“Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
–Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, “The Moral Maxims and Reflections”
I do not direct this quote toward any person or group in particular, but rather toward all people (including myself) as something to keep in mind about human nature when it comes to our own advocacy and activism. The things we say – but just as importantly, the things we don’t say. Either because we don’t think they need saying, but more often, because it muddies or even contradicts the moral purity and simplicity in which it is far more comfortable to drape ourselves.
We do this even when we know better. We do this when we speak differently in public than we do in private, generally with a lot less balance and nuance. We do this when we rob the “other” of their value and humanity, because it is far simpler and less painful to label all of “them” as the enemy (the hypocrisy being that this very tendency is often what we are speaking out against in the first place). And we do this when we do not hold our own chosen “side” accountable for their own negative behavior, which we justify by saying that there are plenty of other people making that argument already, so there’s no need to do so ourselves.
But it doesn’t work. All it does is pollute the integrity of our arguments, and worse yet, turn friends and even potential allies into enemies. And it hinders the solving of actual problems, because it radicalizes those who hear the things we say but who are ignorant of the context into believing that compromise itself and the noble goal of peaceful coexistence is in fact a cowardly act of surrender.
I hope with all my heart that we may all strive to speak complete truths, instead of merely countering the narratives that upset us. Especially when we know that those narratives contain at least some degree of merit and truth, and that our own narratives lack some fairly important facts and considerations.
Be on #TeamHuman. Stand for peace, and against all that stands in its way.
Originally published on Medium.com
