There Can Be No Truth Without Forgiveness

A post-mortem of my latest 'tactical relapse'

"Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information."

Yuri Bezmenov

While on holiday recently I departed from my usual regimen of sobriety. I lolled about in a luxury resort for a few days and drank too much gin and sauvignon blanc, and I indulged my innate hedonist. It was fun, and I would grant, a much needed break away from my day job and afterhours Substack writing. But I knew it could only last for a few days.

Some readers may be familiar with my sobriety story and the ‘tactical relapses’ I allow myself periodically. If not, I explain it in this essay. Without rehashing the whole thesis, I reached a point a few years ago where I was forced to confront an increasingly destructive drinking and drug habit which had been growing steadily worse for over a decade.

I realised I had three options:

1. Do nothing and destroy myself

2. Complete abstinence (the old AA route)

3. Control

A contrarian at heart, I opted for the third option, not only because it afforded me the possibility of continuing to let loose once in a while, but because it presented an intriguing challenge too: Could I succeed where so many others had failed? and where the popular wisdom from all corners goes something like – You have a disease and there’s nothing you can do about it except to never drink again.

That sounded like dogma to me, and I’ve heard the same echoed at the handful of AA meetings I’ve attended in my time.

I don’t like dogma in my politics or my personal life, so I gave option three a go, and by and large it has worked. I live a ‘mostly sober’ life these days, where I was once either drunk or hungover almost 365 days a year, and the lapses I do allow myself have, so far, remained isolated periods of indulgence from which I have been able to extract myself on or around the predetermined date.

One thing I quickly learned about achieving this level of control though was that forgiveness was key.

I have nothing particularly against AA, in fact I would urge anyone who thinks they have a problem with the bottle to make it their first port of call – it’s free and readily available, and it has saved countless people from untold pain and despair. But the problem with AA for me is that it’s such a blunt instrument – ascribing the same monolithic problem to every one of its constituents and offering a simple one-size-fits-all solution for those who work the program.

There is another type of organisation which operates along these lines – a political party. Where the party holds that all adherents have the same set of needs and these can be met by faithfulness to the party platform, AA invites members to put themselves in the Addict box along with all the others and commit to a chaste path forward into broad sunlit uplands.

Don’t get me wrong, forgiveness in the AA context is crucial also, and it is offered repeatedly in much the same way that Jesus is said to offer absolution to the repentant, and this is not the problem. The issue for me is that any solution that requires one to dogmatically declare that they are irretrievably ‘diseased’ amounts to a capitulation of the soul that strikes me as fundamentally demoralising.

We are all sinners, not necessarily in the biblical sense if you don’t want to go there, but we all tend toward self-serving, pleasure seeking, and deceptive behaviours that can be harmful. But that does not mean we cannot change things, sin less, or even just change the manner in which we sin so that it minimises harm to ourselves and others if one wants to get really utilitarian about it.

Let me be the first to say, as I have always maintained, that my life would be better if I simply did not drink, and the day may yet come when I must accept that total abstinence is the only solution for me – indeed, on this most recent foray I encountered slipups that reminded me of the very tight rope I walk.

But to-date I have found, in my periodic struggle back from the edge of madness and into the clean light of sobriety, a profound catharsis that can only come from confronting the very darkest shadows of one’s own soul. Moreover, my continual analysis of my own neurochemistry under these challenging conditions teaches me things about myself that both full-time abstainers and regular drinkers probably miss.

I’m not saying AA adherents don’t confront these same demons, I’m just saying that in my periodic struggles, time and again, I find the power to forgive myself for my frailties, and I find this process has a tremendous bearing on life at large.

Maybe I missed my target sober day by 24 or 48 hours; maybe I said or did something while I was intoxicated that left me loathing myself; maybe I strayed into recreational drug use or started temporarily smoking again; or maybe I just feel like crap because I’m hungover.

Whatever the reason, hauling oneself back onto the straight and narrow after a bender is (or can be for many of us) a monumental triumph of the will, and importantly, one which must always begin with forgiveness.

You forgive yourself for being imperfect and frail… even for being selfish, mean, or lewd. You forgive yourself and you get back to it; “Back to the War” as I have previously termed it.

Now, the point of this piece is not actually whether my method or AA is the right one. It is not even that I find in the dogma of AA a kind of defeatism that can amount to spiritual demoralisation (although I think, in much the same way that voters can become demoralised by the party-political system, AA adherents can become one-dimensional and preachy). It is not even about alcohol in fact.

The point is that the process of forgiving oneself is crucial to the acquisition of true information.

Why is this so? Because truth must first be found in the self. One cannot even begin to recognise truth in the world around them if they have not first confronted the truth about themselves.

And this truth can only be grasped by forgiving oneself for those aspects of the self which are confronting, distasteful, shameful, or terrifying.

If one glimpses the truth about their faults but does not forgive themself, there is only one other option available: Self-justification.

Justification feels an awful lot like forgiveness, but it has the opposite effect. Rather than revealing the truth, it ensconces one deeper in the lie.

Justification and rationalisation are in fact the great imposters presented as forgiveness and ‘self-love’ to the modern consumer via advertising and pop culture. ‘Body positivity’, ‘sex positivity’, the glorification of hedonism, the rejection of traditional family values, and the fetishisation of mental illness, to name only the most prominent, are all mechanisms of self-justification dressed up as forgiveness.

They feel the same when you’re doing them – because they affect the same neurological outcome: the alleviation of anxiety – but they’re very different things. Justification is feeling that you’ve done something wrong but telling yourself you have not. Forgiveness is knowing you’ve done something wrong, sitting with that knowledge, then cutting yourself a break and committing to try and do better next time.

Justification is like amnesty – it’s a get out of jail free card. It asks forgiveness without penitence, like The Atlantic did when it called for a “pandemic amnesty” late last year. Asking to be let of the hook is the action of someone who either knows there can be no forgiveness for what they’ve done, or who is too consumed by hubris to conceive of right and wrong.

Where there is only self-justification, there can be no self-forgiveness, and where there is no forgiveness of the self there can be no revelation of the truth about oneself. One is then stuck in a perpetual state of self-justification or self-loathing, both of which lead to demoralisation.

Demoralisation occurs when a person does not know who they are, what they stand for, or what they believe, and this is precisely the lot of the individual who has failed to grasp fundamental truths about themself.

Thus, I return to Yuri Bezmenov’s quote: "Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information.”

Indeed, the demoralised person cannot assess true information about the world, but they did not reach this state of demoralisation without having first failed to assess true information about themself.

My observations lead me to believe that such people make up the majority of our societies – not bad people, not evil for the most part, but demoralised through a failure to know themselves properly.

Again, I’m not talking about AA members – I merely juxtaposed my sobriety method with theirs to underscore the value I derive from experiencing human frailty in order to continuously confront, evaluate, forgive, and recalibrate.

Nor am I saying that everyone out there has a drug or alcohol problem comparable to mine and that they need to do like I’ve done and get real with themselves. It is in fact the opposite. My relationship with the truth has nothing to do with anyone else’s shortcomings – only my own.

At the risk of overquoting Dr Peterson, it has to begin with cleaning up one’s own room.

I have noticed that it is in fact a feature of the person who has not confronted their own unsavoury truths, that they get particularly hung up on the credibility of those who have.

I had an interesting conversation on the first night of my holiday with someone very close to me who I don’t usually see due to geographical remove in which we discussed all manner of things including my own sobriety. When I was out of the room, he asked Elizabeth “Is JJ really sober most of the time? Or is this just an act?”

What irked me about this was not so much that he asked the question but that it was the second or third time he’d gone behind my back and made this inquiry with my girlfriend.

Now this person himself has a serious drinking problem. He has acknowledged this problem… but he continues to justify it.

What he fails to grasp is that he is asking the wrong question. As far as he’s concerned it’s irrelevant whether or not my sobriety is an act – that is, it’s irrelevant unless he’s looking for a way to justify his own drinking.

What a person engaged in a dedicated pursuit of the truth would say to himself is, “Hmm, it’s interesting to conceive of JJ as sober from what I used to know of him, but whether or not it’s true doesn’t really matter – the question is: do I drink too much and do I need to do something about it?”

I’ve been telling him the truth, but exposure to true information does not matter because a person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information.

This rambling treatise is typical of my introspective post-boozing mind state and has no other purpose than to reemphasise the critical importance of the struggle with oneself – the restless internal fire in which is forged that thing we understand as character, a thing of great power, not itself born of strength, but indeed of our weaknesses and our ability to forgive them, learn, and grow.

My friend’s skepticism matters not to me – like Tony Soprano once said, “I’m not running a fucking popularity contest.” I know what I need to know about myself and those who wish to know these things also (both good and bad) need only look closely, as opposed to seeking confirmation bias from third parties.

Since returning from holiday I got sober again then managed to combat the malaise of hangover and withdrawal, resume my exercise regime, and apply myself in very short order to a complicated work project and have scripted and shot an entire video. And I managed to get this essay written. (What I’ve not done is file my tax return… but I’m sure I’m in good company there).

But importantly, the lessons of this last ride into the danger zone have weighed on me, as they always do, and I’ve spent much time evaluating the viability of my ongoing experiment and positing potential modifications – for let me be clear: this is not about justification. This is more akin to a confession.

I do not claim to be cured; to have ascended beyond reproach. I am just as flawed, or more so, than the average person. While on holiday I walked too close to the edge, felt my grip loosen, drank too much, and made an ass of myself at one point which necessitated a next-day apology to a second friend who I saw on the last night. While I’m pleased to say my apology was readily accepted I soberly admit these facts and I own my misbehaviour in the uneasy knowledge that such slipups call my ‘mostly sober’ approach into serious question. I am not happy with myself and have work to do; adjustments to make, without which I may ironically find myself back at an AA meeting.

But to the extent that it mattered most (the avoidance of violence, injury, and trouble with the law) and not without concern for what could have happened had I slid that little bit further, I controlled myself, and life has now resumed its correct course. But I feel like the second friend I mention above would acknowledge and this fact, whereas the first would search for a reason to be cynical.

He said something else to me on the first night, with regard to a mutual friend whom he felt slighted by for not having been in contact for some time. Another Tony Soprano quote: “He’s dead to me”, he said about this friend of ours.

This struck me as petulant bluster – he’d known the guy since middle school for heaven’s sake... This is the thing about forgiveness – I think until you learn to forgive yourself you have no idea how to treat anyone else. This again comes back to the ability to assess information.

A person who is demoralised is unable to assess true information. Demoralisation occurs when a person does not know who they are. To discover who they are, they must confront difficult truths about themselves. To do this they must be able to forgive themselves.

Only then is the way to greater truth illumined and only when we are well versed in the process of self-forgiveness can we navigate the wrongs that are done to us from without and determine, as we confront each agent of misfortune, what our tolerance level for any given situation is, what can be forgiven and, most importantly, what cannot.