There are many casualties of the recently deposed Trump administration that have, to date, gone unaddressed, and many more than have gone unrecognized.  No matter which side of the proverbial “aisle” you sit on, there are few who disagree that the past four years mark a material shift in American society. While there are obvious and terrible changes, like the loss of civility in discourse, the tribalism of modern politics and the systemic devaluation of academic expertise, those feel like problems with obvious, albeit difficult, solutions.  The more subtle losses betray more challenging repairs, because we simply haven’t had to remediate some social axioms which we took for granted. The best example I have been able to think of is the death of hypocrisy, what it means and how, if at all, we might make our way back.

Merriam-Webster defines hypocrisy as:

a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel

especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion

Merriam Webster Dictionary

Combining these concepts provides a valuable way to identify this critical fallacy in human thinking: i.e. hypocrisy is when someone does something that contradicts their claims to virtue or religion.  (For the record, I am vehemently opposed to the underlying assumption in this definition – that virtue and religion are synonymous, but that’s a different essay for a different time.)

Modern “identity” politics demands a claim to superior virtue – as you can’t vilify someone without indicting their values – but similarly fails to hold the (claimed) virtuous to any account. Now, when faced with the demonstrable opposition of one’s words with their actions, distraction, denial and disbelief have replaced humility, learning and personal growth. Rather than face the difficult truth of being inconsistent, it has become the fashion to simply imagine a “different” reality, where there is no inconsistency, and spending that same energy on immersing one’s self in those now infamous “alternative facts.” In other words, there can be no inconsistency where you can constantly reimagine your reality based on how you’re feeling.  But, what sort of “reality” does that leave us with?

Consistency and accountability are crucial components to what we believe makes a person. We identify one another by those lines we can connect through what we know of their lives – the constant themes, the consistent actions, the identifiable thesis in the lives they’ve lived, that provide context and direction to those lives. While we are capable of allowing others to “reinvent” themselves, after major life events, or as a major course correction after an intervention or other realization that things have gotten way off track; we usually don’t permit such wholesale personal revisions as a matter of ordinary course. We simply don’t have time or space to accommodate people who constantly demand new accommodations for who they are or want to be.  We are far more likely, as Maya Angelou sagely advised us, when: “someone shows [us] who they are, [to] believe them the first time.”

But to really figure out how to save it, we must understand how hypocrisy died. And although I would deeply love to hang this catastrophic social shift around the orange neck of the disgraced President, it was not Donald Trump who killed hypocrisy, it was us.  Hypocrisy was an educational tool that we gleefully weaponized, and as a result we lost it through disarmament – because we should have. You can’t hope to help people with the same tools you hurt them with, and because of the extraordinary lack of grace on the part of academics, we don’t have access to the educational tools we need the most.  But we can.

Consistency is the antidote to hypocrisy, and as a value (versus a cudgel), it’s something we first build within ourselves and then require of others who know and care for us.  It’s an essential bridge to greater trust in our relationships – allowing others to trust what we’ll do, even when they aren’t around to keep an eye on us. I’m confident the parents among us know this, well.  If we start with committing to our own consistency, and holding ourselves truly to account, we will naturally require it of our existing relationships and similarly attract like-minded individuals who are seeking the same for themselves. Eventually, it becomes an unavoidable social requirement (not unlike wearing pants in polite company) that can once again serve to quietly police our behavior, requiring consistency as a prerequisite to legitimacy. 

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It’s a funny thing that happens when you go searching for someone to blame or punish for social change – you often find the most culpable person in the mirror.  The death of hypocrisy is just such a case. It is easy to blame the ignorant for a lack of education – but that doesn’t make it any more correct. Responsibility for education falls to the educated, and nowhere else. There are two kinds of people who run ahead of the pack: those who pull the ladder up behind them, and those who ensure it’s still good for the next people coming up. If we imagine ourselves the virtuous of these two, we must face the hard truth that we killed hypocrisy. Fortunately, that admission comes with the reciprocal realization that we are also in the best place to save it – if we have the stomach to only use it one last time as a weapon: to kill the last of it in ourselves, before we beat it into the educational plowshare we truly need.