Tolstoy (cont'd): pride comes before the fall

More from Tolstoy's A Confession-- chapter 2 and his account of life in his 20's...

I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache...Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder - there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man. So I lived for ten years.

During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride...I succeeded in this and was praised. At twenty-six years of age I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers. They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And before I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated all my former strivings to improve - they furnished a theory which justified the dissoluteness of my life.

How often people choose philosophies that justify their prejudices and selfishness...

The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship, consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in this development we - men of thought - have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we - artists and poets - who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind. And lest the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what can I teach? it was explained in this theory that this need not be known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and taught without myself knowing what. For this I was paid money; I had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame, which showed that what I taught was very good.

Another, secular version of televangelists or Pharisees?

This faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be its priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity....

My first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of this religion were not all in accord among themselves....Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors' creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more attentively, and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military life; but they were self- confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite holy or who do not know what holiness is. These people revolted me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith was a fraud.

Boom!

But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me: the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naively imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.

From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice: abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what....It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic asylum; but then I only dimly suspected this, and like all lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.

At the end of the day, it's often not "truth" that convinces, but a desire to want to believe or to submit to truth...