In this episode we explore how our culture forces so many of us to be hypocrites for much of our lives, whether we intend it or not
Yeah, I admit it: I’m a hypocrite.
Not by choice, though. It’s more that the world we live in doesn’t allow me to be anything else.
Doesn’t allow any of us to be anything else.
I’d guess you could describe me as an activist of sorts: certainly I’m advocating for some pretty big changes in our everyday world, as you’ll have seen elsewhere here on SmallChanges.
But getting to those big changes is going to take time. And in the meantime I have to live somehow in this world - in which, yeah, I’m not managing to do all that well. Not least because almost everything that I believe in, and say that I believe in, living in this world forces me to do the exact opposite. Which, yeah, makes me something of a hypocrite.
And being forced to be a hypocrite grinds away at the soul, day after day after day…
Some examples, perhaps?
Maybe the first is a lifelong commitment to helping others - helping them build their skills, working with them to solve their technical challenges, stuff like that. But the difference between us is that whilst they’re being paid by someone else, I’m not. And in this insane ‘economy’, doing that is tantamount to suicide, especially in the longer term. This world forces me to cut back on helping others, just to be able to survive.
The same with another commitment to make my work on freely available to everyone. Particularly my work on big-picture change and the like, because I believe strongly that we’re all going to need those kinds of skills and tools once the big changes that are coming our way really start to bite. Developing those tools, and describing how to use them, is really my full-time work these days, and has been so for years now. Again, though, no income from that. So I either have to start charging for it - which breaks the promise to make it freely available; or else I’ll just have to stop and do something else to try to bring in some income - which breaks the promise to create the materials in the first place. Whichever way I try to resolve it, I end up being a hypocrite. Which hurts.
This is not a new problem, of course, and neither is it specific to me: it’s just a common outcome of the way that our world (doesn’t) work. To quote from a World Economic Forum study:
just because a profession is producing something desirable, or even necessary to the functioning of society, doesn’t mean society has figured out a way to pay for the care and feeding of its practitioners
Yeah, that’s essentially the situation that I’m in right now. But if it’s hard for me to keep going like this, others have it much worse. Take parents, for example - in principle I can just walk away and do something else: parents they can’t. By any sane measure, parenting is one of the most important jobs in the entire world: and yet we somehow expect parents to be able to do it, year after year, without any support at all? Something’s not right here…
How do we fix this? Well, we’re told that there’s no way to do it, according to that same World Economic Forum study, because:
our political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle these hard choices
But if that’s the case, then maybe it’s the institutions that need to change - rather than forcing parents and others to change on those institutions’ incompetent behalf?
What are some of the other wrong things that this old hypocrite will do?
One obvious example is about the use of fossil-fuels. Like a lot of people, I strongly believe that we need to need to cut back on that - not just because of the now all-too-real issues of climate-change and the like, but also, if we don’t, then there’ll be nothing left for future generations because we greedy ones will have used up the lot. And yet, yeah, here I am with a car:
Okay, there are plenty of excuses, of course. It’s second-hand, I drive it as little as I can, it’s pretty economical compared to all those gas-guzzler SUVs and utes (pick-up trucks), there’s no bus-service round here, I need it for my work, and on my near-non-existent income there’s no way I can afford an electric or hybrid car instead. But yeah, it’s a car, and ultimately all of those are just excuses. Which makes me a hypocrite, right?
Not alone in that, by any means, but still a hypocrite.
Ouch.
Another example: a commitment to reduce waste. As far as power is concerned, it’s not easy. The place I live in is a rental, of course, probably dating back to the 1920s. Which means that it has no insulation in the walls. And in this part of Australia, in this season, yeah, it gets cold: around -1℃, last night, maybe -2℃. Which, with no insulation and no central-heating, means the house gets cold too: around 5℃, maybe just a little bit more. I’ve taken to living and working in the kitchen, because the reverse-cycle aircon is in there, and when it’s freezing outside it only takes about four hours of struggle to heat up this one room. Adding a fan-heater helps, but that means I’m still blasting through something like 4Kw per hour just to get the place warm enough for me to work. Fair enough, the electricity in this region here comes from a hydro plant up in the Snowy Mountains, but even so, it’s still a heck of a waste that I can’t avoid. Oh well.
And then there’s food-waste, of course. The only reasonably priced store round is pretty good, but it tends to package everything in ‘family-sized’ packs. I live alone, so I wouldn’t be able to go through even half of that before I’d have to throw the rest away - which, if I’m trying to avoid waste, means that there’s quite a lot of things that I simply can’t buy. And for the things that I can buy, everything everything everything is wrapped up in layer upon layer of plastic. I do my best, but even so I end up taking a plastic bag full of plastic wrappers out to the rubbish-bin every couple of weeks or so.
So much for minimising waste. Huh: hypocrite!
But in this insane world, there’s not much else that I can do to avoid it. Other than starve. Oh well.
I’d love to live in a world that doesn’t require me to be a hypocrite.
But right now, unfortunately, and until we can bring on the changes that we need, this is the only world that we can live in.
Oh well.
Hi Tom, excellent post, I always think about green activism as something like a non-functional element of our lives that must have balance, like security and many others non-functional requirements. Even using public transportation and electric cars, we are still rolling over thousands and thousands million square meters of devastated green areas... Where does it stop without returning to the caves?
Do not stress over your car Tom, even the EV owners merrily plug their cars into electricity sockets with little or no idea as to where or how the electricity is generated. Hypocrisy is evident across the globe with most climate change advocates flying around the world with little or no concern to the impact of their actions.
Statements such as "we are all in this together" from government officials or billionaires are the highest level of hypocrisy when they have already furnished bunkers to ride out any climate events or nuclear repercussions in the event of global conflicts.
Most of us will be viewed as "collateral damage" in the bigger scheme of things.