Hypocrisy gets a bad rap. I’m a huge hypocrite. I believe humanity should create a robotic workforce so we can spend our lives living as intensely as possible, but I’ve spent a couple hours implementing a business idea just this evening. I believe that our political system is inherently corrupt and attempts to change it from within are absolutely futile, but I get into policy discussions on a daily basis. I believe that our society is rife with unnecessary consumption motivated by corporate profits rather than the needs of the buyer, but I own an advertising agency. Guess what? I’m totally fine with that and apologize for none of it.

The assumption that hypocrisy is some sort of great evil is laughable. Everyone is a hypocrite and everybody knows it. So let’s all drop the collective facade and get over it.

I’ll go a step further. Hypocrisy is positive. Hypocrisy is necessary for us to get from where we are to where we want to be. Hypocrisy is evidence that we realize there is something better than the current reality. Eradicating hypocrisy is tantamount to guaranteeing stagnation.

“Practice what you preach” grates on my nerves. That phrase is ground up and twisted to perversely suggest that the ideas of a person are invalid because the person doesn’t abide by them 100% of the time. This sort of attack is nothing more than the classic “poisoning the well” fallacy. Errors in logic used nefariously should be punished much more harshly than behavior and professed thought in misalignment.

Whether you call our cultural reality the tyranny of the majority or the beauty of democracy is inconsequential; it simply is. Since the magical money I print in Drewtopia is accepted in fewer places than Discover card, I’ll keep talking about cultural assumptions that should be destroyed while working for as many dollars as I can get my hands on. I might even read GQ and watch a reality show on television in the process. Okay, I was joking about the reality TV bit.

Similar Posts:

• Nations: Irrelevant and Arbitrary Bastions of Bigotry
• A Critique of Narcissism’s Critics
• Rule Ignored: Protectionist Investing
• Rule Ignored: Agents Are for Actors and Writers, Not Designers