Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

"No, Harry," the old wizard said. His face was gentle, his hand trailed through a lighted pool of water that made small musical chimes as his fingers stirred it. "Though I can understand how you must think so."

"Do you want to understand the Dark Wizard?" Harry said, his voice now hard and grim. "Then look within the part of yourself that flees not from death but from the fear of death, that finds that fear so unbearable that it will embrace Death as a friend and cozen up to it, try to become one with the night so that it can think itself master of the abyss. You have taken the most terrible of all evils and called it good! With only a slight twist that same part of yourself would murder innocents, and call it friendship. If you can call death better than life then you can twist your moral compass to point anywhere - "

"I think," said Dumbledore, shaking water droplets from his hand to the sound of tiny tinkling bells, "that you understand Dark Wizards very well, without yet being one yourself." It was said in perfect seriousness, and without accusation. "But your comprehension of me , I fear, is sorely lacking." The old wizard was smiling now, and there was a gentle laughter in his voice.

Harry was trying not to go any colder than he already was; from somewhere there was pouring into his mind a blazing fury of resentment, at Dumbledore's condescension, and all the laughter that wise old fools had ever used in place of argument. "Funny thing, you know, I thought Draco Malfoy was going to be this impossible to talk to, and instead, in his childish innocence, he was a hundred times stronger than you."

A look of puzzlement crossed the old wizard's face. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," Harry said, his voice biting, "that Draco actually took his own beliefs seriously and processed my words instead of throwing them out the window by smiling with gentle superiority. You're so old and wise, you can't even notice anything I'm saying! Not understand, notice! "

"I have listened to you, Harry," said Dumbledore, looking more solemn now, "but to listen is not always to agree. Disagreements aside, what is it that you think I do not comprehend?"

That if you really believed in an afterlife, you'd go down to St. Mungo's and kill Neville's parents, Alice and Frank Longbottom, so they could go on to their next great adventure , instead of letting them linger here in their damaged state -

Harry barely, barely kept himself from saying it out loud.

"All right," Harry said coldly. "I'll answer your original question, then. You asked why Dark Wizards are afraid of death. Pretend, Headmaster, that you really believed in souls. Pretend that anyone could verify the existence of souls at any time, pretend that nobody cried at funerals because they knew their loved ones were still alive. Now can you imagine destroying a soul? Ripping it to shreds so that nothing remains to go on its next great adventure? Can you imagine what a terrible thing that would be, the worst crime that had ever been committed in the history of the universe, which you would do anything to prevent from happening even once? Because that's what Death really is - the annihilation of a soul!"

The old wizard was staring at him, a sad look in his eyes. "I suppose I do understand now," he said quietly.

"Oh?" said Harry. "Understand what?"

"Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him , I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?"

They stood there gazing into each other's eyes, the old wizard in his robes, and the young boy with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

"Tell me, Harry," said the old wizard, "will you become a monster?"

"No," said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.

"Why not?" said the old wizard.

The young boy stood very straight, his chin raised high and proud, and said: "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us! "

"I wonder what will become of you, Harry," said the old wizard. His voice was soft, with a strange wonder and regret in it. "It is enough to make me wish to live just to see it."

The boy bowed to him with heavy irony, and departed; and the oaken door slammed shut behind him with a thud.

Harry, holding the tea cup in the exactly correct way that Professor Quirrell had needed to demonstrate three times, took a small, careful sip. All the way across the long, wide table that was the centerpiece of Mary's Room, Professor Quirrell took a sip from his own cup, making it look far more natural and elegant. The tea itself was something whose name Harry couldn't even pronounce, or at least, every time Harry had tried to repeat the Chinese words, Professor Quirrell had corrected him, until finally Harry had given up.

Harry had maneuvered himself into getting a glimpse at the bill last time, and Professor Quirrell had let him get away with it.

He'd felt an impulse to drink a Comed-Tea first.

Even taking that into account , Harry had still been shocked out of his skin.

And it still tasted to him like, well, tea.

There was a quiet, nagging suspicion in Harry's mind that Professor Quirrell knew this, and was deliberately buying ridiculously expensive tea that Harry couldn't appreciate just to mess with him. Professor Quirrell himself might not like it all that much. Maybe nobody actually liked this tea, and the only point of it was to be ridiculously expensive and make the victim feel unappreciative. In fact, maybe it was really just ordinary tea, only you asked for it in a certain code, and they put a fake gigantic price on the bill...

Professor Quirrell's expression was drawn and thoughtful. "No," Professor Quirrell said, "you should not have told the Headmaster about your conversation with Lord Malfoy. Please try to think faster next time, Mr. Potter."

"I'm sorry, Professor Quirrell," Harry said meekly. "I still don't see it." There were times when Harry felt very much like an impostor, pretending to be cunning in Professor Quirrell's presence.

"Lord Malfoy is Albus Dumbledore's opponent," said Professor Quirrell. "At least for this present time. All Britain is their chessboard, all wizards their pieces. Consider: Lord Malfoy threatened to throw away everything, abandon his game, to take vengeance on you if Mr. Malfoy was hurt. In which case, Mr. Potter...?"

It took more long seconds for Harry to get it, but it was clear that Professor Quirrell wasn't going to give any more hints, not that Harry wanted them.

Then Harry's mind finally made the connection, and he frowned. "Dumbledore kills Draco, makes it look like I did it, and Lucius sacrifices his game against Dumbledore to get at me? That... doesn't seem like the Headmaster's style, Professor Quirrell..." Harry's mind flashed back to a similar warning from Draco, which had made Harry say the same thing.

Professor Quirrell shrugged, and sipped his tea.

Harry sipped his own tea, and sat in silence. The tablecloth spread over the table was in a very peaceful pattern, seeming at first like plain cloth, but if you stared at it long enough, or kept silent long enough, you started to see a faint tracery of flowers glimmering on it; the curtains of the room had changed their pattern to match, and seemed to shimmer as though in a silent breeze. Professor Quirrell was in a contemplative mood that Saturday, and so was Harry, and Mary's Room, it seemed, had not neglected to notice this.