“Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Noble Truths of the Heart (1974)
The world has never lacked for lies — political, cultural, and personal. They travel fast, dressed in confidence and convenience, and they rarely ask permission to enter our lives. Some we inherit. Some we repeat without question. Some we benefit from.
But Solzhenitsyn’s words stop me cold every time: let it come, let it even triumph — but not through me. He’s not promising victory or purity. He’s drawing a boundary. It’s the quiet strength of someone who decides that their own voice, actions, and choices will not be instruments of falsehood, cruelty, or cowardice.
This blog series, “Not Through Me,” is about standing in that same space. It’s about conscience in an age of compromise — the ways we can resist the small, everyday deceptions that corrode meaning, connection, and self-respect. Each post will explore a moment where that choice matters: in work, in art, in love, in community, and in ourselves.
I can’t stop every lie that enters the world. None of us can. But I can try to make sure it doesn’t travel through me.
There’s a kind of hope hidden in that stance. It says that even when the system feels too big, the culture too cynical, or the truth too fragile, integrity still begins in the smallest possible place — one life, one choice, one act of refusal. A single “not through me” doesn’t fix the world, but it preserves the world within you. When many people begin to live by that same conviction, it becomes a movement. Thousands of quiet refusals can start to turn the tide, each one saying: the lie stops here.
We’re all navigating noisy times: marketing that manipulates, workplaces that reward silence over honesty, relationships that drift toward performance. “Not Through Me” is an invitation to return to something truer, to live with eyes open and words intact. To consume less cynically, to create more consciously, and to keep the signal clear in every part of our lives.
Each post in this series will be its own meditation on that idea — stories, reflections, or glimpses of people and projects that embody it in the real world. It’s not about perfection or purity tests. It’s about integrity that draws breath. And maybe, if enough of us live by it, the world that lies find will be a little smaller tomorrow than it was today.
A project of Victor Wiebe and No Kings Coffee.