Dostoevsky's simple advice

Above all, don't lie to yourself.

One of the most powerful quotes about the human condition comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky.

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

It’s a deeply insightful observation about what you might call a ‘truth-procedure’. Which is to say, if you want to be a good person, you have to stop lying to yourself. Because the more you lie to yourself, the more you hate yourself, and the more you’ll hate others. Vice versa, the more honest you are with yourself, the more capable of love you become.

What makes this a ‘truth procedure’ in the philosophical sense is that it makes the argument that knowing oneself is a transformative process. Which is to say, it connects the themes of love and truth as universal categories of human transformation.

Dostoevsky argues that being honest with ourselves makes us more capable of loving others. This isn’t merely the cliché that we must first love ourselves before we love others. Against this, Dostoevsky is essentially arguing that the two are intertwined. We can only love others if we love them like ourselves.

Love, in this sense, is also a truth-procedure. When we are in love we become who we were always meant to be. And vice versa, when you are loved exactly for who you are, it means that you can be your most authentic, joyful, truthful self. In that sense it’s similar to foregiveneness. When you forgive someone you’re not just letting them go, you’re also releasing yourself. Likewise with love, when we allow ourselves to love, it means we find ourselves to be deserving of love.

This means that Dostoevsky, as a master observer of the human condition, cautions us against the dangers of lying to ourselves. The more we lie to ourselves, the easier it becomes to lie to others. But the more we work on being honest and truthful with ourselves, the more loving, and giving we can be. We must strive to be honest with ourselves, so that we might learn to love ourselves and others.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself”.

Julian

Thank you for reading my newsletter. If you’d like to support my work please consider becoming a paying subscriber by clicking below. Thank you!