2024: Your Relationship with Truth

You say you want a resolution

Last week I read an essay by Rob Henderson called The Logic of Envy.

It's one of the darkest things I've ever read. Henderson’s (one of my favorite writers) piece is a review of a book called Sadly, Porn by Edward Teach, and a discussion of its ideas. The book is apparently an incredibly dark, borderline-psychopathic read. And yet the essay and the book excerpts were also very moving, very enlightening, very wise in unexpected ways.

Sometimes there is wisdom in dark things. In fact there often is, if you can stomach it.

The essay is truthful in a way that we as a 21st-century global culture run away from. Because it's too insensitive and hurts people's sense of civilization; it makes man (and woman) look like a wild animal with unreasonable, harmful urges.

I just turned 34 years old. Something I've grown to appreciate more as I've gotten older is that the most important truths in your life are the ones that are hardest to talk about. And I don't mean telling your wife that she looks bad in that dress or that your husband smells like sautéed onions after he mows the lawn, or that your coworker’s painting is hideous. Those are incredibly easy truths to speak, and even those we run away from.

The kind of truth I'm talking about is much harder to speak or hear. It's way deep down. It's the parts of us that are broken, the parts of us that seem warped.

But most of all, it's the parts of us that work fully as intended and we just don't want to face them. Or, in some cases, we have simply been coached out of facing them.

Freud wrote that boys are sexually attracted to their mothers, and girls to their fathers. And that our adult lives are basically toxic replies to the bad things that happened to us in childhood, over and over. That our adult lives are cycles of pain, abuse, defensiveness, and transference. Freud wrote things that were extremely controversial.

Even if the things Freud said turned out to be scientifically untrue, they were still worth saying. Because he pushed human thinking forward. He made human thinking more honest.

Jung wrote that inside you are shadows so powerful that they'll utterly destroy you. You didn't do anything to deserve them, they're just there.

Niccolò Machiavelli is another controversial figure; some even call him a teacher of evil. He has one of the three Dark Triad personality traits named after him. But even Machiavelli had some extremely wise insights about how human nature actually works.

My favorite things to read are dark and controversial. Because that’s the kind of knowledge that actually matters. When it comes to human life in the long run, things like economic numbers and geometry homework don’t matter. What matters is our relationship with hard truths about ourselves.

Henderson, in the above essay, describes how destructive, vengeful envy is such a deep biological force that it drives many of our behaviors without us knowing (and also drives society at large). The book argued that destructive envy drives literally all of our behaviors — Henderson didn’t completely agree with that, and added some nuance as any good writer should. But the point remains that human beings are driven by things that go much deeper than money and social cues. We are driven by things that can make your hair stand on end.

People like to live out rape fantasies in their bedrooms. That’s not even uncommon. Some men think about murdering someone at least a few times a week. Especially someone we’re envious of. Women deliberately undermine other women (for instance by encouraging them to be fat) so they have less competition for slightly older men to mate with. People have attractions to people they shouldn’t have attractions to (extremely often), and daydream about things that would harm both themselves and others.

This is what humans are like.

This is not an accident of our time, this is not a moral disease that can be cured. This is what humans are like.

It’s no accident that Fifty Shades of Grey was the best-selling book of the entire 2010 decade. Human beings crave an honest, real experience. We crave honesty, and there was something honest in those books. We crave the ability to discuss and engage with the darkest, lowest truths of who we are. And not just because it gets us off, although that is important. Also because it’s fascinating to know ourselves. We are worth knowing. We’re interesting creatures.

But we live in a time when feelings and moral posturing have overtaken our moral obligation to seek truth. We live in a time when it’s socially frowned upon to know ourselves.

Academia, our most important truth-seeking institution, has been hollowed out and replaced by an Oedipal mother. She doesn’t want us to be happy, she wants us to be complacent. She wants to fatten us up on sentimentality and then devour us alive.

Our political discourse has become a screechy-voiced quibble over long-settled trivialities. Instead of spending our time talking about what humans are really like and how we can use that knowledge to have healthy relationships and a robust society, we spend our time arguing over excruciatingly stupid questions like "is masculinity a good thing" and "what does it mean for a person to have an unfair advantage."

We spend all of our time addressing questions that just don't matter, debating issues that common sense already solved. And in the process, we overthink ourselves right out of the good relationships we should be having. Instead of figuring out how to get people better food and more water, how to get people to marry earlier and commit harder, we argue over the definitions of political terms.

The Millennials have spent our entire lives being told all of the morally agreeable, politically correct ways to have relationships. We have been told how men and women ought to treat each other, how men and women ought to behave. We have been taught what ought to be important to us.

That’s really not useful information. In fact it’s not information at all, it’s weaponized wishful thinking. What’s useful is how men and women do behave. What they do think and feel, what they do value, and how we can use that knowledge to connect better with each other.

Sometimes when I watch podcasts or interviews I can see a moment where a speaker catches himself before revealing something too controversial about his (or her) thoughts or opinions. Before he admits that he thought something cruel, or felt rage at someone, or had a politically incorrect solution for something.

What for? Start saying those things.

Start saying that some performer looked fat in that outfit on stage, or that you felt a certain crude male instinct, or that you wanted to punch some snot-nosed little kid in the face.

There's nothing wrong with saying these things, because saying them is not doing them. The entire point of language is that it lets us simulate ideas before going out and doing them. Language is a restraint mechanism, and it ought to be used that way.

Saying questionable things out loud usually releases their grip over you. And equally importantly, it shows others that they're allowed to have stupid thoughts too. We’re allowed to have stupid thoughts. That’s not evil. That’s life.

In fact, this is basically what Alcoholics Anonymous is. A big discussion where you let other people say the criminally horrible things that go on in their heads, and then hold their hands and don't judge them. It’s a safe zone for expressing thoughts and temptations that are too real for the real world.

And guess what that level of honesty does? It keeps people sober. It literally saves people’s lives.

What makes a person feel lonely, lonelier than anything else, isn't isolation. It's dishonesty. It’s seeing and touching others and yet feeling completely untouched and unseen. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of hiding from the people who are supposed to know you and care for you.

We've created a culture where everyone is hiding from everyone in plain sight — where everyone feels alone because no one can be honest with anyone. We're too afraid of the social repercussions of being human.

There are three reasons to lie:

• You're uncomfortable with the truth;

• Someone else is uncomfortable with the truth;

• You're trying to manipulate the world into giving you the life you want.

This particular topic doesn't involve the third kind of lying, which leaves us with the first two: we lie about our innermost thoughts because they make ourselves and others uncomfortable.

Our social lives have become our political lives — they're now completely the same thing — and the entire political landscape has become filled with land mines. From the top down, politics and ideology have captured our entire lives and, more than any time in recent history, people are genuinely afraid to have opinions. Or desires, or even relationships. Men are afraid to be men. Women are afraid to want to be housewives. People are afraid to admit what they’re attracted to or what is meaningful to them.

The people who are most bold with their opinions are often the people with the worst ones. Because they're usually not doing any actual thinking — they’re saying what they’ve been trained to say by their professors and political superiors. They’re reciting, not discussing.

But for those of us who think carefully about ourselves, our values, and the consequences of opinions... we are keeping too much to ourselves. We must be able to call a spade a spade. An obese person an obese person, a criminal a criminal, a lunatic a lunatic. We must be able to call things what they literally are. Because they literally are.

If you were to ask a historian, “what’s the best predictor of a nation’s downfall,” the historian would likely say “when they lost their relationship with the truth.”

And in our personal relationships, we should be able to have (and express) thoughts we're scared of. Because that's what being human is like. We think dark things or painful things or vulnerable things, and we discuss them with someone who understands and supports us. And in doing so we learn about ourselves. We learn what to do with our thoughts, our fantasies, our damages. We learn to integrate them, ignore them, seek treatment for them, or share them openly.

This is what relationships are for. Especially in an age when our lives are about information and feelings, instead of about surviving in the wilderness. The most important thing in our lives used to be safety — survival. Now that we’re surviving, the most important thing is the emotional side of relationships. There is nothing more important.

If you don't yet have a New Year's Resolution, be more truthful. Learn to speak the truth more, and learn to adopt and foster truth in other people. Learn to defend it when it’s spoken by someone you think is speaking in good faith. Even if that puts you at risk.

The worst that can happen is that you'll humiliate yourself and suffer terrible consequences and social exile. The worst that can happen is total catastrophe.

But that’s rare.

Most people don’t actually get cancelled. Most people just get comments from people who are themselves hiding — comments they are free to ignore.

The best that can happen is that you could feel awake and seen for the first time in your life. Or you could encourage some other person to be more truthful, and have a larger impact on this bizarre anti-truth age we’re living in.

One of the things I admire most about the late Charlie Munger is that he found a way to be charming and completely honest at the same time. Charlie could simultaneously tell you exactly what he thinks and win your heart. As far as I'm concerned, that is the pinnacle of heroic human behavior.

The internet has changed our relationship with truth because you get more points for being dishonest and stupid.

The hijacking of our social lives by our political lives has done the same thing: given us more points for being stupid.

But these points don't matter. What matters are self-respect and relationships. That’s it. When you’re taking inventory upon your deathbed, those are the points you’ll wish you’d scored more of. Everything else is just a game we play because we didn’t think we had anything better to do.

Go for a real resolution in 2024. Strengthen your relationship with the truth.

And drink more water.

JDR

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.” - Eric Hoffer