“Be true to yourself” is one of the primary slogans of our culture.

This same culture insists that if a man feels like a woman, he is one, and if a woman loves a woman, that’s all well and good, and if someone wants to murder their unborn child, so be it. In each case, an individual is being consistent with “their truth.”

Christians and conservatives have long disdained and disproved this sort of logic, which makes the individual human the arbiter of reality, thus destroying any reality beyond the individual. One prominent pastor, Kevin DeYoung, even wrote a book entitled, “Do Not Be True to Yourself,” which primarily instructs young people to seek to faithfully follow God instead of their own whims. “We must be giving better counsel to people than simply to find the true self which may not be the self worth following,” DeYoung said in a video for The Gospel Coalition.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, “The Brothers Karamazov,” however, a wise elder named Zosima gives advice that sounds, at least on the surface, similar to our culture’s: Be truthful to yourself. Zosima – and Dostoevsky through his respected character – says that one must not lie to himself. In the words of Zosima:

A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. … [H]e likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility.

Essentially, these are the dangers of not being truthful to oneself.

Being truthful to oneself is rather different from being “true” to oneself, despite the linguistic and surface similarities. Dostoevsky’s advice implies that we ought to align ourselves with a truth and reality larger than ourselves, thus becoming habituated to that standard, while our culture’s advice implies that each individual is and ought to be, as discussed above, their own standard of truth.

Our culture’s advice is shoddy, but Dostoevsky’s is worth heeding.

Dostoevsky holds that self-deception leads to a slippery slope of evil. After self-deception comes disrespect, a lack of love, the growth of bestial vices, a delight in taking offense, and then real hostility.

Is this not descriptive of many in our culture today? A look at social media – at any time, whether after a major public tragedy or during a normal season – reveals that many seem to enjoy taking offense, even at the slightest differences of opinion. There is a popular false virtue in victimhood, in pointing the finger at an offender. What’s more, the internet world has already far exceeded what Dostoevsky calls “the point of real hostility” – the array of exultation and mockery after the assassination of Charlie Kirk provides one example of this.

Why do so many in our culture enjoy taking offense and deploying their hostility against others?

It is ultimately because, according to Dostoevsky, they have turned from the truth they once knew. Many in our culture have, in the words of Paul in his letter to the Romans, “exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”

Both Paul and Dostoevsky imply that those who have strayed from the path of truth did indeed once know it. This contraverts the modern claim that religion is merely a manmade set of rules, arbitrarily dictated and entirely foreign to those who do not share in the religion. Rather, both Paul and Dostoevsky suggest that man naturally knows right from wrong, at least to some extent. Man has an innate sense of truth vs. falsehood such that he can discern what is a lie or not in the things he tells himself or others. As Paul writes a little later in Romans, the moral law, the law of God, is written on the heart of man.

While we know the truth of morality by design, we will be prone, due to our nature, to lie to ourselves until we surrender to the Lord of both Paul and Dostoevsky, the one who called himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”

Perhaps a better admonition than “Be true to yourself” and “Do not be true to yourself” is this: Know the Truth and be truthful to yourself and others as a result.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image Credit: Flickr-Jeremy Brooks, CC BY-NC 2.0