Recently a close friend of mine told me that he has been reading the famed Russian novel Crime and Punishment, which made me think about another work by the same author Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brother’s Karamazov. In fact, I started thinking about it so much so that I downloaded the audio book and have been listening to it the last couple days.
As Dostoevsky’s final masterpiece in a series of Russian literary classics, The Brother’s Karamazov may be his most comprehensive and personal work that embodies the whole of his lived experiences and his opinion/perspective at the end of his time on this earth. Dostoevsky had lived a long and eventful life that included losing his mother at 16, the murder of his father at 18, military service, incarceration, exile, international travel, poverty, etc. It was this work, which was published in installments in a publication, that placed the final punctuation on a difficult life well lived. Dostoevsky passed away four months after the publication of the final installment.
Though there are many gems embedded in this lengthy narrative, there is one that stood out to me. In the second chapter of Part 1- Book 2, there is an exchange between the morally loose, oft drunk patriarch of the Karamazov clan, Fyodor Pavlovich and a respected church elder and spiritual leader, Father Zosima. In this interaction Zosima observes and gently points out that Fyodor’s vile way of life is rooted in shame, to which the man in question agrees, claiming the elder’s assessment is quite accurate. When Fyodor half-heartedly asks how he can atone for his sins, Zosima imparts timeless wisdom that could benefit even the most civilized human of the modern era.
At first Zosima gives the usual religious prescription, “[don’t give way to drunkeness, sensual lust, and the love of money],” but he concludes with an insightful piece of advice that reads as a full flung analysis of what theologians often label, the human condition.
Above all don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love, he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures and sinks to beastiality and vices. All from continual lying to other men and to himself. A man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it’s very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? Man may know that no one has insulted him, but he has invented the insult for himself; has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque… he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense and will revel in his resentment, and feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.
Whew, what a mouthful. So let’s unpack this powerful insight. At the most basic level Zosima is advising that one should not live out of a place of shame. Why? Because feeling ashamed makes us lie to ourselves. Man lies to convince himself that he is not part of the problem, is not in the wrong, and doesn’t deserve to feel ashamed for actions/words performed. Conversely, man also lies to himself when he falsely believes and attributes to himself faults and missteps causing him to take on unwarranted shame. Regardless of warranted or not, our human response to shame is often deceit of/to self.
When we lie to ourselves, we cloud our discernment and judgment of what is true and what is false. Even apart from the self and the ego, lies, in their very essence are meant to veil the distinction between true and false.
The man who lacks discernment of truth and lies loses respect for himself and a respect for others. This statement is a little more obscure, yet sage in content nonetheless. When we can’t tell what is factual, true, and real in comparison to what is fabricated, false, and fake, we approach and view the world with an underlying caution. When we are lied to and deceived by others, institutions, and informational sources multiple times, we tend to adopt a mindset and attitude of doubt as our permanent lens by which we see the world.
So, why does this lead to a loss of respect? Respect can be equated to trust. We respect people and things that we hold in high esteem, and that which is highly esteemed is, we deem, worthy of our trust; that is to be trustworthy. This, perhaps, explains why serial conspiracy theorists and conspiracy believers exist. After being dealt the pang of the unveiling of former deceptions one too many times, it is not unreasonable that a person would start to accept the rhetoric of “everything is a lie; nothing/none can be trusted; you can never be sure.” The revelation of lies ultimately displaces that which we looked up to from its lofty, romanticized pedestal. Even those things we thought to me normal are found out to be quite deceptively mundane.
Once respect is lost and nothing is trustworthy; once the romantic images are torn in two, we find that we no longer have the capacity to truly love. In the words of Zosima, “having no respect, [we] cease to love.” What does respect have anything to do with love you ask? Everything.
Love, which is adoration and admiration to the point of desire, requires respect of- even a divine fear of- the beloved. Infatuation and lust, both of which share the carnal and emotional aspects of love, are differentiated from true love by the lack of respect. Respect requires a level of selflessness, that is to say the respect of another is so detached from one’s own motives that respect of someone is a neutral label of an external entity that is not me/I. Man cannot truly love something or someone that he has no regard (respect) for; he cannot love that which he does not hold in high esteem. Love is reserved for people and things that are valuable and worthy of respect.
When we are unable to love, or put in another way, have nothing trustworthy and respectable enough to love, we have nothing to commit to nor to work for. It could be argued that the essence of man’s purpose and meaning is derived from his associations and identifications, both of which are defined by what we have committed to or work for. In the case of Fyodor, like so many of us, shame became the cause of self-deception, which in turn led to the loss of a sense of certainty and truth, ultimately abandoning him to moral relativism. Once the world was understood through this medium, he lost respect for self, others, and existence itself, ripping away his ability to love anything. Without the ability to love nor the existence of anything to love, Fyodor became someone who was committed to nothing. He had nothing to work for; nothing to work toward. He lacked purpose. He lacked meaning. He lacked identity. This unfulfilled hole led him to indulge in vices and further deceit to justify and sedate his miserable existence. An existence without a light at the end of the tunnel, an existence that had nothing to look forward to- nothing to live for.
Participating in vices as a tool of sedation and distraction digs the grave a little deeper, as the conscience accuses us as being guilty, not necessarily of our carnal sins, but of our lack of meaning, which as we discussed to this point stems from a sense of shame. We find ourselves feeling guilt and shame for our actions which were birthed by shame in the beginning.
Though we could explore the last part of Zosima’s quote about offense and the creation of narratives of offense, I’ll let the text speak for itself as this would be another lengthy rabbit hole to venture down. In conclusion I would like to point out that the root of human evils, whether it be deceit, hate (the opposite of love which births violence), or carnal indulgence, is shame. It is the unique pain of feeling shame, the sensation and experience of being exposed, which has so often become the father of evil. It’s the very thing that marked the lives of Adam and Eve when their eyes opened to the reality that they were naked. It’s precisely why the Christian and Jewish traditions name Lucifer, the father of lies. The devil, a being existing only to encourage shame and affirm lies. A being to which much evil is attributed.
So maybe, just maybe, the next time you find yourself over-indulging in either bodily pleasure, hate of others/self, or the depressive ponderance of the meaning of life, it might behoove you to consider- what am I ashamed of?
