Let the plane take the strain. Photo: COURTNEY AFRICA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
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In a classic line by the comedian Norm Macdonald, he recalls how a friend told him the worst thing about Bill Cosby was “the hypocrisy”. “I disagree,” Macdonald apparently replied, “I think it was the raping.”
Hypocrisy is the easiest vice to diagnose because one only has to hold one’s rhetorical opponents to their standards and need not articulate one’s own. If you charge me with a sin, moreover, but then prove to have committed it yourself, your shame spares me the burden of defending myself.
This is not to claim that hypocrisy has no immoral implications. It is almost inevitably an act of deception — and a demand that others meet standards one is either unwilling or incapable of meeting. All of us are hypocrites, to some extent, inasmuch as it is easier to say something than do it, but that does not make it right.
Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing.
People on the Right love to talk about hypocrisy, in its undeniable and contentious forms. Check out any Right-wing website and you will find article after article about hypocrisy — and, more specifically, staggering hypocrisy. The “staggering hypocrisy” of the BBC. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Jean-Claude Juncker. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Labour.
But then I love to criticise hypocrisy as well. On the Right, our red meat is an environmentalist who takes a plane, or an advocate of socialism with a second home, or a male feminist who gets handsy after dark. Progressives idealists and scolds who cannot, or will not, live up to their own lofty ideals are entertaining archetypes, who make for good copy, but there are limits to this kind of rhetorical manoeuvre.
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SubscribeI had often wondered why South Asians seemed to punch way above their weight in the white guilt industry in North America, and Razib Khan offers some kind of explanation. It is ironic that such privileged people should still see themselves as among the wretched of the earth.
So that I get this right, what the author’s saying is that in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs are cool dudes and perfectly justified in binging while banging on to the rest of the animals that starving is a necessity?😳
Sorry, young man, but you are wrong. Hypocrisy is the core of our failure, as individuals, but as humans, as well. All our other sins are only simple upgrades.