On Truth
“Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.”
How many men have you known that said “I am a dishonest man?”
How many men have you known that said “I am a selfish man?”
And yet, how many men have you known that were both of these things?
The truth of life appears to be untruth, and I hate to have come to this conclusion as I am a perma-optimist by nature. I look for the best in every person and every situation—sometimes to the point of delusion—and I want to believe that we really do inhabit le meilleur des mondes possibles. But mostly, I don’t want to view the world through lenses that are wrong anymore. This perma-optimist shit has gotten me hurt too much. I just want to view the world clearly and I want to view people as they really are. I want the truth.
What is the truth?
The truth is that we don’t like the truth.
Go tell someone that, yes, they do look fat in that dress.
Go tell someone that they have a serious drinking or drug problem.
Go tell someone they’re getting married to the wrong person.
You’ll discover what Pascal wrote: “To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them disliked.”
People choose to go through life disillusioned, blind to the vanity and arrogance and selfishness that is core to who we are as human beings. How many people who use Machiavellian as a pejorative have actually read Machiavelli? Both the Discourses and the Prince are nothing but factual descriptions of human nature, example after example of how kingdoms have been ruled and how the history of man has unfolded over thousands of years. Nothing has changed. “For this can be said of men in general,” he wrote, “they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, fearful of danger and covetous of gain.” We don’t like that description. Why? Because it’s true. Anything that shows how we really are versus how we view ourselves is offensive to our delicate sensibilities.
“Why we cry out so much against maxims which lay bare the heart of man, is because we fear that our own heart shall be laid bare.”
Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. Solomon was the first to tell it as it is, followed by Heraclitus. Everything is vanity. Once you realize this, you will be much closer to shredding the web of Maya and welcoming in the light of truth.
Even altruism is nothing but a façade. Start with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, the king of making one say I feel seen, whose maxims reveal that all our faux-altruistic actions are in reality self-serving and driven by the corrosive influence of self-love and egotism. How many buildings would be donated for charity if the giver wasn’t allowed to smear his ugly name on the front door? I spent a year volunteering all around Palm Beach County at a bunch of small, no-name charities and every single one of them was grossly underfunded. I would ask them how the hell that’s possible when they’re in the backyard of the richest zip code in the country (Palm Beach), and their answer was always the same: “Rich people only want to donate to brand names.” Tells you all you need to know. There is no true altruism, folks, just a diaphanous veneer of hypocrisy and selfishness.
The truth about what you see is that it’s all false. Page one, line one of the Maximes: “Our virtues are nothing but vices disguised.” Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human sings the same song, that every single action is driven by ego to varying degrees, and that there is no genuine altruism. Altruism towards family is the simplest and most salient example, because the truth is that our families are nothing but an extension of ourselves, both biologically and psychologically. Start from there and work your way outwards and everything will start to make sense.
“One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves is that most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are.”
I will go first and put myself in the line of fire instead of continuing to name-drop all these practitioners of the human heart, because anyone can write an intelligent-sounding post full of other people’s theories.
I just published a book for charity where 100% of the donations are going to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I have a handful of reasons behind the decision, such as that hopefully the dough could save a life, that no one writes books for charity anymore and I hope to inspire some copycats, that it feels wrong to profit off a financial crime, and that I lost a friend to suicide at a younger age and feel compelled to toss up a spiritual obelisk, because he really was a good-ass dude and a loyal pal.
But aside from all these reasons, you know what number one is? Karma. I did a lot of ill shit five years ago and I’ve been trying to get myself back to even since then. Who is the prime beneficiary of this karmic boost? ME ME ME ME ME. It’s MY karma, and I want it now! Peek behind the curtain of altruism yet again and you will see the familiar faces of ego, of pride and of vanity, revealing that in essence, all karmaholics are pump-faking whether they want to admit it or not. Trust and believe that they won’t. “We become so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others,” wrote the Duc, “that at last we are disguised to ourselves.”
“Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion…I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.”
You are probably having one of three reactions.
Reaction one is that all of this stuff is true about other people, but it’s not true about you.
Reaction two is a tugging feeling in your brain, a voice saying no, I don’t like how all of this is making me feel.
Reaction three is a warm wave of relief.
Reaction one, you are hopeless, sorry. Good luck out there. Reaction two, I have hope for you. Your subconscious has revealed that you may be receptive to the truth about yourself, and you have the capacity to feel that it is uncomfortable and painful. Reaction three, this is not your first rodeo. You are well on the way to knowledge, wisdom and understanding and you didn’t need this post to tell you that the road is a perpetual gauntlet of incinerated amour-propre.
For now, in the event you ever come across a man who says these words to your face—“I am a dishonest man”—just know that he may be the only honest man you’ve ever met.
Veritas odium parit,
GB
