the personal journal of Brent Stewart
When I was a child (the 70s), I understood that the worst insult possible was hypocrite. The other day I encountered the word and it struck me how uncommon it has become. This was a pretty bad thing to be called - why is it not anymore?
Before we consider the larger picture, it’s worth taking a moment to understand terms. Frankly, we didn’t understand it very well in the 70s.
I remember hearing the word and - as children do - working it into my vocabulary and calling someone a “hypocrite”. My early understanding was that it meant “bad person”, but my mother reacted strongly to my use and told me it was an awful thing to call a person. When I asked her why, and what the word meant, she struggled to define it to five year old me beyond “liar” and I probably carried that definition with me for a while.
Hypokrisis is a greek word, as it turns out, with two roots. “Hypo” means under and the verb “krinein” means to decide, so from those roots we get a sense of an inability to judge. Hypokrites was a term for an actor, someone who put on a character, and over time the term developed this sense of someone who doesn’t have firm principles, but acts out a virtue as a means to personal gain.
To be a hypocrite is therefore to choose to present oneself in a deceitful way as a way to manipulate others.
It’s worth considering that we all have hypocritical tendencies. We all have those difficult social momeents where standing up for our principles doesn’t seem worth the cost. A close uncle wants to discuss political conspiracy theories, for instance, and we run the calculation and decide that being the voice of reason isn’t going to change his mind (it will probably just make him more argumentative). So we find something we can agree with (“I’m not that politician’s biggest fan either”) and try to steer the conversation onto another topic. If you think about that moment, dwell on the discomfort you feel because that’s your sense of ethics battling with expediency.
There’s also a psychological concept called mirroring. When we are trying to connect with another person we, consciously or unconsciously, adopt some of their mannerisms. We match the pace of speach, the volume, and gestures. My southern twang becomes a little more pronounced when I’m around other southerners, for instance. Mirroring isn’t necessarily hypocritical, but it demonstrates the pull toward agreement that can influence us to adopt a persona in a conversation.
It’s also true that our aquaintances take a flat, kind of 2D image of us and fail to understand our full selves. I remember being in college and the jarring differences in the way people perceived me. My fraternity brothers thought I was a nerd, but the people I worked with thought of me as the “cool college kid”. My mom worried I wouldn’t succeed in college because I’ve never been a good student. My friends saw me as an uber-geek who was clever and could “figure things out”. My mentor saw the possibility of who I could be. I had “basketball friends” and “computer friends”. Everyone had a different take on who I was, so it was easy to just slip into that character and play that version of me in their company. There’s a thin line between disingenuousness and social grace.
Another way to think about this topic is in contrast. If hypocracy is selfish deceit, then it’s opposite is integrity. Integrity is the sense that something is whole or complete. It’s also the sense that something is consistent. Having integrity is to line up outward appearance with internal thought. It is pursuing what is right and not what is expedient.
We all think of ourselves as “good people”, but I remember a particular part of my early career in management. My boss would ask unreasonable things, because he didn’t understand the network the way I did. I had to be a filter between “management” and “technical reality”. At times he would ask for something to be done, but if something more urgent came up then I had the right perspective to decide which course to pursue. When my review came up, I rated myself highly for integrity because I was always pursuing the “higher truth”. He rated me poorly and gave me the best definition of integrity - it’s doing what you say you are going to do. By that standard, he was right. I wasn’t guarding my commitment and zealously following up, nor was I communicating when circumstances changes. Frankly, that hurt but (after a short period of licking my wounds) I understood he was right and have consistently tried to be a better person since then.
The story is that centurions used to do inspections by walking down the line of soldiers. Each man would bang his hand against his heart and say “integras”. I am here, I am complete, I am ready. The sound of their fist striking the breast plate was a clue that the armor was in good condition and correctly worn, but their alignment of person and purpose spoke to readiness in a deeper way.
Hypocracy isn’t really a standard to which we hold people accountable. Examples are too numerous to list. In the United States, involvement in politics almost requires hypocracy (it’s probably the same in other places, but I’ll leave that to their citizens to describe). Republicans speak out against budgetary excess, then spend like drunken sailors when in power. Democrats champion the powerless, then ignore them when they get power. Both parties mimic piety for votes, but take two guesses to figure out which side of the Bible is up. We celebrate their “effectiveness”, even when we can never be sure of their goals.
Salespeople who over promise are “driven” and “effective”. Marketing, as a profession, is about confusing motives and manipulating decisions. We teach our children to “play until the whistle” and imply that the ref will be the judge of what is legal, and we are happy when the refereee doesn’t see and our children gain an advantage.
We rejoice when we win and view cheating as “gaining an advantage”. Today’s culture can be quick to judge our conformance to the two accepted modes of belief - liberal and conservative - and both sides refuse to acknowledge the inconsistencies in their argument and describe compromise as “a slippery slope”. How can we have integrity in a cuture where we agree that identity is a meaningless made up value and that facts are a tool of oppression?
Celebrites are too easy - they posture and speak out in favor of the cause of the day without really understanding it. But this is understandable - they are professionals at playing a character and changing their delivery to get applause. Here, the original Greek comes back and we get the sense of why a word for actors became an insult. In fact, another story says that Demonthenes once spoke against a candidate for office on the grounds that he was an actor, and therefore couldn’t be trusted.
Integrity isn’t the same as goodness, it’s simply a mark of consistency. But integrity requires an inner discipline and constant self-examination, and those things tend to pull toward what is right. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us to “let your yes be yes and your no be no” (Matthew 5:37).
I strive to have integrity. Some of the things I’ve found helpful have been reading (almost anything, including fiction, at some point deals with right and wrong), taking care with my commitments and developing systems to track my promises to help with follow-through, and surrounding myself with other people who aspire to integrity. My Sunday School class is great at discussing these issues and our struggles and, with appreciation, I acknowledge that my wife helps me see the way my conduct impacts others and the gaps that form in my integrity.
It’s important to lift-up integrity when we encounter it, to encourage it’s emulation. This is especially true in our children. It’s important to recognize those lives that are lived with integrity and to study them.
We can value objective truth, even while acknowledging the difficulty our perspective presents in seeing it. In fact, we must. Over time, the legionaires got tired of the heavy armor and helmets and stopped wearing them. They lost the discipline to exercise and drill. And when that integrity collapsed, the legionaires were no match for the “barbarians” and their civilization collapsed.