Talking about Hypocrisy

(I’ve been unwell this week and haven’t finished this week’s topic; also the news from around the world gets worse by the day and I need a break from it. This week’s topic was to be on neoliberal economics, to show how it’s just dominance by another means but, of course, it was a bit too big to cover when you’re not feeling the best).

This article is on a topic that has long interested and bothered me: how can people say one thing and do another? In particular, how can they tell me to do one thing and they do the opposite?

I grew up in a tiny town in rural Western Australia. In those days, there were no flush toilets as there wasn’t enough water and nobody could afford them anyway. The dunny (aka privy) was somewhere out the back of the house and consisted of a roof and walls that leaked, a door that never stayed shut, a flat wooden seat over a pan reeking of phenol and, as there was no toilet paper in those days, a wad of newspapers torn into squares and stuck on a nail in the wall.

I’m reminded of this because Mr. Rupert Murdoch, fabulously wealthy muckraker and compulsive schemer, is back in the news, having finally been forced to admit that his arse-wipe newspapers hacked the phones of the Royal Family, among many others. It has cost him over £1billion (AUD2million) so far and we hope and pray it costs him much more. But the point is that he knew all along what was going on. Murdoch was born under a printing press and was suckled on printer’s ink. There is absolutely nothing about the media industry that he doesn’t know and hasn’t tried, yet he makes out he is oh so respectable, he wouldn’t try to influence politics or gain an unfair advantage, oh no. He told the UK Parliamentary enquiry into phone hacking at the defunct News of the World that it was the most humiliating day of his life; he was only humiliated because he got caught, not because he did wrong. He told the US Congressional enquiry into the hoax about the stolen election that he knew what his commentators were saying on Fox News was false but he didn’t stop them. It cost him $750million for the pleasure, with more to come.

How can anybody say one thing and do another, and why does hypocrisy offend us so much? The idea of dominance hierarchies is central to the biocognitive theory of mind and provides an answer to these vexing questions.

We are biological animals; we need to breathe, eat, drink and shelter from the elements. Because of our primate heritage, we are social animals: once these elemental needs are satisfied, our next move is toward other humans. We feel comfortable with other people and will always gravitate into groups but we much prefer familiar faces to strangers. We have a deep-seated mistrust of the unknown. This easily turns into hatred of “The Other,” which leads directly to our next feature, we like to be dominant. There is such a strong biological basis to this that the idea of dominance hierarchies is central to our concept of self and to our organisation of society, to the extent that we hardly recognise it. So, once we form our groups, we immediately and unthinkingly sort ourselves into chiefs and indians, just because being on top feels so good. As soon as our hierarchy is established, we then try to dominate the other groups around us. The converse is that being stuck on the bottom rung of the ladder, with everybody above looking down and sneering, feels terrible. This is the paradox of hierarchy: we love to dominate yet we hate being dominated; we fight to be dominant and we fight to avoid being crushed underfoot. From this contradiction stems practically all the trouble in the world today and throughout history, as Shakespeare understood so well.

What we call hypocrisy is just a subtle form of exerting dominance. I’m doing something that I think is reasonable. Smith comes along and says “Hey, you can’t do that here. You’ll have to take your stuff and go.” He has dominated me and I don’t like it. Annoyed and more than a little humiliated, I pack up and leave. Later, I learn that Smith was seen doing more or less the same thing in the same place. I am much angrier than if, before I tried, I had discovered he does it himself. We can sense when people are trying to dominate us and we don’t like it. I don’t even want him to walk around thinking he had pushed me around, and I definitely don’t want him telling other people. My anger comes from feeling someone is trying to dominate me combined with the humiliation of giving in when I should have resisted. I want to humiliate him to even the score but I want to do it publicly, so everybody can see what a slime he is. I’ll feel better if other people mock him as well.

The eternal dominance-submission battle is the most powerful destabilising factor in human affairs. In order to feel our best, we need to dominate other humans but nobody likes to be dominated. This contradiction is almost diabolical: it means that, for humans, cooperation is not the default. Our default position is snapping and snarling at each other, jostling and pushing until it gets out of hand just because everybody wants to win and nobody wants to be the first to say “OK, this is silly, it has to stop. There’s enough to go around without pulling the place down around our ears.” Hypocrisy is simply part of that eternal struggle but it’s amplified by the sense of having been manipulated into accepting defeat by a lesser person.

Hypocrisy is, of course, stock in trade for politicians who will try anything to get their own way. When the International Criminal Court decided it had better do something other than indict deposed African dictators, it issued a warrant to arrest Mr Putin over alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Mr Biden was delighted and “welcomed” the process, quite ignoring the fact that Russia and Ukraine (and the US) have not signed the ICC covenant so it has no jurisdiction. The US actually has a law that says if any Americans are arrested, they will invade the Netherlands to rescue them. When the ICC issued warrants against Israel’s prime minister and defence minister for crimes against humanity in Gaza, Biden was outraged, saying the ICC had no jurisdiction (it does as Palestine is a member). Netanyahu, of course, said it was antisemitic, as he does. 40% of Australia’s trade is with China yet we have now signed a treaty to spend $380billion of the proceeds of that trade on nuclear submarines to block China’s trade with the world. Hypocrisy? Or just plain stupidity? Boris Johnson approved very strict lockdown provisions for the UK during the pandemic, then had boozy parties for his friends at government expense in his official residence. In December 2019, Mr Scott Morrison, former prime minister and devotee of prosperity gospel, left the country during the bushfire emergency. He didn’t follow the rule of announcing his deputy as acting PM, and made sure nobody knew he had gone. If he hadn’t been photographed on the beach in Hawaii, when many people here were being burned out of their homes, nobody would have known. But he didn’t think he was dishonest.

OK, you say, business as usual for politicians, what’s new? The new bit is to stop seeing it as an aberration, a personal quirk or bad day: it is NORMAL. That’s what politicians do. Partly this is the sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from being higher up the hierarchy (Johnson: “We’ve been working very hard, we deserve a drink,” as though nurses weren’t); partly a dismissal of lesser mortals as inconsequential (Trump’s “shithole countries”); and the rest is their ingrained habit of lying to get what they want. For them, winning is more important than integrity, which is how they got to be in those positions in the first place.

As long as there are humans, there will be struggles for dominance. We would like to bring this under control before we annihilate ourselves but the people who actually have the power to stop it are all utterly committed dominance warriors, they can’t conceive of any other way to relate to humans. And as long as there are dominance hierarchies, there will be hypocrisy. We just have to be alert to it and not fall for the notion that people who manage to get to the top in anything are necessarily more moral and more talented. That’s exactly the sort of story that hypocrites spread around. This includes politics, business (“Hi, Mr Convicted Felon President”), religion, academia (let’s not start on academia), the military, even sport and the arts (that actually does require a bit of talent but is helped along by nobbling the opposition). Nice people rarely get to the top as they stand aside for other people to have a go and are knocked down in the stampede.

Instead of seeing human affairs as the struggle for pleasure, or the struggle for meaning, we need to see it through the lens of the struggle to dominate and its converse, the fight to avoid being crushed and despised. Mr Murdoch, of course, is the exemplar of wealth, stealth, subterfuge and hypocrisy, but spying on the late Princess Diana? Jesus wept. We had an expression for that in the little country town I’m from: Murdoch is so low he could parachute out of a snake’s arse. And wipe it with his newspapers on his way through.

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