Communities summon their own monsters. Not through ritual or intention, but through need. Through the stories they tell themselves about who they are. Through their investment in maintaining those stories regardless of what contradicts them.
This is an old pattern. Wisdom traditions have named it for millennia. But it keeps appearing in new forms, wearing new faces, speaking the language of whatever era it inhabits. Joyce Carol Oates’ recent novel Fox provides a particularly clear view of how this works.
The Pattern in the Present
Fox is a 672-page literary thriller about a pedophile who works as an English teacher at an elite boarding school. Francis Fox is brilliant, cultured, charming. He arrives at each new place and reads what they need. Then he becomes it. At Langhorne Academy, he performs intellectual rigor and old-fashioned moral seriousness. With parents, he reflects their children back as gifted and misunderstood. With his victims—girls he calls his “kittens”—he becomes the only adult who truly sees them.
He doesn’t create these needs. He finds them waiting for him.
The boarding school needs someone who validates its prestige. The parents need confirmation of their good judgment. The students need someone who recognizes their specialness. Everyone has a reason to believe in Fox. When evidence emerges that contradicts the narrative—girls losing weight rapidly, emotional distress, vague details about his past—the community reinterprets or dismisses it. Parents say “you know how girls are.” Colleagues praise his “moral core.” The headmistress values his credentials too much to question his history.
This isn’t passive blindness. It’s active maintenance of a preferred story. The fantasy exists first. Fox simply embodies it. The community summons him by needing him.
What the Traditions Teach
Buddhist teaching identifies tanha—craving, thirst, clinging—as the root condition that creates suffering. But tanha operates collectively as well as individually. Communities cling to their self-images, their narratives of prestige and safety and righteousness. This clinging creates the very conditions that undermine those things. The attachment to being seen as an elite institution prevents seeing the predator within it. The desire to believe in one’s good judgment prevents questioning it. Delusion serves desire.
Christian tradition names corporate sin—the collective participation in patterns that enable evil. Jesus overturned tables in the temple not because individual money changers were corrupt, but because the entire system had become oriented toward institutional preservation rather than sacred purpose. The prophets consistently condemned communities that maintained impressive facades while allowing injustice to flourish within. “Whited sepulchres,” Jesus called the religious leaders—beautiful on the outside, full of dead bones within. Communities that invest in appearing righteous while protecting systems over people summon exactly what they claim to oppose.
Islamic teaching speaks of nafs—the ego-self that operates through desire and denial. The greater jihad is not external struggle but internal—the battle against self-deception. Collectively, communities engage in this same ego-protection. They defend the image they have of themselves even when that defense requires not seeing what is directly in front of them. The nafs wants comfort, validation, the confirmation that we are good and safe and right. These wants create blindness.
Taoist thought observes how forcing creates its opposite. When systems are built on pretense—on claiming to be what they are not, on maintaining appearances rather than alignment with true nature—they generate the conditions for their own collapse. The boarding school claims to protect and educate children. But its actual operation protects institutional reputation. This misalignment creates the crack through which harm enters. Wu wei suggests that right action comes from alignment with what is, not imposition of what we wish to be. Communities that insist on false narratives about themselves create the very chaos they seek to prevent.
Indigenous wisdom traditions speak of right relationship—with land, with community, with all beings. When relationship breaks, when we value some lives over others, when we protect systems over people, we create imbalance. That imbalance doesn’t stay contained. It spreads. The boarding school values prestige over the girls Fox harms. This breaking of right relationship doesn’t affect only those girls. It affects the entire web. Everyone becomes complicit. Everyone is diminished.
The Mechanism of Summoning
Oates forces readers to spend extended time inside Fox’s consciousness. His grooming mechanics laid bare. His contempt beneath the charm. How he sees himself as victim, artist, misunderstood genius. How he performs empathy while feeling nothing. This sustained inhabitation is the book’s central violation—not the acts themselves, which Oates renders with disturbing clarity but stops short of pornography, but the 672 pages inside this mind.
There is no escape. The prose is extraordinarily beautiful. “The sky at dawn is clotted with dark tumors of cloud through which a sudden piercing light shines like a scalpel.” You are reading gorgeous language about a man who grooms children. The craft traps you. You cannot look away.
This demonstrates something. Predators succeed because they are brilliant at reading people, at crafting performances, at building narratives others want to believe. Oates shows this by doing it—by using brilliant craft to trap you in a predator’s perspective. You are simultaneously repelled and unable to stop reading. This is how seduction works. This is how Fox works. This is how the pattern perpetuates.
The book asks: What does it mean that you kept reading? What does your inability to look away reveal about the communities in the novel who also could not—or would not—see?
The Contemporary Pattern
This pattern appears everywhere. Political demagogues who embody what communities want to believe about themselves, despite evidence of their destructiveness. Institutions that protect abusers because admitting the abuse would threaten institutional reputation. Systems that value appearance over reality, prestige over protection, comfort over truth.
The pattern operates the same way each time. Communities develop attachments to particular narratives about themselves. These attachments create needs. Predators—whether individual abusers or collective systems of harm—read those needs and fill them. When evidence emerges that contradicts the preferred narrative, it is reinterpreted or dismissed. The investment in the story is too great. The ego-need for validation is too strong. The attachment to being seen a certain way overpowers the capacity to see clearly what is.
The predator doesn’t create these conditions. The predator exploits conditions that already exist. Communities summon monsters through their collective needs, their willful ignorance, their investment in maintaining stories about themselves that require not seeing clearly.
This doesn’t absolve predators. They are fully responsible for their actions. And communities are implicated in creating the conditions that allow those actions to occur and continue. Both things are true. Wisdom traditions hold both.
The Hard Question
Fox ends with a twist that divided reviewers. Some found it brilliant, others insufficient. But the twist isn’t the point. The point is the 672 pages you spent getting there. The point is that you read them. The point is the examination of how communities create the spaces predators occupy, then express shock when predators occupy them.
Oates doesn’t resolve this. She witnesses it. She makes you witness it. She makes you witness yourself witnessing it.
The contemplative question isn’t “how do we identify predators?” The contemplative question is “what are we attached to that prevents us from seeing clearly?” What narratives about ourselves do we need so badly that we will dismiss evidence to maintain them? What collective fantasies do we summon into being through our refusal to look at what threatens them?
Buddhist teaching says the root of suffering is craving. Christian tradition says we cannot serve both God and mammon—we will love one and despise the other. Islamic wisdom says the greater struggle is against our own ego-deception. Taoist thought says alignment with true nature prevents the chaos that comes from forcing false narratives. Indigenous wisdom says breaking right relationship creates conditions for harm to all.
All of them are saying: Communities that invest in appearing righteous while protecting systems over people summon exactly what they claim to oppose. The attachment to the appearance creates the conditions for its opposite. The need to believe we are good and safe prevents the seeing required to actually be good and safe.
The monster you refuse to look at doesn’t disappear. It finds the crack your refusal creates. It reads what you need to believe. Then it becomes that thing. You summoned it by needing it.
This is the pattern Fox reveals with uncomfortable clarity. This is the pattern playing out in institutions, systems, communities across contemporary life. This is the pattern wisdom traditions have been naming for millennia.
The question remains: What are you willing to see clearly? What will you stop protecting so you can start protecting what actually matters? What narrative about yourself are you maintaining that requires not looking at what contradicts it?
The contemplative practice isn’t finding the answer. The contemplative practice is staying with the question until it changes you.
