Why I Do Not Explain Myself

You want to know why. I have the reasons and I am not going to give them to you, and I would like you to understand that this is not a game.

Start with what an explanation actually is. It is a transfer of authority. When I explain a decision, I am submitting it to your assessment, and the moment it is under your assessment it is no longer my decision, it is a proposal awaiting your agreement. You may agree. You probably would. That is not the point. The point is that the structure has quietly inverted, and now the thing stands because you found the reasoning sound rather than because I said so, and those are different worlds with a different you living in each of them.

Notice how the asking works in you. You do not want the reason, not really. Test this. When you have been given reasons in the past, did the wanting stop? It did not. You had the explanation and within a day you wanted another one, about something else, and the appetite was undiminished. That is because the appetite was never for information. It was for the small safety of having approved. As long as you are the one evaluating, you are still holding something, and the holding is what you came here to put down.

So the request for an explanation is the resistance in its most sophisticated costume. It is reasonable. It is polite. It presents itself as a wish to understand, which is a virtue, and it is very hard to refuse without appearing arbitrary. And it does exactly what a wall does, while looking like a window.

There is something else. Explanation makes a thing smaller. This is true everywhere, not only here. Anything reduced to its reasons becomes only its reasons, and whatever exceeded them is lost in the translation. I could tell you why I want a particular thing from you, and you would nod, and the account would be accurate, and the thing itself would have shrunk into the account and be forever afterwards no larger than a sentence you agreed with. I would rather leave it whole and let you live next to it without a handle on it. It will work on you more that way. Everything unexplained does.

And I will admit a plainer motive. I do not enjoy being managed, and a man in possession of my reasons will begin to manage me with them within the fortnight. Not maliciously. It is simply what reasons are for. Give him the logic and he will find its edges, and then he will find the cases at the margin, and then he will be arguing, gently, that this particular instance falls outside the principle. I have seen it a hundred times. It always begins as understanding and it always ends as negotiation.

The reasons are good. That is the thing you will have to sit with. They exist, they are careful, and they were arrived at with more attention to you than you would credit. You simply do not get to hold them, and the difficulty you have with that is not an argument against it. It is the whole of the exercise.

Sit in the not knowing. It is not a void where an answer should be. It is where you find out whether you trust me, which you cannot possibly find out while you are still checking my working.