Would you be glad or ashamed if others could read your thoughts?

By David McElroy · April 20, 2021

No one will have any secret
No one will tell any lie
Things that we’ve done in hiding
Are gonna reach to the highest sky
— Annie Herring, “No One Will Have a Secret”

A friend of mine almost died Sunday. He was just finishing work when he knew something wasn’t right. He drove to an emergency room, where he passed out as he had a heart attack.

Doctors told him later that he was clinically dead for at least two minutes — and the work to revive him went on for nine minutes before it was clear he would live. If he had been anywhere other than a hospital, he would have died.

My friend’s experience reminded me of some study I’ve been doing lately about people who go through “near-death experiences.” One of the common features I’ve heard from the people who describe such experiences is of being in a place where everybody knows what they have ever done or thought or said.

In many of these stories, the subjects say that the people to whom they had lied or hidden things in life were completely aware of everything. There were no secrets — and they found themselves experiencing the pain they caused for other people.

In the weeks since I first encountered these stories — some in books and some on YouTube videos — I’ve found myself wondering uncomfortably how I would feel if this is really true.

I’ve realized that I would be ashamed if you knew many of my secret thoughts.

I’m not proud of this, of course. It makes me question whether I’m really what I think I am. I like to see myself as a good and decent person who wouldn’t do things to harm others. (That’s my egotistical need to justify myself, naturally.)

But how good is a person who is proud of how he acts for other people to see but knows he would be ashamed if they knew what he thought in secret?

I often feel as though there are a dozen or a hundred different people living inside me. I don’t mean in the sense of having multiple personality disorder, of course. I just mean there are competing forces and desires within me — each seeming to have a will of its own — and those forces battle to become the supreme “executive” for the rest.

I know who I think I am. Although I’ve changed radically over the years — as I’ve learned more about myself and the world around me — I have a firm sense of what I stand for and what kind of person I want to project to the world. But other forces inside seem to have different agendas.

I want to love everybody. I want to be kind and understanding of others. I want to have patience and overlook things which I resent in others. But no matter how much I determine that this is who I want to be — that this is who I’m going to be — those other parts of me come out at times.

I get angry with other drivers in traffic. (I’ve actually found myself getting angry at people for doing things I probably would have done in their positions.) I get angry with other people who don’t see the world the way I see it. They seem like idiots to me, even in cases in which I might have once agreed with them about those very things years ago.

More than anything, I get angry and defensive and hostile toward those who have hurt me. Or who might hurt me. Or who I fear might want to hurt me.

The parts of me which have been hurt in the past are eager to notice every little thing someone might do or say to make me suspect he’s going to hurt me. If I just suspect bad motives or the possibility of actions or words which might hurt me, there’s a part inside that’s ready to lash out like a caged animal.

On the outside, I’ve learned to hide those things. I know how to act like a kind and gentle and decent person — almost all the time. But I can’t seem to stop the thoughts which would shame me if you knew about them.

I sometimes find myself spontaneously hatching a plan which would hurt someone who has hurt me. I’m not going to carry the plan out, but some part of me wants to do it. I think about how I could do this or that little thing — secretly, so nobody would ever suspect my involvement — and it would hurt someone who’s hurt me.

For the most part, I just accept such fleeting thoughts as a part of being human. But as I’ve been thinking lately about this notion of everybody — including God — knowing every thought or feeling I’ve ever had, I realize how ashamed I would be of myself if you knew these dark thoughts.

I have an idealized vision of what it’s possible for a human life to be. I do realize that my standard of perfection — for myself and sometimes others — is ridiculously high. I don’t really see any evidence that I’ll ever be half as good a person as I want to be. I don’t see how anybody else’s heart and mind can be as pure as I’d like it to be.

But in moments such as these — when I think about what it would be like to have others know my thoughts — I feel as though I have to find a way to do better than this.

I want to be completely consistent between what I present on the outside and what you never see on my inside. I know that isn’t possible. Not really.

But when dark thoughts go through my mind — and a part of me wants to hurt someone who’s hurt me — I know I have to do better. I’ll never be perfect in this life, but I have to walk a little closer every day to becoming the man that I know I ought to be.

The hardest battle we fight in life isn’t with other people. It’s with the untamed fears and dark passions inside which would destroy us if we allowed ourselves to follow the way of this world.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts