Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a deeply pessimistic Russian writer with a streak of Orthodox Christianity that he could never reconcile with the 19th-century ideals of a mythical European rationalist utopian project, was also an inveterate gambler. This habit gave him a unique view on risk, loss, victory, and the thrills that can only emanate from the depths of resentment, envy, and anger. It also gave him insight into how individuals lie, how we lie to each other in social relationships, and how even the apparatus of the state can be corrupted by lying.

Dostoyevsky wrestled with all of this in a time before Freud’s insights into human psychology really got a hold of the Victorian mindset. His writing was positioned during a transitory era in the mid-19th century, before what we now know as “the modern world” began truly seeking the transcendent. Mostly self-published, Dostoyevsky was the anti-Tolstoy, penning The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and, notably, Notes From Underground.

The problem Dostoyevsky put his finger on in Notes From Underground, a rambling volume profiling the resentments of a dyspeptic and unreliable narrator, is that, while the individual liar needs a society to operate in (1984), a series of distractions to fool and narcotize himself and others (Brave New World), and the totalizing force of the state to ensure no one gets out of line and maintains the absurdity of the lies (Invitation to a Beheading), the liar can never fully escape the one person he hates and fears the most—himself.

And, since the moral courage to face himself is lacking, the liar–gambling on escape, social control, or command structures to do the work he cannot fully do himself–instead of abandoning his lies, spins the roulette wheel of philosophy and lands on nihilism, existential dread, or even a species of pet rational cynicism. Dostoyevsky knew that moral courage was the antidote to despair in a modern rationalist world, but he couldn’t figure out how to get people from the comfort of their intractable lies, or their adoption of alternative facts to soothe their moral turpitude, to the uncomfortable place where ultimate, knowable Truth resides.

We have the same problem with liars playing poker in our era. Except the liars are playing poker at a technological, social, and cultural scale that would be unfathomable to Dostoyevsky. And the problem can only be solved by each of us, individually, adopting the moral courage to say the Truth. The economist, author, and researcher Thomas Sowell once noted that, “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”

There’s no surer way to spread panic among a multitude of liars than to bet on the Truth.