Self-Interrogation Principle
noun
The Self-Interrogation Principle holds that serious writing inevitably becomes a moral act because precise language exposes self-deception and forces individuals to confront their own motives, evasions, and contradictions. Rather than treating personal narrative as therapeutic indulgence or sentimental “enrichment,” this principle treats it as an instrument of clarity: when students articulate their behavior accurately, dysfunctional patterns lose their charm and become difficult to sustain. The aim is not confession for its own sake, nor a classroom turned talk show, but disciplined self-examination that collapses euphemism and replaces clever rationalization with honest reckoning. In this view, education cannot operate in a moral vacuum; teaching students how to think, argue, and write necessarily involves teaching them how to see themselves clearly. In the AI Age—when both cognitive labor and moral discomfort can be outsourced—the Self-Interrogation Principle insists that growth requires personal presence, linguistic precision, and the courage to endure what one discovers once illusion gives way to understanding.
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Thirty years ago, I assigned what now feels like a reckless little time bomb: a five-page extended definition essay on the term passive-aggressive. Students had to begin with a single, unsparing sentence—passive-aggressive behavior as an immature, cowardly, indirect way of expressing hostility—then unpack four or five defining traits and, finally, illustrate the concept with a personal chronicle. The goal was not linguistic finesse. It was exposure. I wanted students to stop admiring passive aggression as coy, clever, or emotionally sophisticated and see it instead for what it is: dysfunction with good PR.
One essay has stayed with me for three decades. It came from a stunning nineteen-year-old who could have easily assembled a respectable boyfriend the way most people order coffee. Instead, she chose the town slob. He was twenty-six, unemployed by conviction, and committed to the craft of professional bumming. He was proudly unwashed, insufferably pungent, and permanently horizontal. He spent his days in her parents’ living room—drinking her father’s favorite beer, eating his snacks, parking himself in his favorite chair, and monopolizing the television like a hostile takeover. He belched. He cackled. He stank. And all the while, his girlfriend watched with satisfaction as her father’s misery fermented. She resented her father—another strong-willed soul who refused to bend—and rather than confront him directly, she opted for a scorched-earth tactic: ruin her own romantic prospects to punish him. Bite my nose to spite your face, weaponized.
I remember her sitting across from me in my office as I read the essay, half-imagining it as a dark sitcom pilot. But there was nothing cute about it. When we talked, she told me that writing the essay forced her to see the ugliness of what she was doing with unbearable clarity. The realization filled her with such self-disgust that she ejected the boyfriend from her parents’ house and attempted, awkwardly but honestly, to confront her father directly. The assignment did two things no rubric could measure. It made her interrogate her own character, and it precipitated a real, irreversible change in her life.
Thirty years later, I’m still unsure what to make of that. I’m gratified, of course—but uneasy. Is it my job to turn a writing class into a daytime talk show, where students inventory their neuroses and emerge “healed”? Is moral reckoning an accidental side effect of good pedagogy, or an unavoidable one?
My answer, uncomfortable though it may be, is that a writing class cannot exist in a moral vacuum. Character matters. The courage to examine one’s own failures matters. Writing things down with enough precision that self-deception collapses under its own weight matters. Whether I like it or not, I have to endorse what I now call the Self-Interrogation Principle. Students do not come to class as blank slates hungry only for skills. They arrive starved for moral clarity—about the world and about themselves. And when language sharpens perception, perception sometimes demands change.
I’m reminded of a department meeting in the early nineties where faculty were arguing over the value of assigning personal narratives. One professor defended them by saying they were “enriching.” A colleague—an infamous alcoholic, who sulked at meetings in his black leather jacket, appeared to be drunk at the table—exploded. “Enrichment? What the hell does that even mean?” he shouted as his spittle flew across the room. “Just another woeful cliché. Are you not ashamed?” The woman shrank into her chair, the meeting moved on, and the word enrichment was quietly banished. Today, in the AI Age, I will defend it without apology. That student’s essay was enriching in the only sense that matters: it helped a young adult grow up.
I am not proposing that every assignment resemble an episode of Oprah. But one or two assignments that force honest self-examination have enormous value. They remind us that writing is not merely a transferable skill or a vocational tool. It is a means of moral reckoning. You cannot outsource that reckoning to a machine, and you cannot teach writing while pretending it doesn’t exist. If we are serious about education, we have to teach the Total Person—or admit we are doing something else entirely.
Cinemorphosis 
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