How to Speak Truth Without Fear

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What is your most controversial opinion—something you wouldn’t dare divulge publicly? Perhaps you are from a devout religious community and secretly don’t believe in the most sacred doctrine. Or perhaps you love your activist friends but think their views are based on pious nonsense. Maybe you don’t actually support the troops. Or you doubt that climate change is such a big problem.

As a social scientist, I like to ask people about their most unspeakable view. I am genuinely unvexed by others’ opinions, including those that are orthogonal to my own. And I am really interested in what people keep bottled up. What I have found over the years is that nearly everyone has beliefs they feel they cannot share. Sometimes this is a way to survive under an authoritarian system (where you can’t say what you believe) or a totalitarian one (where you must say something you don’t believe). Such systems can be de jure, as is the case with tyrannical political regimes, or de facto, as with college campuses where dissent from political orthodoxy is liable to incur substantial punishment.

Even under systems that are truly free, which at least nominally permit full and frank expression, you may still be reluctant to divulge certain secretly held beliefs for fear of being ostracized by those you care about. Such shunning is, for normal people, excruciatingly painful. This fear does not mean you are weak or a fraud. Good evolutionary reasons account for your harboring this caution. But if you feel a need to come clean—to say what you really think—you don’t have to be bound by that fear. Understanding how ostracism works, and how you can manage it, will set you free.

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For your ancestors, conformity meant survival. When humans clung to one another against the elements, predators, and warlike rival tribes, to go against the group was to risk being cast out and dying alone in the wilderness. We’ve come a long way since those primitive days, of course, and you know logically that you won’t literally be devoured by wild beasts, be clubbed by another clan, or freeze to death for openly disagreeing with a DEI statement or refusing to go to church. But your limbic brain has not caught up with this reality; it is still terrified of social rejection. Indeed, you have a piece of neurological hardware on board called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is dedicated to detecting rejection and making it acutely painful.

Ostracism threatens at least four psychological needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaning. If you are rejected by your friends or family, you lose the identity of belonging to a particular group and the meaning this brings to your life; you feel diminished by disapproval; and you lose control of your social situation. For example, I have talked with scientists who have spoken out against recent orthodoxies in the academy. They told me how they were attacked by opponents, isolated and undefended by their institutions, and shunned by valued colleagues.

Disagreements among scholars are normal: sticks and stones, right? Think again: These academics disclosed to me the real harms that had ensued—how they fell into a depression, in some cases for the first time in their life, and even contemplated suicide.

Some people truly don’t care about ostracism, of course. But before you envy them, note that psychologists believe such seeming immunity may actually be evidence of a pathology called antisocial personality disorder. Neuroscientists have found evidence that people with this disorder have reduced activity in certain parts of the brain, including our friend the anterior cingulate cortex. To envy someone who doesn’t care about rejection might be like envying someone with defective nerve endings who can’t feel anything when they touch a hot stove.

None of this means you are doomed to a life of either silent moral compromise or terrifying isolation. Some people without compromised limbic systems are able to stand up for their beliefs even in the face of group disapproval. They possess a special virtue: moral courage.

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Moral courage, which involves acting in accord with one’s convictions despite a natural fear of retaliation or punishment, is not easy to muster. “It is curious,” Mark Twain wrote, “that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.” Fortunately, moral courage isn’t just a virtue; it is also a skill that can be developed. Here are four steps to help you do so:

1. Make the threat real.
Fear of ostracism is difficult to deal with because it is a form of worry—a focus on an uncertain but probably negative event. Research shows that our worries tend to be hazy because our brains tend not to process the most likely real outcomes: So we broadly imagine ostracism as really bad and something to be avoided. But when we make our fears specific, we can prepare ourselves and devise defenses. To help you do that, aim to answer the following questions as precisely as possible:

2. Don’t go in hot.
A lot of the time, people get in trouble for their opinions because they bottle them up and then finally explode with the truth at an inopportune moment or in a way that is especially disadvantageous. For example, if you don’t like how your sister-in-law treats your brother but have held it in, you might find yourself yelling about it in a hostile, unplanned way at the Thanksgiving table. Learn how to manage the best time and manner to share your concern by answering these questions:

3. Practice, practice, practice.
An extraordinary facet of human intelligence is our ability to practice future scenarios we have never experienced in order to eliminate errors we have never made. Early in my professorial career, I delivered my economics lectures twice before ever getting in front of the class. I would imagine students getting confused about a hard point of theory, so I’d find different ways to explain it without getting flustered. Similarly, you can practice different ways of saying your hard truths, envision the reaction of the people concerned, and make adjustments. When you confess your contrary belief publicly, make it the tenth time you have heard yourself say the words.

4. Tell it slant and with love.
As you practice telling the truth in different ways, consider the advice that Emily Dickinson gave in her poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In other words, find a way to divulge your belief subtly—indirectly or bit by bit. “The Truth must dazzle gradually,” she advises, “or every man be blind.” Maybe this involves standing up for someone else who holds a controversial view without stating it as your own or suggesting that an issue can be seen in more than one way. Perhaps you can own your view over a period of time rather than dramatically, all at once—like soaking and gently working at a Band-Aid, rather than ripping it right off. Above all, remember the admonition of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, to speak “the truth in love,” not with hate.

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Perhaps after reading all this, you are wondering whether saying what you really think is worth the trouble. That is something you must decide for yourself. Moral courage does not come without risks, and the path of least resistance in our world may be to just swallow your views—or change them to agree with the masses.

But you may feel that conformity comes at a price too. Consider Polonius’s famous words of advice to Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” That describes a peace you can gain only through personal integrity, a peace that requires honesty with yourself and others. It is not the easy path. But that’s the point.