Nietzsche said that you could tell...
Much about a man's character by how much truth he could tolerate,
which is very interesting.
You know, there's an idea in the great Western tradition that...
The truth is the way and the path of life and that no
one comes to the Father except through the truth.
And I believe that to be the case,
because I don't think that you can manifest who you are without the truth.
And so I think it's literally and metaphorically true that the pathway
to who you could be if you were completely who you were is through the truth.
And so the truth does set you free,
but the problem is that it destroys
everything that isn't worthy in you as it sets you free.
And that's a process of burning.
And it's painful, because you cling to what you shouldn't be,
partly out of pride and partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness.
And so then you encounter something true, and you all know this.
You all know this perfectly well, because when was the last time that you
learned something important that wasn't a blow, of some sort?
It's often you look back at your life
and you think, "Oh, God, I really learned something there.
I wouldn't want to do that again, but it really changed my life."
I mean, sometimes it can really destroy you, you know?
An encounter with the truth, and you never really recover.
But now and then something comes along
and straightens you out, and a lot of you has to go.
A lot of you has to burn away.
And I suppose in some sense, the idea is that everything about you
that isn't worthy...
Is to be put into the flames.
I learned when I was a kid, about 25 or so, little older than a kid,
that almost everything that I said was one form of lie or another.
And I wasn't any worse,
I would say, than the people that I was associating with or any better.
And the lies were manifold.
They were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning the argument.
That might be one.
Attempts to indicate
my intellectual prowess when there were competitions of that sort,
maybe just the sheer pleasure of engaging in an intellectual argument and winning,
my inability to distinguish between ideas that I had read and incorporated because I
had read but hadn't realized that I hadn't yet earned the right to use all of that.
And I had this experience that lasted
a long time, but I would say it's really never gone away.
And I think this was the awakening of my conscience.
And I didn't realize this until much later when I was reading Socrates Apology.
This voice, for lack of a better word, made itself manifest inside me.
And it said every time I said something
that wasn't true, and that's usually what it said:
"That's not true. You don't believe that."
Or there was a sensation that was associated with it.
I don't think this is that uncommon.
I asked my psychology classes for many
years in a row if they had an experience, this experience, that they had a voice
in their head, let's say, a metaphor or a feeling
that communicated to them when they were about to do something wrong.
And it was universally the case
that people agreed with one of those statements or another.
And the other thing I would ask is, well, do you always listen to it?
And of course, the answer to that was definitely no.
I learned that so much of what I was doing was false.
And I think I learned this...
There was a reason that this came to me so clearly.
I was trying to understand why people did terrible things,
and I was really concentrating on the terrible, terrible things that people do.
And I was interested in Auschwitz, for example, and not as a political
phenomenon, but as a psychological phenomenon.
I was curious about how you could be an Auschwitz guard.
Many people did many terrible things during the 20th century.
And the idea that I was somehow better than them or that I should assume
a priority, that I was better than them, and that I wouldn't have made the same
choices or worse had I been in the same situation,
was a very-very-very dangerous supposition,
and, in fact, a sufficiently dangerous supposition
to bring about the very danger that I assumed was worth avoiding.
I had this idea, you know, that what had happened,
especially in Nazi Germany, but also in the Soviet Union, shouldn't happen again.
That what we needed to do because of what happened in the 20th century,
especially because we also managed to create hydrogen bombs
and that we had become so technologically
powerful that there wasn't time for that anymore.
The time for that was over,
and that we really needed to understand why it happened and that perhaps we could
go deep enough in that understanding so that you could...
Stop it.
Because if you understand the problem, maybe you can solve it.
And at least in part,
I came to believe that the problem was, as Solzhenitsyn said,
that the problem is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart.
And I was reading Jung at the same time,
and he believed that the human soul was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell,
and believed also that in the full investigation
of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche,
was that it was bottomless, essentially, that it was like an experience of hell.
And that also struck me as true.
The way to stop
those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort
of person who would do it, who would even start to do it.
For me, it was a matter of understanding
that if we want this sort of thing to not happen anymore, then we have to start
to become the sort of people who wouldn't do it, which seems rather self evident,
all things considered, unless you believe that we're the pawns
of social forces, for example, like the Marxists do.
And I don't believe that because we're also the creator of social forces
and we're also capable of standing up to social forces because I would say
the individual is more powerful than the social force, all things considered.
Interestingly enough, that the way to stop such things
from happening, the way to remember properly is
to understand that you could do it.
That you could do those terrible things
because the people who did them were like you.
And that the way out of that is to stop being like that.
And the way you stop being like that is,
well, at least in part by stop... By ceasing to tell yourself lies that you
don't believe in and that you know you shouldn't act out.
And that's made a huge difference in my life, for better or for worse.
I mean, it was very uncanny experience, I would say,
because it's very discombobulating to...
Experience yourself as
fragmented enough so that much of what you do and say is actually false.
It's a lot of work to clean that up.
A lot.
The consequences are, in principle worthwhile.
Understanding that was part of what drove me towards
clinical psychology, saying away from political science and law
and from politics in general, because I started to believe that...
And I think this is the great Western idea,
which people were quite irritated about,
by the way, on Q and A last night as well, that: the proper route forward
for the redemption of the individual and for mankind as a whole is
as a consequence of the redemption of each individual.
And I truly believe that.
And I believe that that occurs as a consequence of adherence to the truth
and courage in the face of being.
That's rule 1, right? Stand up straight with your shoulders back:
is to take on the onslaught and to enter the contentious ring
and to do more than your best,
because your best isn't enough, because your best isn't as good as you could be.
You have to push yourself past that.
And that's, as far as I can tell, where you find what you need in life,
you find the meaning that sustains you in life, and you find the patterns
of action that redeem the world both at the same time.
Life is a very difficult business.
It's fatal and it's full of suffering and it's full of betrayal and malevolence.
There's nothing about it that's trivial.
It's all profound.
And in order to find your way through, all of that,
that capacity for hellish experience, let's say,
you need to develop a relationship with something that's profound,
and you can! You have that capacity.
And what could be more profound than the truth?
And what would you rather have on your side?
And you might say, well, that's obvious.
And of course everyone should do that.
And then you need to know why you don't.
And the answer is, well, the burns are still healing.
It's like, well, there's no shortage of deadwood to burn off
and there's no shortage of pain when the deadwood burns off.
And that's what makes people afraid of the truth.
Maybe that's why Moses encountered God in a burning Bush.
Who the hell knows?
But there's something about that idea that seems to me to be the case and so...
What's the decision that you make?
You decide to believe, you know? It's a risk.
An existential risk.
It's an act of faith.
You believe that the truth can set you free.
You believe that people have an intrinsic divinity about their soul.
You decide that you're going to live in that manner and that you're going
to let everything about yourself that isn't...
Worthy of that goal...
Die.
And that might be almost everything that you are.
And that's a terrible thing to contemplate.
The only thing that's worse, I would say, is...
The alternative.
Because the alternative is
the sorts of hells that we managed to produce around us and that we produced
with particular expertise during the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
And it would be a good thing if we decided
collectively and individually not to go back there again.