On Hypocrisy

One thing I hate is when somebody gets accused of hypocrisy just for changing their mind about what they believe in. It would be pretty poetic and I would love it if I could use razor-like logic right now, to demonstrate that those making such an accusation are, in fact, hypocrites themselves - but I don't really see the angle in to that argument right now. So I'll let that one pass.

But the fact is: people are allowed to change their minds, change the way they live, change what they believe in. It isn't hypocrisy. You may be a teenager who believes in God, Jesus, 10 commandments, the whole kit. Then later on, you may at the age of 60 decide "hell with all that! From now on it's hard drugs and celebrity prostitutes for me!" This is not hypocrisy. To believe in one thing, and then to go on to change your ways or your beliefs, is not hypocrisy.

For that matter, other things that are not hypocrisy include:

1. Subscribing to a portion of a particular belief system / philosophy / party political platform, but not all of it - you're not required to swallow the whole bill of goods just to satisfy other peoples' stereotypical impression of how "that type of person" is "supposed to" believe and act!

2. Giving different advice to two different people on what each should do - they're different people! What's good advice for one may not be the same as what's good advice for the other!

3. Giving another person advice that you wouldn't necessarily follow yourself - astute readers will have noticed that this is identical to #2...and for the same reasons.

A word about "do as I say, not as I do" - this is the standard nutshell definition of a hypocrite. But is it necessarily hypocritical to tell someone to do one thing while you yourself do the opposite? Is a Catholic priest hypocritical to advise someone else to get married? What if you're a professional daredevil and you tell the people at home not to try this? Suppose you're a doctor who smokes. That's bad enough, but should you also tell your patients to smoke, so as to avoid being a hypocrite? Let's take more extreme examples: what if you're a drug addict? What if you know it is killing you, but you just can't stop - and then you turn around and tell someone else not to do the drug? Are you a hypocrite? What if you are a mass murderer, only just sane enough to be able regret your homicidal binges - and so you tell people they should not kill others? Is that some kind of hypocrisy or what? And, would that make it bad advice if it was?

What if you are for lack of a better word a sinner, and it's killing you inside, and you know whereof you speak. What if you have tried as hard as you can to reform whatever it is that you do, whatever it is that is cutting you off the rest from humanity, or from the grace of God, or from whatever you might conceptualize that as. Think of the worst thing possible. Now imagine you are one of those driven to that act. No one is forcing you to do it! But you've succumbed to the urge nonetheless, and you really feel that your next step should be to kill yourself. Because what you did, is just that bad.

If you speak out against it, against what you did...against the worst act possible, that one human being can do to another...are you being a hypocrite?

I don't know, but I don't think so. We may not all be out there committing the worst possible act. Nonetheless: we all fall, and we all fail. If failing meant that we could no longer say what we believed to be right, then all of us would be utterly lost, and...there would be no more guides.