According to Peterson, to “live in truth” is the “meta-goal” that all other life goals should be oriented toward. Such a goal is practical—since lies tend to be destructive and complicated to maintain—but also requires immense courage, since staying in denial is much more comfortable than expressing oneself truthfully and facing the harshness of reality. If we fail to accept the truth, Peterson says, it’s impossible to recognize and fix our own flaws or try to solve the problems we see in the world. If we can’t clearly and honestly articulate our goals, it will be impossible to aim at them, and you can’t hit something without aiming toward it. By the same token, if we avoid interpersonal conflict and honest, precise communication—in other words, if we commit “sins of omission”—our relationships will suffer. Although telling the truth to oneself and others can be scary, Peterson says that dishonesty and denial are even scarier: they guarantee that problems stay vague and looming, growing ever-larger and more intimidating in one’s imagination. In fact, dishonesty (whether actively lying or failing to recognize a lie for what it is) can spiral into a “life-lie” that someone shapes their values around—and undoing such a big, elaborate lie requires a great deal of personal sacrifice.
Furthermore, dishonesty has ramifications far beyond the personal. Drawing on Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Peterson argues that “deceitful, inauthentic individual existence is the precursor to social totalitarianism.” In other words, lies can corrupt not only individuals but human society as a whole, because unchallenged lies are the foundation of murderous ideologies (Nazism, for example). Telling the truth—or, at least, refraining from lying—may be terrifying and painful in the short term, but it’s necessary to grow as an individual, build trust with other people, and maintain a healthy society.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Truth ThemeTracker
Truth Quotes in 12 Rules for Life
Consider the following situation: A client in my practice recounts a long, meandering, emotion-laden account of a difficult period in his or her life. We summarize, back and forth […] It is now a different memory, in many ways—with luck, a better memory […] We have extracted the moral of the story […] That’s the purpose of memory. You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded” […] but so that you are prepared for the future.
To have this kind of conversation, it is necessary to respect the personal experience of your conversational partners. You must assume that they have reached careful, thoughtful, genuine conclusions […] You must meditate, too, instead of strategizing towards victory. If you fail, or refuse, to do so, then you merely and automatically repeat what you already believe, seeking its validation and insisting on its rightness.
Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything […] Communication would require admission of terrible emotions […] But in the background […] the dragon grows. One day it bursts forth, in a form that no one can ignore. […] Every one of the three hundred thousand unrevealed issues, which have been lied about, avoided, rationalized away, hidden like an army of skeletons in some great horrific closet, bursts forth like Noah’s flood, drowning everything.
If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganized and chaotic. […] Ignored reality transforms itself (reverts back) int the great Goddess of Chaos, the great reptilian Monster of the Unknown—the great predatory beast against which mankind has struggled since the dawn of time. […] Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering.
If the consequences of placing skatestoppers on plant-boxes and sculpture bases […] is unhappy adolescent males and brutalist aesthetic disregard of beauty then, perhaps, that was the aim. When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine […] I see the operation of an insidious and profoundly anti-human spirit.
It is almost impossible to over-estimate the nihilistic and destructive nature of this philosophy. It puts the act of categorization itself in doubt. It negates the idea that distinctions might be drawn between things for any reasons other than that of raw power. […] There is sufficient truth to Derrida’s claims to account, in part, for their insidious nature […] [T]he fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role.
