On Hypocrisy

While talking with a group of much younger people this week, the state of world politics came up. One of them mentioned the death in prison of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and bitter critic of the massive corruption at the heart of the current Russian government. Navalny was adept with social media and published material exposing the industrial-scale corruption that has thrived in Russia since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The reason it thrived is because it never went away, it was never not corrupt, but it was kept under some sort of control. However, when Boris Yeltsin took over and allowed the national assets to be distributed to an assortment of relatives, friends, insiders and crooks, corruption exploded. Catherine Belton's book, Putin's People: how the KGB took back Russia describes in awful detail how Putin's group greatly extended this process and entrenched it at every level of society.

Navalny's group made several lengthy documentaries on the corruption of what is now known as the kataskopocracy, the government by spies (Russian κατάσκοπος – kataskopos: spy. 80% of Russia's modern high officials served in the Soviet KGB or its successors). There was one centred around Putin himself but I can no longer find it on YouTube. This one, on a mysterious palace on the Black Sea, shows how the Russian people are being robbed senseless by their rulers, but what you see is nothing. The real money is out of sight. Just as an example, between 2007-15, the Estonian branch of the main Danish bank, Danske Bank, processed some €800 billion of suspicious transactions, most of it originating in Russia and headed to offshore tax havens.

It would have been crystal clear to Navalny and his group that anybody who wanted to reveal that sort of theft would be in the most serious danger, yet they did it. The news of Navalny's death provoked outrage in the West. President Biden put the blame squarely on Russian President Vladimir Putin, pointing out how dreadful it was that a person who exposed government corruption and wrongdoing, who had never hurt a person in his life, was finally hounded to his death.

Meantime, I see, the ever-helpful folks at Psychiatric Times have reported a US Government initiative to make psychedelic-assisted therapy using MDMA (a methamphetamine, aka ecstasy) available for treatment of PTSD. To a large extent, this means disabled military veterans, of whom the US has many millions. Coincidentally, The Intercept reports that a program has been launched in Israel to use MDMA to treat people suffering post-traumatic mental symptoms as a result of the attack on October 7th. Using US$2.2 million in private funding, an independent group will study how to conduct group therapy to extend the benefit to as many people as possible (their motto: Join Us In Expanding Consciousness in The Middle East). I mentioned this development to the group and brought up the link to the article, with its evocative photograph. My colleagues were dumbfounded, pointing out the inconsistencies:

They are mourning Navalny as a fighter who died for openness and integrity in government while doing their utmost to hound Julian Assange to death for his fight for openness and integrity in government.

The Israeli government accepts that traumatic events can cause lasting mental damage at the same time as it is inflicting massive physical and psychological trauma on millions of defenceless civilians on other side of the fence in the picture.

Australia is sending weapons to Israel but has just suspended its contributions to UNRWA, the only agency providing any sort of care or sustenance to these desperate people.

"What's wrong with these people?" they asked. "They're supposed to be our leaders. Are they all crazy or is this just mind-bending hypocrisy? Do they think we're so stupid that we can't see what's going on?" As the only person with a psychiatric background, it was dumped on me to answer these questions. The answers are No, Yes, Yes. No, they're not in any sense of the word mentally-afflicted although some of the "leaders" show signs of cognitive decline that, in any normal setting, would render them unfit for work. Yes, this is hypocrisy on a truly cosmic scale but it's nothing new. This is BAU, Business As Usual, for all governments in all countries around the world all the time. And Yes, governments most definitely think you're so stupid that you will swallow any crap they dish up. The reason they do this is because it works. They do it once, it works, so they do it again, and again and again. Any people who are so impulsive and misguided as to try to expose their lies will be hounded to death, à la Navalny and Assange. For example, in Australia, there is clear evidence that troops in Afghanistan murdered as many as 39 civilians. Years later, after various investigations, just one soldier has been charged. Meanwhile, David McBride, who exposed this matter, has been investigated, charged and now convicted after he was refused permission to present his evidence during his secret trial. The murderers are back home with their medals, the whistleblower will go to prison, and the Australian Government feels it has done a jolly good job.

The next question was "What is hypocrisy? Is it a mental illness?" Despite its importance, there is surprisingly little serious research on this question, and no agreement on what it actually "is." There isn't even agreement on whether hypocrites actually believe what they're saying but first, we need to settle this small point: Can we rightly refer to "people who display hypocritical behaviour" as "hypocrites" (the noun)? Without drifting off into yet another futile debate over essences, my answer is yes, that's what I will do, as in: "Hypocrites are people who implicitly or explicitly endorse principles clearly contradicted by their behavior" [1]. In the main, when we see somebody acting hypocritically, we experience quite intense and often disproportionate outrage. Why? If my neighbour lies about the size of the fish he caught or his birdie on the sixth hole, I don't take any notice. I just say "That's nice," and will probably laugh when telling the family (if I bother).

But when we see a senior member of parliament extolling "family values" just before his secretary gives birth to his child, and "upright living," after being found drunk and anything but upright in the street (also here), that's different. It's different when everybody weeps over the unquestionably brave Alexei Navalny, but labels Assange a traitor who should be executed for doing exactly the same thing. It's different when practically the whole of the West unites in condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and sends untold billions in weapons, yet says nothing over the far more lethal Israeli atrocity in Gaza, and sends untold billions in weapons but, then, on no evidence at all, suspends payments to the life-giving UNRWA. Hypocrisy at this level puts the world at serious risk, not to overlook the Ukrainians and Gazans who weren't asked whether they wanted to be targets in somebody else's shooting range. Firstly, why do people act like this and second, why do we get so angry? All of this, in my view, goes back to the human drive to dominate.

Humans are hierarchical animals, that much is beyond dispute [2]. First and foremost, we are social creatures, we gravitate together to form families, tribes, nations and so on. We also fear the outsider (xenophobia), which serves to strengthen the tribal bonds. As soon as we have formed a group, our next move is to establish a dominance hierarchy. Being higher up the hierarchy feels so much better than being at the bottom. There is a very clear biological basis for this in the testosterone economy, yet nobody wants to know about it. No politician would admit to being driven by testosterone - OK, Boris Johnson apart. Most are smart enough to realise admitting that would be the kiss of electoral death, so they pretend they're exempt from human biology. Let the common herd cheer their football teams, we clever people are motivated by selfless impulses like bringing democracy to the downtrodden, god's message to the heathens and coca cola to the impoverished.

That's their story, but reality has nothing to do with such noble fantasies. The political game is all about power: more power for me, and more power for us because that way I get a bigger share of a bigger pool of power. That's how it is today and that's how it's always been, since Ugh the Neanderthal clubbed his neighbour to death (there is a convincing account of a Neolithic massacre in [3]). One proven way of dominating my neighbours is to exert moral authority over them. I tell them that what they are doing is evil or disgusting to shame them into compliance because they don't like the sense of somebody looking down on them. Shame is the sense "People think I have done wrong, they're looking down on me." We don't like it as it means we go to the bottom of the hierarchy. Guilt is the sense "I am disgusted with myself. Regardless of what anybody else thinks, I have done wrong."

The easiest way to avoid shame is to make sure nobody knows but, as every drunk sprawled in the street knows, that's not so easy these days as everybody has a mobile phone and can post a video in seconds. And babies have a habit of arriving, ready or not. If we find out that the person who has been heaping shame on our heads is actually doing worse behind the scenes, we're twice as angry because we've been both humiliated and cheated. We were falsely pushed down the hierarchy by a hypocrite, so now we're going to get even, with interest.

It all goes back to the biologically-driven and insatiable human urge to climb to the top of the hierarchy. Some people are prepared to work honestly at it and accept the outcome if it doesn't work, but plenty aren't. For them, winning is everything, there's no second-best, so they convince themselves that cheating and skullduggery are acceptable. And since our politicians are now almost entirely people who have made it their vocation since schooldays, who have been obsessed with power since childhood, the political classes worldwide are dominated by people who regard cheating and skullduggery as normal. But they don't want the masses to find out, they wouldn't understand. Serve them some pleasant patriotic rubbish or religious pap (in the case of political psychiatrists, some high-sounding pseudoscience) just to keep them quiet while we stir up a highly profitable war. Sure, it will probably kill a lot of them but as long as we get rich, who cares? There are plenty more where they came from.

So to go back to the questions I was asked: "What's wrong with our leaders? Are they all crazy or is this just mind-bending hypocrisy? Do they think we're so stupid that we can't see what's going on?" That's easy: there's nothing wrong with our leaders, as in "sick." They are not mentally-disordered in any form. The vast majority of them are not lacking intellect and many are highly intelligent. With precious few exceptions, what they lack is the wherewithal to manage that intellect fairly for the benefit of all, meaning the personality and the sense of morality to control their actions.

Yes, it is mind-bending hypocrisy - our minds, not theirs, as even while they were still in short pants, their minds were twisted out of shape by the irresistible seduction of power. To them, power is all; everything else, including morality, exists only to serve the accumulation of power. And with power comes an exponentially growing sense of entitlement and privilege: the more I have, the more I believe I'm entitled to have, and the more I resent anyone who opposes me. Morality becomes a tool for the political class to control and manipulate the masses in their frenzied pursuit of power. Yes, the ruling class in Russia is totally corrupt but, as the ghastly story of Jeffrey Epstein shows, the differences between "them and us" are of degree, not of nature. Whitney Webb's massive exposé [4] of the limitless corruption and criminality that permeates the American (and Western) elite shows only that Western countries have better cosmetics, not better morals.

Do the political class think we're stupid? Most assuredly, that's exactly what they think. Partly it's because all politicians believe they're the smartest person in the room, and partly because they know the masses can easily be distracted by nonsense. Hermann Göring made this absolutely clear in his trial at the Nuremberg Tribunal:

Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship ... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country...

All politicians know this intuitively. To them, it's not hypocrisy, it's political realism, as (Jewish) Henry Kissinger sneered: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern” (link). While plotting the Pinochet coup in Chile, he said: “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves” (link). Morally, Kissinger was a singularly untroubled man.

For them, morality is a tool to be wielded in the pursuit of power, a way of keeping the masses in line. That is the exact reverse of how we ordinary people believe it ought to be: power must be subject to morality. Which is why they're in power and we're not. So are the scales now falling from people's eyes, is the grand illusion of a world of goodies versus baddies starting to fall apart? Daily, we watch the horror of "The most moral army in the world" firing American thermobaric Hellfire missiles from American planes at the terrified people of Gaza. Is their rancid hypocrisy the beginning of the end of the narrative of the West as the "moral policeman of the world"? We can hope so.

The battle has to be seen for what it is. It is not a fight of West and East nor capitalism vs communism, not Christian against Muslim, white on black, straight against gay, male on female, good opposing evil, none of this. It is the endless battle of the power hungry versus the reasonable. Choose your camp, but if you want to be seen as reasonable, don't forget that the other side don't see it that way. To them, reasonable is what lets them win.

****

Ode to Julian Navalny

Strophe:

Alexei is dead. I hear the rage of people who champion his cause.

Noble soul, they cry, illustrious man, Our world is poorer without you.

Hands on hearts, candles lit, they curse the man who killed him.

We'll not forget your valiant fight nor e'er forgive your murderers.

And yes, it's true, an hon'rable man, not perfect but then who is?

He fought and lost and fought again, aware of the terrible risk

Which lifts him above the rest of us, uncertain which way to turn.

So we salute you and sing your praise, and wait for another to follow.

Antistrophe:

Assange still lives but not for long, executioners wait in line,

And rightly so, this dreadful fellow betrayed our nation's secrets.

A gunship at night, a bit of fun, some journos out to make trouble,

We cleaned 'em up, bagged a few Arabs, and he paints it as a crime.

A tool of Putin, that's what he is, making us out as murderers,

When he should know, as we do well, that God is on our side.

The West is good, the rest are bad, so in order to learn the truth,

You call us first, we'll set you right, don't print or you’ll surely perish.

Epode:

The cries of the children of Gaza drift soundless into the night,

Joining the children of Auschwitz, starved Yemeni babies too,

Unheard by the wealthy at Davos and Wall Street titans at play,

Who know their God prefers winners, let the devil take the rest.

Sipping their drinks in the penthouse, watching their yachts below,

They justify all their actions by counting out their pelf.

But evil is as evil does, fine words cannot conceal

How maggots of hypocrisy are dropping from your lips.

****

References:

1. Alicke M, Gordon E, Rose D (2012). Hypocrisy: What counts? Philosophical Psychology.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2012.677397

2. McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

3. Spindler K (1994). The Man in the Ice. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

4. Webb WA (2023) One Nation Under Blackmail: the sordid union between intelligence and organized crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (two volumes). New York: Trine Day.

*****

This material is copyright but can be copied or quoted on condition the author is acknowledged.