The Hypocrite Paradox

Happy Labor Day. Today’s post is short and sweet, and will hopefully make your mind labor a bit.

This one is a bit different. I’ll chalk it up as a social thought exercise. It’s about hypocrisy: a nasty, infuriating trait we see all too often.

Let’s take a guy, call him Jeff. Jeff hates when he sees people text while driving. He sits out beside the highway every day with a sign reading “Quit texting.”

After a year of this, city officials notice that car crashes on that stretch of highway have reduced by, say, 80%, all thanks to Jeff’s efforts.

But there’s one catch: Jeff is an avid texter while he’s driving. He admits this, will not apologize, and says he has no plans of kicking his lethal habit. People call him a hypocrite, rightfully so, as he continues to sit by the highway with his sign.

He’s made clear he won’t stop texting and driving. So really, Jeff has two options:

1. he can stop sitting by the highway (car crashes increase)

   or

2. he can continue in his hypocrisy

It feels strange to tell a hypocrite to continue in their ways, but if we care about reducing car crashes, wouldn’t it be best for Jeff to take option two?

This is an exercise in hypocrisy vs. wrongdoing.* While ideally, we’d like to stop both, it’s interesting to decide which we would stop if we could only stop one.

This is difficult because we detest hypocrisy so much that we actually use it to defend wrongdoing, as if it makes our misdeeds somehow milder.

Take this quick exchange from the film The Big Short. Now, I know I picked a complicated movie, and to try to set the scene would take three Museletters, so if my quick description is gibberish and you’d like to watch it instead, here’s the clip. Fund Manager Mark Baum has just figured out that the ratings agencies, like S&P and Moody’s, are giving gold stamps to objectively terrible bonds (further exacerbating the mortgage crisis), only because they have their own little game with the competing agency. His short position on those bonds also happens to mean he is losing money because of these inaccurate ratings. So, while he is right in saying they are doing something terrible, he also has his own skin in the game that’s being hurt financially. Upon thinking about this, the S&P representative, Georgia Hale, actually seems to deflect some of the wrongdoing, simply because of what she sees as hypocrisy in the man who’s calling out the bad practice. Do you see how that’s an issue? She’s essentially saying that just because the person calling them out has personal interests affected by their bad practices, their accusations of immorality are less credible.

Hale: “Is it maybe in your best interest to have the ratings change? How many credit default swaps do you own?”

Baum: “That doesn’t make me wrong.”

Hale: “No. It just makes you a hypocrite.”

Mark Baum isn’t wrong here. At worst, he’s coming from a false moral high ground, which is where Georgia Hale claims hypocrisy. Enough about the movie; my point in using this scene is to highlight that we often think even a hint of hypocrisy in someone else gives us a ticket to BlamelessVille.

Hypocrisy is wrong. Our issue is that we think it erases our own wrongdoing.

With that in mind, how do I think this would play out with Jeff?

It becomes well-known that he’s an avid texting driver, and now, people see his sign on the road and think: “I’m not listening to that guy anymore. He’s a hypocrite.” They continue texting, even though Jeff’s hypocrisy has nothing to do with their decision to do the right thing. In the same way S&P thought they had a checkmate for what they saw as hypocrisy, so does the texting driver. And thus, they continue their dangerous practice.

It’s weird to see the ways we justify the bad things we do.

Happy election season!

1  I understand that hypocrisy in itself can be seen as wrongdoing, but I think it’s more accurate to say that hypocrisy is a combination of doing a right thing and a wrong thing at once, things which happen to butt heads.