Hari quotes a line from the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story that he calls one of his favorites: "the time to make your mind up about someone is never."1 Then he gives the evidence. He's interviewed people who've done terrible things and one incredibly good thing in their lives. He's interviewed people who were wonderful and then catastrophically destructive. People are everywhere in between. When you're telling a story about someone, the temptation is to act like you've captured their essence. People don't have essences. They have multitudes — Whitman's word, used by Hari directly.
The corollary is craft-operational. The writer who goes in looking for the one thing that unlocks the subject is going in with the wrong tool. There is no one thing. The honest portrait gives the reader the space to be complex, contradictory, ambiguous. If the writer collapses the multitude into a single trait, the portrait flattens — and the flatness is what makes the work feel manipulative even when the writer didn't intend to manipulate.
Hari is making a structural claim about how truthful portrayal of human beings works. The claim has three load-bearing parts.
Part 1 (ontological): Humans don't have essences. The notion of a person's single underlying truth is an artifact of bad biography, not a description of how persons actually exist. Persons exist as bundles of behaviors, traits, contradictions, history-marks. The bundles cohere enough to be recognized as the same person across time, but they don't reduce to a single underlying trait.
Part 2 (craft): Treating subjects as having an essence flattens them in the writing. The flat portrait is what produces the readerly experience of being preached to — the writer has already collapsed the subject into a moral judgment, and the reader has to accept or reject the judgment without being given the material to think with. The complex portrait produces the readerly experience of thinking with the writer — the contradictions are visible, the judgment is partial, the reader has work to do.
Part 3 (ethical): Subjects deserve the dignity of being represented as complex. This applies symmetrically — to subjects the writer likes and subjects the writer doesn't like. The temptation in both directions is the same: the writer wants their hero to be a hero and their villain to be a villain. Both temptations betray the actual people. "Demonization and valorization are equally untruthful."
Hari illustrates with a Pauline Kael review of the Australian film Walkabout (the 1971 Nicolas Roeg film about two white children rescued in the desert by a young Aboriginal boy). Kael argued that the film represents the Aboriginal characters as kind of magical and mystical, and what it denies them is the dignity of just being real people like everyone else.1
Hari adopts the principle. Demonization and valorization are equally untruthful or oversimplifications of human beings. The film that turns its Aboriginal hero into a magical-mystical archetype hasn't honored him — it's flattened him in the opposite direction from a racist demonization, but the flattening is structurally the same. The mature portrayal gives the character the dignity of being a real person — flawed, particular, with the same range of qualities the white characters get.
Hari applies the principle directly to the work he's currently doing. He's writing about homeless people in Las Vegas. They've been demonized — devils, dangers, blights. The temptation is to swing the other way: no, they're angels, they're saints, they're the wisest people you'd ever meet. That's not dignity. That's valorization-as-equal-disrespect. The actual person — like Tommy, the homeless friend Hari mentions, who was murdered — was someone who had complicated qualities, did some absolutely remarkable things, and did some bad things. The portrait must hold all of it. The flattening in either direction would betray him.
This page is the worldview-corollary of Look for a Reason to Love Them (Hari) and "I Don't Believe in Evil" (Hari). The three pages form a unit: the stance produces openness, the openness produces foundational stories, and the foundational stories reveal the people as multitudes rather than essences.
It connects strongly to Lieberman Mindreader: Uncertainty of Other Minds — Lieberman's central claim is that our reads of other people's minds are systematically more uncertain than we treat them. Hari's craft principle is the operational corollary: since reads are uncertain, portrayals should be complex enough to honor the uncertainty. The simple portrait pretends to a certainty the actual epistemics doesn't support.
It sits in productive tension with Character-Anchor Traits (Bilton) — Bilton's craft method gives each character a single distinctive trait the reader can hold (Rubik's-cube-guy, fast-walker, slow-blinker). Hari warns against the single-trait approach for real people in nonfiction. The tension is productive because it points at a distinction the vault should hold: in fiction or narrative-condensation, single-trait anchors help readers track many characters; in deep portrayal of real subjects, single-trait anchors flatten the subject and produce manipulation. The same technique that helps thirty fictional characters cohere can destroy a single real subject's truthfulness. The vault holds both.
Hari mentions, in passing, someone he calls Tommy — a homeless man Hari had been writing about for years, who was murdered before the book about Vegas was finished. Hari describes the temptation he had to manage: the temptation to sanitize Tommy. Homeless people are demonized in contemporary American discourse. The natural counter-move is to swing them to the opposite pole — present Tommy as the saint of the underclass, the wise prophet of survival, the moral superior of the people who passed him on the street.
Hari refuses both poles. Tommy was complicated and he had some absolutely remarkable qualities and one of the best people I've ever known and he did some bad things and it's tempting to downplay the bad things, but I have to say to myself, no, because that's not according him the dignity of being who he was.1
The bad things stay in the portrait. Not as moral lecture, not as gotcha — as part of the truthful complexity of who Tommy was. The remarkable qualities stay in the portrait. Not as sanctification — as part of the same complexity. The reader closes the chapter with a sense of who Tommy was, not as a category (homeless-saint or homeless-degenerate) but as a particular human being whose life resists summary.
This is the operational meaning of dignity in Hari's craft. Dignity is not flattery. Dignity is the refusal to flatten. The bad things are part of dignity precisely because honoring the person means honoring all of them.
You're three-quarters through the book. You print out the chapters that profile your main subjects. You sit with them at the kitchen table with a red pen.
For each subject, you ask three questions.
First: What's the one trait this portrait is using to anchor the subject? Find the sentences that do the anchoring work. Are there too few of them? Too many? Has the trait become the whole portrait?
Second: What's the opposite of that trait — what does this subject also do, also feel, also embody that contradicts the anchor trait? If you can't find the contradiction in your draft, you've flattened. The contradiction is in the subject. Your job is to surface it.
Third: What's the worst thing this subject has done? If the portrait is of someone you like (a hero of the project, a sympathetic witness), the question gets uncomfortable. Have you suppressed the worst thing? If you have, your portrayal isn't honoring them — it's valorizing them. Put the worst thing in. Not as gotcha, not as undermining the hero, but as the texture of dignity.
Conversely: if the portrait is of someone you dislike (a villain, an antagonist), what is the unexpectedly good thing they did? The thing that, when you found it, complicated your relationship to your own portrayal? If you can't find the good thing, you haven't done the work. The good thing is somewhere in their life. Your portrait isn't done until you've found it and let it stand alongside the bad.
You do this for every named subject. The portraits get harder, more uncomfortable, more real. The book gets better.
You'll know the portrait has flattened when readers describe your subjects in a single sentence after closing the book. "That was the chapter about the cruel sheriff." "That was the saint who lived under the bridge." The single-sentence summary is the diagnostic — the reader has caught only the anchor and missed the multitude. Sometimes this is the right artistic choice (short profiles, character glimpses), but for sustained portrayal of major subjects it's the failure mode. The reader's takeaway should resist single-sentence summary.
You'll know it's working when readers describe your subjects as complicated. "That sheriff — I don't know what to think about him." "Tommy — he was so much more than I expected him to be." The complication is the work. The complication is what makes the portrayal honor the subject. The complication is also what makes the book hard to forget.
Hari's claim has plenty of company. Orlean's portrait methods. Tracy Kidder's character work. Patrick Radden Keefe's complex sympathies. Jung on the integration of opposites within a single self. Tucker Max's same insistence on contradictory truthful portrayal. Five writers from five different rooms keep arriving at the same move because the move is what people actually are.
The open tension: short-form journalism (5,000-word features, op-eds) can't always afford the complex portrayal at full depth. The constraint produces a structural difficulty — short-form has to anchor with single traits to be readable in the word count, but the single-trait anchor is the failure mode Hari warns against. The likely resolution is that short-form pieces should flag their own simplification — admit to the reader that the portrait is partial — rather than implicitly claim completeness. Hari's longform books have room for the complexity. Short-form should claim less.
Hari and Greene are mutually corrective. Greene's Laws of Human Nature tends toward type-classification — narcissist, envious, gender-rigid, etc. The taxonomy gives the reader operational handles for recognizing dangerous patterns in other people. Hari's principle pushes back: the type-classification, taken too literally, produces the demonization Hari warns against. The corrective Hari offers Greene is type as one face of a multitude, not the whole face. The corrective Greene offers Hari is some patterns are dangerous enough to need operational handles even at the cost of some flattening — the cost of recognizing a narcissist too late may be greater than the cost of flattening the portrayal in your head. The vault should hold both correctives. They're appropriate at different stages of engagement: Greene's typing is useful at first encounter when you need to protect yourself; Hari's complexity is required for the deeper portrayal once protection isn't the primary concern.
Hari and Karlsson converge on the suspicion of essence. Karlsson treats writing as discovery — the writer doesn't know in advance what they're going to find, including about themselves. Hari treats subjects as not-yet-knowable — the writer doesn't know in advance who they are, including the most familiar subjects. Both writers reject the I have already understood you/myself posture as the entry to flattened work. The convergence reveals that honest portrayal requires sustained uncertainty about the subject, whether the subject is the writer (Karlsson) or the writer's interviewees (Hari).
The multitudes principle shows up in two other domains worth naming.
Psychology: Integration of the Multitudes: Jung / Internal Family Systems — Jungian and Internal Family Systems frameworks treat the individual as a cluster of part-selves that need integration, not as a unified essence to be discovered. The clinical insight is what Hari's craft principle says from outside. Single-essence portrayal of the self flattens the interior as much as it flattens the third-person portrait. The principle is symmetric across self-relation and other-relation. The writer who portrays others as multitudes — if they apply the principle inward — finds themselves to be multitudes too. This often is what produces the later-career shift toward more compassionate self-account that you see in mature memoirists.
Behavioral Mechanics: Avoiding Fundamental Attribution Error — Fundamental attribution error is the documented bias of attributing others' behavior to character while attributing your own to circumstance. Elite negotiators, investigators, and strategists deliberately counter the bias by holding their adversaries as situation-responding rather than essence-driven. Hari's craft discipline and the operator's strategic discipline are the same move. The writer who runs Hari's portrayal-discipline becomes a better strategic thinker almost as a side effect, because they've internalized the situation-over-essence read of other agents that the literature shows produces better predictions.
The Sharpest Implication If Hari is right, the contemporary political ecosystem is structurally producing demonization-or-valorization portrayals of every public figure on every side, and the producer-incentives in the ecosystem reward flattening over complexity. The result is a public unable to think clearly about any of the actors in its own political life — they have only flattened images, and the flattened images can't support real understanding. The corollary: political dysfunction is partly a flattening-of-portrayal dysfunction. The journalism that would help — the complex portrayal of figures across the political spectrum — would also be the journalism that underperforms commercially in the current incentive structure. The structural problem is not that complex portrayals don't exist. It's that they're outcompeted by flattened ones. Restoring the public's capacity for political thought requires changing the incentives that select for flattening, which is not a writer-level intervention.
Generative Questions