“To offend a strong man, tell him a lie. To offend a weak man, tell him the truth.”
That was Marcus Aurelius, by the way, who managed to govern an empire, write a best-selling journal, and somehow avoid being canceled, which is more than I can say for most of my high school friends with Twitter (X) accounts.
When I first heard that quote, I thought, Well that explains every family dinner since 2015. My uncle Pete, a former Marine who now grows heirloom tomatoes and lifts kettlebells recreationally, will go absolutely ballistic if you try to tell him the government has his best interests at heart. Meanwhile, my cousin Dana once burst into tears because I said soy milk isn’t technically milk. She told me facts like that are “violence,” which felt a little rich coming from someone who once got banned from Etsy for yelling at a customer over macrame quality.
But the more you think about it, the more it rings true. The strong man, someone like Marcus, or my uncle Pete, or that weird guy at the gym who deadlifts and reads Solzhenitsyn between sets, has the capacity for truth. Not just little truths like “Your breath smells like canned tuna” or “Your dog doesn’t actually like wearing that costume.”
I’m talking about the big truths. The uncomfortable ones. The world-isn’t-what-you-think-it-is truths. The maybe-the-news-isn’t-just-the-news truths. And when you try to slip propaganda past him, when you grin and say things like “This injection is safe and effective,” with the same tone you’d use to assure a child that thunder is just God bowling, he gets offended. Not because he’s paranoid. But because he’s paying attention.
The strong man has a kind of inner spine most of us lost in elementary school, around the time we were told that everyone’s a winner and then given a trophy shaped like a narwhal for “most creative lunch.” He doesn’t want comfort. He wants reality. He doesn’t panic at the sight of it. He wants to see the strings on the puppet and the hand behind the curtain and the accountant behind that hand.
The weak man, on the other hand, wants bedtime stories. Give him a placard, a hashtag, a well-produced video with music swelling under vaguely utopian language, and he’ll cling to it like a toddler to a teddy bear. Tell him the food pyramid might be upside down or that the experts have been wrong a few hundred times and he’ll twitch like you’ve unplugged him from the Matrix. He doesn’t want to be unplugged. He wants to believe. In safety. In consensus. In sunscreen that heals emotional trauma.
I met a weak man once at a writing retreat in Vermont. He wore scarves even in July and spoke in hushed tones as if each word might trigger someone into a lawsuit. When I mentioned that the government has, historically speaking, lied more often than a Golden Retriever trying to act like it hasn’t been in the trash, he blinked at me like I’d kicked a plant. “That kind of talk is dangerous,” he said.
I wanted to ask: dangerous to whom? But I knew the answer. Dangerous to him. Because if the truth cracks through the thin membrane of his curated worldview, his entire sense of self might dissolve into a puddle of oat milk and panic.
What’s funny is how each side accuses the other of being brainwashed. The strong man says, “You’ve been programmed.” The weak man says, “You’re a conspiracy theorist.” And they both stare at each other across the digital battlefield of a Facebook comment section, each convinced the other is the lunatic.
But there’s a simple test you can run. Tell each of them something uncomfortable. Tell the strong man the government spies on us. He’ll nod. Tell him the pharmaceutical industry isn’t run by saints and he’ll say, “Obviously.” Tell him war is often just a profitable chess game and he’ll ask you if you’ve read Smedley Butler.
Now try the same with the weak man. Tell him some mandates weren’t really about science. He’ll gasp like you insulted his mother. Suggest the media might have agendas. He’ll Google “how to report domestic extremists.” Say a man can’t get pregnant and you’ll see an eye twitch that belongs in an exorcism movie (Calm down, I fully support trans rights. I’m just making a point).
And yet, I don’t hate the weak man. I get it. The truth is hard. It keeps you up at night. It ruins brunch. Once you admit that certain people lie with smiles on their faces, you have to reconsider everything: your job, your bank, your school, your calendar. You have to question things. And that’s exhausting. It’s so much easier to be told what to do and believe that all dissent is just noise.
Still, I’d rather offend the strong man. He’ll survive. He might grunt or lift something heavy or write a blog post with too many Greek references. But he won’t crumble. He won’t hide behind slogans or tell the teacher. He’ll just nod and say, “Thanks for not lying to me.”
The weak man, meanwhile, will scream that your honesty is hate speech, your facts are misinformation, and your silence is also violence. Which is weird, because he asked for your opinion in the first place.
So yes. To offend a strong man, lie to him. To offend a weak man, tell him the truth. But if you want to offend everyone, just keep talking. Someone’s bound to be fragile enough to shatter.
And someone else will thank you for the hammer.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.