The Onion

You can do a thousand good deeds to atone for the guilt of committing a murder, and you still remain a murderer. Save a thousand lives and it is still not enough to wash away the sin of murder. We know this instinctively. Once a murderer, always a murderer. The idea of the onion inverts this proposition. Live a wicked life, but do one good deed. How much weight does that single act carry?

There is so much focus on darkness that we sometimes forget that without light there would be no darkness at all. The obsessive attention we give to violence, depravity, and the worst parts of human nature is not a complete picture of who we are. Yes, the first encounter with evil often marks a turning point in a person's heart. It forces you to confront difficult truths about human nature, and more importantly, it forces you to look at yourself in the mirror. Can evil exist in me? From this realization emerges the asymmetry of evil. It is hard to make things good, but almost always easy to make them worse. Out of this first confrontation comes disillusionment, and from disillusionment grows a fixation on human corruption. We call that cynicism. But cynicism is just another, more degenerate, form of naivety. It also misses the forest for the trees. If there is so much evil, and if that is all that we are, then how have we come this far at all?

Yes, man is wicked, but that is not all that we are. There exists a weight of good that stands against the weight of evil. True goodness does not come from denying evil, but from looking it in the eyes, confronting it within ourselves, and still extending an olive branch. To give an onion is to perform one selfless act with no ulterior motive, no expectation of return. And just as violence can spread like wildfire, so too can goodness. One good deed can move outward, touching others in ways that are unseen but real.

This is precisely why giving an onion is so difficult. You cannot give an onion simply because you have heard the fable of the onion. That would be hedging, a softer version of Pascal's wager. The concept of the onion transcends the fable itself. An onion must be given without calculation, without keeping score, outside the calculus of utilitarianism: in a word, outside the concept of an onion. But if you can give such an onion, it carries a lot of weight.