I never cease to be amazed by Carnegie’s uncanny understanding of human nature. Clear evidence of this is to be found in the very first chapter – “If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive” - where he explores the counterproductive logic of harsh criticism.
To drive this point home, he uses a number of well-known cases, at least to the average 1950s contemporary, when the book was written, of widely condemned behaviour by a number of people. This includes a notorious and murderous bandit called “Two Gun” Crowley who would “kill at the drop of a feather”, the infamous gang leader of yore Al Capone and a shamelessly corrupt politician Elk Hill, among others.
What is astounding to me is not that there are people who do horrible things out there like Crowley, Elk Fall, Al Capone and, I’m sure, many of our own heartfelt examples, but that their misdemeanours are obvious to everyone else but themselves!
Carnegie quotes Warden Lawes of the Sing Sing prison who observes:
“Few of the criminals in Sing Sing regard themselves as bad men. They are just as human as you and I. So they rationalize, they explain. They can’t tell you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the trigger finger. Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning, fallacious or logical, to justify their anti-social acts even to themselves, consequently stoutly maintaining that they should never have been imprisoned at all”
What sociopaths! We appropriately bewail. Yet scripture seems to make the shocking suggestion that we are all cut from the same cloth.
As Jeremiah rhetorically inquires, "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?"[i] And that seems to exclude none of those who possess one.
Clearly the prime victim of the heart's deceitfulness is ironically ourselves. Deceivers are usually the first to be deceived by their deceptions. It was George Costanza, one of Seinfeld’s inimitable characters, who once let us in on the deep secrets of the dark art of lying captured in this absurd yet revealing statement: “It’s not a lie if you believe it“.
So it seems, from Carnegie's examples and some very high profile contemporary examples of our own times, the heinousness of the faults has no ameliorating bearing on the powers of the heart to deceive. Instead, to the contrary, the greater or more obvious the sins, the greater the summoned powers of deception.
This highlights the disturbing reality that our earthly sojourn is endlessly staged before the ubiquitous spectre of self-deception. Meaning that many of us are staggering obliviously towards the abyss, which is where self-deception leads. And the ominous thing about it is that its host is usually the last to know about it.
Carnegie's recommended and counterintuitive response is where his genius resides. Instead of bludgeoning the errant into their senses by criticizing, complaining, threatening and condemning, as we are inclined to do despite the pitiful evidence of success we can show for that approach, he advises pausing and considering not merely the futility of that course of action but its far-reaching potential destructiveness.
He argues: "if you want to stir up a resentment tomorrow that may rankle across decades and endure until death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism - no matter how certain we are that it is justified".
There is a cautionary here for both the fault-finder and the faulted one, roles that we constantly play interchangeably, most of the time simultaneously. Precisely as we are usually in no greater danger of blindness to our own faults than when we are preoccupied with those of others.
Perhaps this is why the Lord Jesus warned:
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?
Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.[ii]
It seems the critic must surrender or at least blunt his weapons whilst the faulted ones, that is all of us, must contemplate the difficult truth that we are potentially walking about with damning faults that are obvious to everyone else but ourselves.
[i] Jeremiah 17:9
[ii] Matthew 7:3-5
