Know Thyself

Inscription from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi borrowed indirectly from a post on the University of Connecticut’s UConn Today

In case it weren’t obvious from the fact that I wrote an entire essay about my struggle to figure out when it was appropriate to not wear a shirt, I tend to overthink things to an obscene degree. But occasionally I devote some of that overthinking energy to subjects that actually matter, like the question of how to be a good person.

One thing that I haven’t spent much time thinking about until recently is the maxim “Know Thyself.”

I’ve long heard of it as a reminder about being true to your own principles, but always dismissed it as being too vague and easily-manipulatable to be useful. At best, it seems to be just a trivial reminder to have integrity and always act according to your best judgment. At worst, it has a solipsistic, Ayn Randian, moral-relativistic connotation to it. “No, I am right. It’s the rest of the world that’s wrong.”

Which is never a good idea, but especially not when we’re in a world of billionaires trying to out-do the robber barons of the previous Gilded Age, casting themselves as messiahs who are exceptional and uniquely capable of solving the world’s problems, the main one being the problem that they don’t have nearly enough money.

I have less than zero interest in considering whether people like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, or Andreessen are genuine believers in their own hype and actually believe they’re working in the world’s best interest. Every second spent thinking about their motivations just feeds into that hype, furthering the idea that they are so exceptional that millions of people need to be thinking about who these white men are and what they really want. Our energy would be better spent thinking about the toxic effects of their actions and how to free ourselves of them and minimize their damage.

So I’m more interested in the question of how “Know thyself” applies to people who still have functioning moral compasses, which aren’t constantly pointing at the pole of “I am Uber-man.” In other words: the vast majority of people on the planet.

It was Michael Schur’s casual overview of moral philosophy, How to Be Perfect, that first gave me a clear understanding of what “Know thyself” really means and how it can be applied. It’s not as simple as “if you truly believe you’re doing the right thing, then you’re doing the right thing.” It’s more of a demand that you constantly interrogate your own beliefs and assumptions, to get at the core of what you absolutely know to be true.

At least, that’s my interpretation. I should make it clear that I’m very ignorant of the history of moral philosophy. For all I know, the slave-owners of ancient Greece really were all-in on the idea that some people were exceptional and uniquely able to determine for themselves what was moral.

But I believe that the most useful aspect of “Know thyself” is how it requires a kind of humility, a willingness to abandon ego instead of doubling down on it. We need to shed the lifetimes’ worth of assumptions, prejudices, anecdotal evidence, victories, defeats, compromises, all of the stuff that we’ve built around ourselves just to be able to function day-to-day in society, and get down to the core of what we really believe. The things that we know to be true, and that we can never be talked out of.

It requires humility because it means we have to accept that none of us are really all that deep. We all (or again, most of us) have a core set of beliefs about what’s right and wrong, and everything is built on top of that. We might like to think that we have rich inner worlds that would require a lifetime of introspection to truly understand, but all of that is between you and your therapist.¹Or the readers of your blog, if you’re more frugal.

The core ideas that drive us really aren’t that complicated. And we know in our gut when we’re in violation of them, even if everything else is telling us it’s fine, or it doesn’t really matter.

And I think that’s extremely relevant now. Because more than at any other point in my lifetime, I feel like there’s constant pressure from every direction to define who I am, what I should believe, what I consider righteous, and what I consider intolerable. Even more than the pressure I felt from the church, and even more than the pressure I felt to stay in the closet, because those could be more easily compartmentalized.

Now, we’re constantly being confronted not just with absolutely repugnant ideas that we feel obliged to speak out against, but ideas that we might agree with on principle but object to the presentation or execution. It’s been established that the internet is a polarizing force, pushing people to have more extreme opinions about things than they would have otherwise. A side effect of that is that we’re constantly being barraged with a kind of “ethical noise,” the accusation that not speaking out about any particular injustice is equivalent to being complicit in it. Or that our indignation over this issue should be instead directed towards that more important issue, because what kind of monster are you, don’t you even care? Must be nice.

It can feel like the ultimate selfishness to shut all of that out, or even to think of it as “noise” in the first place. It can be useful to recognize a few things:

1. There is almost nothing you can do to make yourself immune to criticism; people who want to find fault with you will always be able to.
2. It’s “almost nothing” only because there is one thing you can make yourself immune to criticism: say nothing of any merit or relevance. (And then people will find a way to criticize your refusal to take a stand, assuming they don’t just criticize your appearance).
3. People you don’t know, especially on social media, aren’t responding to you, but the version of you that they’ve constructed. (Which may or may not resemble you, which is where “know thyself” comes in).
4. People who think in terms of power dynamics like to believe that their actions are justified or even righteous, because they’re “punching up.” But they’re working on that perception of who you are and what your position is, which often bears little resemblance to how you see yourself.
5. Online harassment or bullying can’t turn a good person into a bad one, but it can discourage a good person into silence, and make a bad person lean into or even celebrate their worst tendencies.

We’ve seen plenty of examples of celebrities having very prolonged, very public meltdowns and destroying whatever good will they once had. The combination of rich people who can’t take criticism, plus hundreds of people eager to call them out, plus groups of bigots eager to find high-profile people to pull into their cause, is why I can no longer go to parts of Universal parks, or watch The IT Crowd and Father Ted. And again: it’s not that the harassment transformed them into bigots, but that it made them feel justified in giving full voice to their already-existing bigotry.

A mis-application of “know thyself” would be “all these transgender people are being so mean to me, but I know that I’m a good person, so their harassment means that they’re bad people and I’m justified in my colossal assholery.” It’s hard to believe that any functional adult wouldn’t be able to recognize the flaw and lack of self-awareness in that.

But again, I’m really not interested in examining the motivations and inner minds of rich adults who have every opportunity to do the right thing and be helpful people instead of worthless shitbags. I’m more interested in the rest of us.

Simply put: we’ve got the more difficult task of staying true to ourselves while having to live in a world with extremely vocal, worthless shitbags. We have to constantly ask ourselves, why am I doing this? What am I putting into the world? When am I choosing to react, and when am I choosing to show grace? When am I choosing to remain silent? And in particular: if I ever find myself justifying something as “punching up,” am I asking myself why I’m even punching at all?

There’s all kinds of pressure to make sure that we’re not actually being complicit, or diminishing the severity of injustices by not acting or speaking out against them. Marginalized people are not obligated to show grace or to tolerate the intolerable. People are not obligated to be polite or show respect to those who refuse to show them any respect. The idea here isn’t to “accept the things I cannot accept,” to misquote the serenity prayer.

Instead, it’s simply to remain mindful that we don’t lose ourselves, and that we don’t lose sight of the things that we actually value. That we’re not pulled into dogpiles even if they seem to be justified. That we’re not ever finding ourselves saying that the ends justify the means, if the means are repulsive. That we’re always acting on our beliefs, and not on the things we think we’re supposed to believe.

I think it’s difficult because I mess it up frequently. I lose my temper and get pulled into arguments that I know I shouldn’t. I sometimes can’t resist throwing in my opinion on some repulsive idea that other people can respond to more eloquently, meaning I’m actually doing nothing more than spreading around that repulsive idea. I get caught up in the heat of the moment and casually attack someone who’s said or done something offensive, because it feels justified to call it out as offensive.

Most of the time, asking for nuance or grace, trying to de-escalate a situation, or simply ignoring the Discourse, isn’t a case of trying to defend someone who’s said or done something intolerable. It’s not really about them about all. It’s more about the danger of losing ourselves and the things we really value.

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  Or the readers of your blog, if you’re more frugal.