Lately, I've been thinking about hypocrisy and inconsistency. Frankly, I think there are some shenanigans going on!
I'm going to try to flesh out a bit of what hypocrisy is and then build up some of the ways that I've seen hypocrisy in action and a few common pitfalls that we walk into.
By definition, it's the act of promoting or claiming to live by a certain set of rules (e.g. a moral code) but behaving in a way that does not follow those rules. There's a disconnect between what is spoken about and what is done.
There's almost always a very negative connotation and I'm not sure there's much room for positivity in the definition. It's a breach of trust and trust is one of the most important social tenets that we uphold.
Intent doesn't really matter that much. It's obviously much worse if the person is purposefully creating the disconnect because they'd be explicitly deceiving people, but I'd argue that we don't even need that much distrust to treat someone with apprehension.
Compare hypocrisy to simply not doing what you say you're going to do. Am I a hypocrit for saying I'm going to go the gym one time but then not going? No, not really! It could've just been wishful thinking or I could've genuinely tried and failed. However, if I was preaching about the wonders of the gym for months, how it's so important, that everyone should do it, that you suck if you don't AND I NEVER went, then yeah.
There are some parameters in this example that I think are important:
- what exactly you say
- the intensity and frequency with which you say it
- the actual details of your actual behavior
They all combine to paint this picture of "how big is the disconnect between what you say and what you do?". This is incredibly subjective and difficult to assess, but I think it's at the heart of our feelings about hypocrisy. Issues with this assessment are in the later sections, but next I think it's useful to look at how we use hypocrisy to filter our world views.
NOTE: put your pop-psychology hats on, no citations necessary.
Hypocrisy is when, intentional or not, someone advocates for a set of actions, but doesn't do them.
Our repulsion at this stems from a desire for consistency and stability, which when provided over time give us trust in something. We want to trust things and we tend to avoid things we don't trust. So, if we deem something untrustworthy we can use our "essentialism instinct" to just completely dismiss it. In this way, hypocrisy becomes a very useful high-level filter* to get rid of things we don't trust.
- *how many troublesome human things are from broken filters? We need them, because we couldn't possibly consider everything all the time or else we'd be in a constant state of analysis paralysis, but the cost of a broken filter is being blind to what gets filtered out.
In social relationships, trust is hard to build up and easy to lose. We give it out sparingly and limit the people that we truly trust. We want the people we trust to trust us and mutual trust naturally leads to a relationship, which involves reciprocating other social exchanges as well. There is a real cost in bringing someone into your life and Dunbar's number of max 150 relationships hints at this. If such a relationship draws on a resource and it is limited, then it makes sense to have good cut-off habits/criteria.
Along with social energy, we might also filter because of time. There's an opportunity cost in respecting, listening and considering something, so filtering out based on trust makes sense.
This system feels pretty useful! The problem is when it gets over-tuned and you start filtering out far too many things. You need a balancing force. Often that comes from people in your life who you already trust and that can show you the value of something. If you don't have this support, or this support system has an overlap in the same gaps, then it won't work.
It's a balancing act of filtering out unhelpful non-sense that will just confuse you and exposing yourself to challenging things so that you can change. There's no perfect answer, but we should pay attention to how our filtration is working to make sure we're not ignoring things that would be good for us.
Filtering out too many things!
- to discredit someone you disagree with
- to complain about or justify something that you're not going to do
Bringing something into our inner lives in an intimate way is a natural impetus for change.
So, as a defense mechanism of sorts, we can't afford to trust everyone. We can't afford to respect everyone, because we'll feel accountable to things we respect. We'll want to change and change takes effort. We might not even be able to "handle" the feedback that something is giving us, so we cut things off before they get the chance. There are many reasons we tend to stay the same and they're probably all fine most of the time. We get by, mostly we do alright and mostly we do alright by others. It does feel a bit troublesome with hypocrisy, though, because the mental gymnastics we can perform strays into the realm of being delusional. This is probably a problem for ourselves, as we are building a mental house of cards that is bound to crumble, and others in our lives, as they're burdened with this delusion.
It can be big or small, but I think a healthier way to try and live is to figure out how to avoid [[defensive rationalization]]s, build an intrinsic sense of resilience to our own shortcomings and have a bit more consistency with how we think.
Not all instincts we have should be overridden. Some are playful and fun and the root of so much diversity and beauty. Others cause internal and external conflict, while not adding that much value.
- creativity, spontaneity
- selfishness, tribalism
If you tell me to do something because it's good for me, or to stop doing something because it's bad, almost without fail my first instinct will be to scrutinze your own behavior. Lord help you if you fail the inspection! The audacity for you to tell me something without doing it yourself? The offense I would feel. So much so that I would completely ignore the actual advice, even if it were good for me! This can't be healthy.
- [[tu quoque argument]]
- [[what-aboutisms]]
- [[appeal to hypocrisy]]
Rather than filter everything through a dismissive/hateful/aggressive and often distorted lense, it'd be better to also include some confidence, pride and comfort in the way that you're already doing things. This is intangible and difficult to acquire. It comes from aligning your thoughts, words and actions and being aware of what you care about. If you care about something, the alignment is even more important and it's worth the effort. You'll be less susceptible facing concepts, people or events that challenge this alignment.
The above is concerened with overuse of hypocrisy as a method of filtering out things from your life. Our systems are sometimes over-tuned, such that we're often willing to very quickly dismiss things as hypocritical even if they're not.
The next pitfall is that we often confuse mere inconsistency with hypocrisy.
We fallback to hypocrisy as a discrediting filter that excludes something from being worthy. We do this too much, probably.
I'll go further and say that we do this so much and are SO AVERSE to it, that we often miscategorize things as hypocrisy without giving them a chance. We do this habitually. We are habitual hypocrisy labellers. This failure mode stops us from critically thinking about things, which can have a wide variety of negative impacts.
Part of this failure is a miscategorization of inconsistency as hypocrisy.
There is a core base of inconsistency with hypocrisy, but it's not just that, though. There's an added inflexion somewhere that betrays our sense of trust. Inconsistency on its own shouldn't be distrustful and there's a lot that needs to be established before you can really make the leap form inconsistency to full-blown hypocrisy.
Inconsistency is a necessary, but not sufficient condition. It's only when we have that extra information and I'd argue a large of that information can only really come from an intimate relationship. There's a line here.
TODO: Explain these alternates and identify the other conditions of hypocrisy:
- [[hypocrisy can just be the midst of change]]
- [[hypocrisy vs compromise]] and the constraints [[implementation issue]]s
- hypocrisy requires some sort of commitment because to break trust you need to have a commitment
- saying you'll do something is a commitment
- condeming someone else for doing something is a commitment
- EVEN STILL, account for fleeting states and weaknesses of people. Things change! Maybe this should go below?
Inconsistency is everywhere! If we are prone to confuse any inconsistency with an offensive hypocrisy, then its prevalence will certainly be a recipe for disaster.
If you take the right lense, almost any human action has some inconsistencies. Call it human nature, call it the nature of reality. What's the root of human inconsistency? Short-term impulses fighting against long-term cerebral concerns? The way that we act in public vs private? The shitty ways that individual behaviors scale up to societies? The tragedy of the commons? The internet shedding light on issues that we'd like to correct, but can't? A more enlightened sense of morality than the world's geopolitical reality will allow us to embody?
Whatever the root cause, consider it the rule, not the exception. The exceptions are people or things so wholely devoted to their cause that they dedicate themselves to it. Even then, I could imagine a particularly annoying devil's advocate* could still poke some holes in their lives.
- *you start to realize how useless this role often is or at least that its value is quite limited or requires very specific instances
I can try it! Give me some things and I'll try to be a dick and find some inconsistencies.
- charitable giving in a developed country
- being politically active online
- recycling
- giving homeless people clothes and/or money
One common way that inconsistencies arise is through compromises when dealing with implementation issues. Take any ideal and start planning some way to bring it to reality. You will quickly find that your biggest obstacles will be shitty aspects of reality. The simple fact that people won't want to do it, even if it's good for them, even if they know this. Resources, time, opportunity costs, active opponents who will capitalize if you weaken your position. Whatever it is, you'll have to temper your ideal to compromise with it. Your plan will slowly change as you figure out these details and you'll end with something completely different from what you started with. Imagine now someone with your original ideal in mind comes and sees your final product. If they're critical, they'd be disgusted. How could you sully such a pristine thing with this? It's the ignorance of idealism, which still thinks not only that the ideal can be a reality, but that it should have already become one.
Hinted at earlier, inconsistency implies a baseline set of criteria to judge something against. Who decides criteria? Me? You, Leuitenant Weinberg? We swap these criteria so seamlessly as to be unnoticeable. We do it when we're tired or hungry. We do it when we're judging someone we already don't like compared to someone we do. A habit that our oldest friend has will be endearing, but a coworker we hate will do it and be insufferable.
Then there's our judgements of ourselves! We judge outwardly by outcomes and actions. We judge inwardly with aaaaaaaaall the disclaimers and context and best intentions that our inner world provides.
So, we go around swapping lenses as if we're a model at a "insert glasses manufacter here" fashion show and it's hard to tell which we've got on at any given time.
We also live in the post-globalization, post-internet era. If you're in a developed country, you are benefiting from a historical advantage on the world stage that has put you in a privileged position. The very technology we use to learn about global inequality is built by this inequality. Ignoring a wave of the "the global economy is slowly improving everyones lives" want, when push comes to shove, we mostly prioritize our leisure over clear impactful actions that we could do right now to make the world a better place. How do you reconcile this with any individual charitable act? Well, narrow the lens.
The point is not to shit on people doing good things, it's to highlight that the world is complicated and often thinking more in attempt to find some perfect principle will probably fail. Also, shit is hard. Getting up and dealing with your own shit is often a feat in-and-of-itself. There's some merit in sitting back and thinking that, yeah, honestly, things are just getting better.
- *I do think there's room for developing stronger local communities that encourage more selfless living and shift some economic drivers from materialistic leisure to productive output. Less consumption of media, more small-scale creativity. Self-sufficient communities who are engaged in a small, transparent democratic process.
We all draw lines, we just draw them differently.
Hypocrisy is a type of inconsistency where someone promotes doing something, but does do it themselves. It's this dialed up to an offensive degree.
To navigate a world with overwhelming information and uncertainty, we need basic filters to include and exclude things based on some basic criteria. Trust, which hypocrisy undermines, is one of those. Left completely unchecked, this filter can start including things prematurely and excluding things that might be beneficial to you.
Amplifying the problem above is that we often confuse any inconsistency with offensive hypocrisy, which is actually a special type inconsistency between outward expressions and actions. This is compounded by the sheer amount of inconsistency that exists in the world, almost by definition, or that we are able to shift lenses to make anything look inconsistent.
This cycle of reactionary judgements dismissing things as hypocritical can create a delusional and detached mindset, which can be harmful to oneself and others or at least is brittle and susceptible to "rug pull" moments.
