O, That Polonius!

Have you ever came across something where you thought, why didn't they teach us that in school? Well, I have. Just yesterday in fact, as I read an article about the bunk that is, be yourself, as though that's all there is to life. No need to grow, no reason to improve ourselves; that would involve judgment about better or worse, right and wrong, and we can't have that, can we? 

With all the Shakespeare they made us read in high school, one simple little fact did not get shown. And it makes quite a difference in interpretation.

Polonius is a character in Hamlet. He's most widely remembered as the man who advised, 'To thine own self be true'. How often have we heard that (or similar) in today's world? "You've got be true to yourself." Uh-uh. 

Well, here's this: Polonius was a conniving imbecile. Virtually every judgment he makes in Hamlet is wrong. He's also a spy who routinely tries to pull everyone else's strings. The Shakespeare critic William Hazlitt calls him 'an impertinent busybody' only looking out for numero uno. Hamlet refers to Polonius as 'a tedious old fool'. He died while spying on Hamlet, seeking some advantage. Why should we take his advice on anything? Why would we want to?

So remember anytime you think, to mine own self be true, I've got to be true to myself, you're acting on the encouragement a pompous windbag who cares only for himself. Is that really how you want to be seen?

To thine own self be not true

I've come to discover that I don't much like the phrase, be true to yourself. I find it ultimately, as I find so much else, conditional. Left unexamined, it begs a lot of questions, the most important of which is, what if you're a jerk?

I mean, if a guy's a jerk and he just stays that way, isn't he being 'true' to 'himself'? Why shouldn't he? He would be being true to himself. But we don't say that. We tell him, don't be such a jerk.

So I'm officially kicking a whole phrase into the pile of meaningless words (if unexamined) such as peace, freedom, education and so forth. I assert that you should not be true to yourself unless and until you have become a better person. That means asking yourself and answering honestly what actions and beliefs will make you positively better. Before you do that, I suggest that you should not be true to yourself. A child will always be a child unless he grows into adulthood. And jerks will stay jerks until they evolve past that.