reading in a living host, not the Past, and it can occur. Gil’s act has only the second. He had no earlier event to reach back to.

So the two come apart on why they do not complete. A reaching toward the event cannot complete, because the event is out of reach. The aim at another host’s reading can complete, and the one who aimed cannot take it. I note that resemblance and I draw no line under it. The foundation has an open question on forward-facing feelings, whether the split that holds for a backward-facing feeling holds for one facing the other way. What closing it would take is a showing that the Future node supports the same two-job decomposition on its own terms, an evaluation with a completion condition and a reaching without one, without simply reflecting what holds for the Past’s inaccessibility. This piece does not do that. The other host’s later reading is a reading in a living host and is not the Future node, and the open item is about the node. The item stays open.

What it costs

The first cost is that the price is the one line she can read for certain. The act stays (R2). Cal’s prediction of Lena has moved, and what she loses, a Saturday’s goodwill, a swap he will not offer again, is in front of her in the record. If Wes’s brother stops answering him, that he can read. The only thing the transaction delivers with certainty to the maker is the receipt for what it cost.

The second is that spite between people who know each other well pays the least, by construction 01, and so those are the people for whom a success is the flattest. Lena’s “less than I imagined” is what the arithmetic gives her. I suspect that leaves a person looking for a larger act, and I mark that as speculation: it would be the revenge piece’s climb, reached from the side of the payoff. No claim here rests on it.

The third is smaller and true. The foundation says an act the host makes reads smaller to her than it does to the person it reaches, in direction and with no size. So “it was only a rota” is honest as a report of Lena’s quotient. It is silent on Cal’s.

Last, I have not said that Cal was owed his Saturday, that Lena will be answered for it, or that it evens anything up. The ledger is not invoked. This repays no one, and the thing she aimed at was not delivered into any hand she holds.

An ordinary Tuesday

These are practice and not doctrine. They are revisable on evidence and they are not grounds for anything above.

1. Before you do it, finish the sentence “I want her to…” and ask where that is. If the answer is in her, ask what you will be shown: a reply, a silence, a face. Ask whether those would satisfy you. If they would not, the act is paying for something you cannot take.
2. Say out loud what you predict she will do. If you are sure, you have already read most of the reading you were going to be paid in, and the act will return a small quotient. If you are not sure, you are buying surprise, and a large negative one is possible as well as a large positive one.
3. Count the cost first. It is the only line you will read with certainty, and it is the one the picture leaves out of the sum.
4. When the shrug comes, read it as one thing she did. A composed face is made. It does not settle whether anything happened in her.
5. If you have done it, add a mark and do not try to take one back. Say what you now read. The first act stays, and a plain second one sits beside it.