In her lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey said, “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”
“Your truth” Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of “your truth” destroys families when a dad suddenly decides “his truth” is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It’s a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person’s truth will go to battle with another person’s truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.
“Your truth” also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. “Live your truth” autonomy is thus as exhausting as it is incoherent. As French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg points out in The Weariness of the Self, the self-creating person turns out to be fragile and “weary of her sovereignty.” Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”
“Your truth” autonomy invariably leads to loneliness. It erroneously suggests we can live unencumbered and uninfluenced by the various structures that surround us (families, churches, cultures, biology, etc.) But it becomes impossible to form community when everyone is their own island, with no necessary reliance upon larger truths or embeddedness within a bigger story.
“Your truth” Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of “your truth” destroys families when a dad suddenly decides “his truth” is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It’s a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person’s truth will go to battle with another person’s truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.
“Your truth” also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. “Live your truth” autonomy is thus as exhausting as it is incoherent. As French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg points out in The Weariness of the Self, the self-creating person turns out to be fragile and “weary of her sovereignty.” Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”
“Your truth” autonomy invariably leads to loneliness. It erroneously suggests we can live unencumbered and uninfluenced by the various structures that surround us (families, churches, cultures, biology, etc.) But it becomes impossible to form community when everyone is their own island, with no necessary reliance upon larger truths or embeddedness within a bigger story.
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021
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