What’s Wrong With The World Part IV —Hypocritical
Hypocritical
My second glimmering that the rot was even deeper than I feared came in the 1990’s, when the Clinton Scandals were defended by the National Organization of Women.
Until that time (to admit my naivety now causes me a pang of shamefacedness) I actually thought the feminists were either in favor of women or were at least neutral toward women. The National Organization of Women famously flew to the defense of Clinton (or, rather, to use the infelicitous phrase the feminists of the time proposed, they knelt to his defense on their kneepads of oral sex) on the grounds that killing girl babies in the womb was the paramount, nay, the sole cause and sum of the Women’s Movement. Apparently a powerful adulterer spraying semen into the face of a woman young enough to be his daughter and using the vast resources, prestige and powers of his office to humiliate and silence her was as nothing. Hearing feminists defend the modern Muslim fanatic practice of putting women in trashbag-shaped head-to-toe garb could not be more shocking and hypocritical.
Again, I was at a loss for explanation. I admit I was a scion of the sexual revolution, a firm believer in sexual equality, a fan of fornication, and I bought into all their thinking uncritically, and it shocked me to my core to hear it so casually and so completely repudiated.
But for feminists to fly to the defense of a woman-abuser was not merely insane, not merely hypocrisy, not merely evil; it was a form of insolent evil, rejoicing in evil, evil for evil’s sake that did not even have the crass justification of self-interest to support it.
The feminist women were announcing to the world that they wanted to be abused, exploited, humiliated, betrayed, treated as sex toys, abandoned when inconvenient, and in all ways to be treated with the same respect due the contents of a chamber pot.
The speed with which the Office of the Presidency was desecrated and humbled even to this day astonishes me. I recall conversations taking place less than a year after the scandal, when folk I thought honest and innocent would reassure me, with no gleam of fanaticism in their eyes, that every president since Washington had kept and abused mistresses, and that this practice was normal and unexceptional—indeed, it was then hinted broadly that to dwell on the matter further was impolite, and could we not simply Move On?
In one year, the norm of what we expected from our Presidents and what the office stood for went from being something every schoolboy was taught to salute and admire, to a sink of filth I would not dare describe in detail to my seven-year-old son.
“Daddy, is it OK for the President to shoot semen into the face of a young intern who trusts and loves him, when he is married to another woman?”
“Ho, ho, of COURSE, my son! And I want you to betray those who trust and love you—everyone cheats on his wife, and everyone performes unnatural sexual acts out of wedlock, and everyone, everyone, everyone lies. Everyone admires a weasel who cannot define what the word ‘is’ is.”
“Is it okay if the pale sticky love goo gets in her mouth?”
“Okay? Why, it is expected! If she does not swallow, slap the whore bitch around your office a few times! It’s the way I treat your Mom, and the way I want your sister’s anonymous and unmarried lovers to treat her! Because I respect women!”
I could not fathom the feminist defense of this woman-hunter. I kept telling myself in disbelief that no one could be that smirkingly evil as to betray everything for which they had taken a stand since the days of Susan B. Anthony merely for a four-year political gain. I could not explain it.
My eyes were opened by, of all things, my archenemies. I was an atheist at the time, and not just an atheist, but a zealous evangelistic proselytizing atheist. My mission in life was to talk all of mankind, one man at a time, out of the madness and self-deception of religion. While switching channels on the radio I came across a preacher, and not just any preacher, but someone with a low-class Southern accent so thick that he sounded like central casting had sent him up to answer a casting call for inbred Appalachian Fundie Baptist know-nothing.
Except he was not a know-nothing: The so called “yokel” explained something no conservative commentator I had heard could explain: Clinton’s continued popularity as an adulterer, perjurer, liar, womanizer, and possible rapist.
His theory was that Clinton was popular because he gave to his followers the one thing they wanted most of all in the world. What they wanted most of all was for their consciences to stop goading and annoying them.
Your conscience can never be silenced (so the preacher said) because it is the Voice of God.
The only thing you can do is drown it out for a time with the clamor of the voice of other men. So if your leaders, and the society around you, and your peers, and everyone you respect tells you that your sins and filth and fornications and adulteries are perfectly fine and innocent, while you do not for a moment believe them, the voices of flattery and falsehood sooth you.
Even if adultery is not your particular vice, whatever your vice is, hearing that the President, and, by extension, everyone whose opinion and example we admire and follow, are sinners as bad or even worse than we are, it acts as a balm on the inflammation of the conscience, or a gag to stifle that still, small voice of the little angel sitting on your right shoulder.
Such was the preacher’s theory: Clinton was popular because the people want and crave an immoral and devious leader. A Clinton supporter is unlikely himself to be personally harmed Clinton’s crimes or sins, and a Clinton supporter cares very little about the public weal. To him, the dishonor in the abstract means nothing; to the contrary, the crimes and sins of a unscrupulous and dishonorable leader soothes the supporter, and justifies his own adulteries of mind and body.
If everybody does it (so the warped thinking goes) then to single me out for condemnation betrays double standard in the accuser—whereupon the accuser can be accused of unfairness, bias, bigotry, witch-hunting, and, in a word, hypocrisy.
Got that? The game is simple and any fool can play. All you do when accused of anything is to say that everyone does it, and to accuse your accuser of hypocrisy.
Of course, the fool playing this game does not notice, and does not care to notice, that he himself is uttering an accusation which can be excused by the very standard he himself uses to excuse the accusation he seeks to escape.
The rule the hypocrite uses to break the rules is a rule that by its own logic the hypocrite cannot use, either to break rules or for any other purpose.
When the fool playing this game says, “Everyone commits adultery and lies about it! Ergo you are a hypocrite if you condemn me!” you can reply with logic no less valid that everyone seeking to weasel out of a condemnation accuses his accusers of hypocrisy, but that accusing all accusers of hypocrisy is itself hypocrisy, for it assumes a double standard. Your sin of adultery can be excused because others have committed it? Why, if so, then my sin of making a hypocritical accusation against you sin can also be excused because others have committed it, including you.
In case that is too confusing, let us note a simple truth. In order to maintain a double standard, one must tacitly maintain no standard. This mean, in effect, that one must deny reality. It is no coincidence that one of the most famous weasel-phrases that emerged from the weaseling surrounding the Clinton impeachment was that “it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.”
In effect, any hypocrisy is an tacit assertion that existence does not exist. ‘Is’ either may or may not be ‘is’. A is not A.
The study of philosophy cannot cure this. Philosophy assumes that anything being studied has a nature, that is, that the object of study is what it is, and is not what it is not.
Indeed, the basis of all philosophy is ontology, the study of existence, the study of being. Whatever one might say or believe about being, the essential property is that to be is to be. Is is is. Existence exists.
Someone who tacitly or openly denies that existence is existence, or who thinks the relationship is optional rather than necessary, cannot study philosophy. The most he can do is play increasingly boring, pointless and stupid word games, or ponder whether the statement “the cat sat on the mat” truly means what it seems. The contempt the modern world has for modern word-game philosophy is entirely deserved: of such drivel do modern so-called philosophers occupy their days. They are not seekers of truth—in a world where ‘is’ is not ’is’, there is no truth—they are apologists for hypocrisy.
In seeking an ontological reason to support a double standard, or to support no standards at all, modern philosophers seek something that, by its own terms, cannot exist (no matter what “exist” might mean). A “standard” means that which exists, the coherent and essential property that endures or defines a set despite changes or the appearance of changes of accidental properties. When applied to moral reasoning, a standard is that by which human actions are judged, despite the accidental property of the identity of the moral actor. A double standard is not just fatal to moral reasoning; it is fatal to any reasoning whatsoever.
A person fallen into such blatant hypocrisy as the feminists defending an exploiter of women cannot be talked or trained out of it, because to return to a non-self-contradictory and coherent standard would be antithetical to the deliberate purpose of the hypocrisy, which is, namely, to undermine the standard.
Such people are deliberately illogical, deliberately dishonest, deliberately evil because they think it makes them free: free of standards of right and wrong; free of the authority of conscience.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
