And now the picture was shattering, in a hotel ballroom, in real time, and I did not have to say a single cruel word to make it happen.

I only had to stand there, and let him see.

There is an irony at the center of my whole career that I did not appreciate until that night in the ballroom, watching Marcus’s face, and it is this: that his contempt for what I did was the very thing that made what I did so powerful.

Marcus mocked compliance work because he could not see its power, and he could not see its power precisely because it does not announce itself, because it is quiet and procedural and dull, because it happens in documents rather than in dramatic scenes.

And that invisibility, which he read as insignificance, is in fact the source of the entire discipline’s strength.