Be comfortable with hypocrisy

My personal examples of hypocrisy:

I believe it is ethically better to be a vegetarian, or even better to be a vegan. Yet I am not a vegetarian, and to be honest, it's not even because I would love eating meat to much (veganism would be more difficult, because I love cheese), but merely because it would be inconvenient. If I had a vegan restaurant near my job, and enough practice with cooking different vegetarian meals, I probably wouldn't mind being vegetarian; it wouldn't even seem like having sacrificed anything.

(Okay, I took some steps to fix this, but this is not meant to be a thread about making excuses, it's about admitting hypocrisy.)

I believe I should spend less time on internet, because my spending too much time online is probably the worst obstacle at reaching many of my goals. Guess what I am doing right now?

Seeing an ideal not being met is not an argument against the ideal.

Hypocrisy is always evidence. Often, it is evidence about the hypocrite. It may be evidence of a weak will, a misguided belief, a misunderstood belief, or even deliberately disguised intentions. It all depends on the person and the act.

Sometimes, hypocrisy is evidence about an ideal itself, especially if many holders of the ideal also practice the hypocrisy. Then, you might start to link the hypocrisy to the ideal, perhaps as a correlated phenomena, perhaps as an effect of some specific phenomena or axiom of the belief. It, again, all depends.

Of course, like any error, hypocrisy is a sign that something, somewhere, is not optimized. It may be as simple as "I just COULDN'T resist that steak when I saw it sizzling" or it might be more systemic. But hypocrisy does not automatically destroy an ideal. It is evidence and it is up to us to decide what needs to be fixed. Do I need stronger will power? Do I have personal beliefs I profess not to hold but continue to act upon? Do I have a belief about my ideal that is in error? Or, finally, is the ideal itself in error? We have to figure it out.

Reminds me of "The Proper Use of Humility". With artificial humility, a human pretends to have no strong beliefs, so they can socially display humility about any of their beliefs. In this case, with articifial consistency, a human pretends to have no difficult-to-achieve values, so they can socially display consistency between their values and behavior.

Acting according to your values is a virtue, but pretending to have no nontrivial values is cheating (or perhaps admitting to psychopathy if that really happens to be true).

It does not make sense to compare how much person X acts according to X-values with how much person Y acts according to Y-values (where X-values and Y-values are the professed values, not necessarily the ones truly felt). Those are two different scales.

A huge problem with seeing hypocrisy as a vice is that it's prevents one from pointing out in polite company that the other person is hypocritical.

In general it would be good to have a culture where people can say: "Yes, I'm a bit of hypocrical about one issue. Yes, it would be better if I would walk my talk but the flesh is weak."

The danger of being accused of hypocrisy led me to embracing amoralism. If you have no principles, you can't break them and you have no chance of hyporcrisy. It is the only honest option, don't want to be hyprocritical after all.

This is based on "hypocrisy" referring to not living up to one's values, but I think that there is another sense of "hypocrisy" that refers to not merely acting contrary to one's stated values, but asserting rights inconsistent with one's stated values. Take, for instance, members of the KKK. They surely considered themselves to have a right to not be murdered, yet they asserted a right to murder others. Avoiding this sort of hypocrisy is a fundamental principle of morality: when a kid hits another kid, an adult will often ask something like "How would you feel if he did that to you?" If you're not willing to give others the same rights as you give yourself, that's a good clue that either you are assigning more rights to yourself then you are entitled, or you're assigning less rights to others, or both.

Hypocrisy is only a vice for people with correct views. Consistently doing the Wrong Thing is not praiseworthy.

Unfortunately, it's much easier to demonstrate inconsistency than incorrectness.

"In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet."

• Winston Churchill

(it's not quite hypocrisy, but related)

The role of bodhisattva is hypocrisy as virtue. Nirvana is best for all, but a bodhisattva turns away from nirvana to help others go in. And as J. R. "Bob" Dobbs said, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of man I'm preaching to."

Those who know me in person will know I regularly point out at least one of my own hypocrisies: specifically, that of eating meat. My hope is that it makes clear that I don't endorse my own behavior on the matter, and that I'm generally "on Team Vegetarian" even though I eat meat (largely for flesh-is-weak reasons). I'll even refer to meat as "animal suffering" in regular conversation, as in "I usually get the 'Tarzan' at Sandwich Spot, which is like the 'Erica Cato' but with animal suffering added" or "Spoonrocket's veggie option today look edible, so I'll pass on the one with animal suffering in it."

I do hope the all-vegan supermarket Veganz opens in Berkeley soon; it seems like a natural first stop for such a thing in the USA. And if they do, I hope they're available via Instacart. Then I would really have no excuse.

To generalize: holding high moral ideals is going to produce cognitive dissonance when you are not able to live up to those ideals. It is always tempting--for me at least--to resolve this dissonance by backing down from those high ideals. An alternative we might try is to be more comfortable with hypocrisy.

It seems obvious to me that you won't be able to follow your own moral code in the strictest way possible. Humans are fallible and minds are lazy. The point is not that you should always live up to your moral ideal, it's that you should always try to do so.

We should allow for failure. If you want to name that sort of failure hypocrisy, I'm fine with that.

After all, clearly any moral code which is inconsistent is wrong.

I don't find this self-evident. In which meaning do you use the word "wrong"?

It's an interesting thought.

Hypocrisy involves (I think necessarily) deceit, which is why I think it is viewed as "wrong". Most people I know are okay with the idea that living up to the ideals we hold is very difficult, and are okay with the idea when people talk a better game than they are actually living.

In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy.

Hypocrisy, and lying in general, is a large part of social advantage as long as there is not a high social punishment enforced when detected by others. Defecting works, if you can get away with it, or if you're not punished when found out. If there's no real cost to being found out (or even a potential benefit, as you've marked yourself as an in group liar), the benefits outweigh the costs.

I think an honest group out competes a dishonest one, but IMO, in today's world, a dishonest strategy out competes an honest one.

But the problem is that we're not all the machines the comment makes us out to be. Switching on psychopathology is no more easy than "just eating less" to lose weight. Easier said than done. For many, being a lying weasel, or even just dealing with them, causes the bile to rise in the gorge, while for other it's comes as naturally and comfortably as breathing.

The number of true psychopaths is low, I'm guessing. But the number who instinctively say whatever is socially advantageous is much higher. It's not like they're planning to lie and deceive, it's that they're interacting to their advantage. Correspondence to reality is simply irrelevant.

I'm not sure if I agree with this characterization of the current political climate; in any case, that's not the point I'm interested in. I'm also not interested in moral relativism.

As an aside, then, if anyone is interested in the sort of thing Stephenson is possibly referring to, David Foster Wallace's essay E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993, two years before The Diamond Age) is a classic. In DFW's version, hypocrisy was the monarch of vices for a time, although discourse was not a matter of simply pointing it out (which still required the kind of positive statement untenable to a jaded relativist) so much as satirizing it. But that kind of irony was co-opted, leaving people not only unable to take a positive moral stand but now also ineffectual in the only critique remaining. He suggested a return to sincere, positive values:

And the rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn't only credible as art; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture critics call "a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems." [...] Irony in sixties art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind this early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure; that revelation of imprisonment yielded freedom.

[...]

Rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative tasks of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough cynical rebel skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in other words they just become better tyrants.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

[...]

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to endorse single-entendre values. [...] The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

I would expect anyone who genuinely believes that eating meat is wrong to not eat meat. If they eat meat while talking about how wrong it is, they believe something other than "Eating meat is wrong", such as "I don't want other people to eat meat". Or perhaps they think that eating meat promotes suffering, and suffering is socially assigned the label "bad", but they don't actually think that the extent to which they contribute to it is bad.

If your high moral ideals are unappealing to you, then perhaps they're incorrect and you shouldn't abide by them. More generally, if you can't live up to your own ideals, you should reexamine what you mean by "should" and "your ideals".