Dealing with politics, we often think it is all about consistent ideology. But it is always about both ideology and behavior.
We most often struggle with the inconsistency of others. We think that if we point out the hypocrisy in their actions, it will have an effect.
It rarely does. Or, more precisely, having the effect of fixing the problem.
So clearly, exposing hypocrisy won’t solve the problem. Because hypocrisy isn’t the problem.
We’re all allowed to have different ideas. Even ones that conflict with each other.
It’s something else.
Often, what looks like hypocrisy to many of us, is a kind of rhetorical illusion.
The problem isn’t that they are believing two conflicting things at once. It is that they think they can only worry about one thing at a time.
The Liberty Example
For instance, the classic understanding of freedom understands that individual liberty is dependent on shared liberty. For one person to have unfettered liberty means none can have unfettered liberty; as we all live in the same reality.
For a neighbor to live without restraints on his liberty would mean he has a right to your property. Truly unfettered liberty means the ultimate rights of one person to use their property would confine my rights to ever make use of mine.
To live in a society requires fettering liberty such as we all might have as much liberty as possible!
We all desire individual liberty. But for any of us to ensure that we might have as much liberty as possible, we must ensure we all have it. Which requires we consider both individual liberty and equity.
In other words, freedom.
What appears to us as hypocrisy is the specific kind of rhetorical illusion in which one attempts to have one without the other. In other words, demanding unfettered liberty without regard to its effects or the necessity for considering how it even works.
Acting like the idea of unfettered liberty is enough.
So there is no hypocrisy to them, because the other idea is not even considered as essential.
But it doesn’t stop being essential. They simply refuse to consider it.
This gets doubly complicated when, in addition to refusing to consider the whole equation, they ascribe the remainder of the equation to an imposed “other side.”
So they, in effect, are defenders of maximal liberty and “the other,” with their talk of equity, must be opposed to liberty itself.
But it all remains essential.
Regardless of the rhetorical illusion. And it is illusory.
This is why exposing the hypocrisy does so little to solve the problem. It does little to expose what we are intuiting as hypocrisy.
Better to enforce the real contours of the problem.
Not just that some who want maximal liberty in one part of their world will encourage us to minimize it elsewhere.
But that they think they can pick and choose, not when maximal liberty is their value, but when they think they don’t ever have to worry about the impacts on real people.
We actually can’t separate ideas from their impact on people.