08 February 2001, 813 words
There are two kinds of hypocrisy. The first kind is when someone expresses a belief or an emotion which they do not truly think or feel. This kind of hypocrisy is relatively rare. The second kind is when someone's actions contradict what they think they believe. This kind of hypocrisy is common.
It may seem strange to say that the first kind of hypocrisy is rare. Aren't we always meeting people who say things they don't really believe or feel? In fact, no. The prevarications most people indulge in are trivial, non-habitual, and usually done for the purpose of maintaining good personal relations.
That is why, when we do catch people in a lie, it assumes exaggerated significance in our minds: because most people are mostly truthful about their feelings and beliefs. Human beings are social animals and a society is only possible if we assume that other people are honest and/or if we have means of ensuring good faith. This is the basis of the social contract.
In his book Consilience, the biologist Edward O. Wilson notes, "Contract formation is more than a cultural universal. It is a human trait as characteristic of our species as language and abstract thought, having been constructed from both instinct and high intelligence...More than error, more than goods deeds, and even more than the margin of profit, the possibilities of cheating by others attracts attention. It excites emotion and serves as the principal source of hostile gossip and moralistic aggression by which the integrity of the political economy is maintained."
What you get outraged by, of course, depends on what contract you think you have with someone. The Indo-Trinidadians represented by Sat Maharaj and Kamal Persad and Indira Maharaj cannot be outraged by anything Basdeo Panday does, as long as he seems to represent "Indianness". Only if he decided to promote douglarisation or secularism, let us say, would that for them represent a breaking of their implicit contract.
This is because humans, like all creatures, are highly motivated to seek their own genetic interests. Racial, ethnic and religious bigotry arise partly because an individual's genetic interest is often bound up with the political interests of his group. The social imperative has prevented homo sapiens from evolving into a lying species (lawyers, as we all know, evolved from rodents). Instead, humans have evolved lie-detecting brainware and truth guarantors.
This is why we display our emotions on our faces and by other involuntary signals, such as breathing fast and nervous gestures. So evolved is this wiring that we even use a different set of facial muscles for a social smile than we do for a genuine one. Nor is it only emotional lies which are detectable: false statements of fact, even about trivial matters, cause physiological changes in our pulse and perspiration rates - in other words, stress.
But, although we have evolved guarantors of our sincerity, we have also evolved a method for fooling others: by believing our own lies. Our self-deception has a particular purpose, however: to make others think we are better than we actually are. In any positive trait you care to name - benevolence, managerial skill, athletic prowess, driving ability - most people will rate themselves as above average.
The social psychologist Eliot Aronson noted that people doctor their beliefs to eliminate any contradiction with the proposition "I am nice and in control". This alone explains the appeal of religion, despite religion's obvious falsities. At the same time, our brain necessarily recognizes the truth - any human who lacked that ability would have soon been eliminated, genetically, from the species.
What happens is that we generally keep the part of our brain that sees unpleasant truths walled off from other parts. That the truth is somewhere in there, however, is shown by how upset or angered people get by rational arguments that contradict their cherished beliefs. That is why political and religious demagogues favour censorship and murder as debating tools.
In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker writes, "In cartoons and movies, the villains are moustache-twirling degenerates, cackling at their own badness. In real life, villains are convinced of their rectitude. Many biographers of evil men start out assuming that their subjects are cynical opportunists and reluctantly discover that they are ideologues and moralists."
On this basis, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, "the man people love to hate", is no villain. Statements such as the one he made at a recent ASJA function - "Those of us who hold public office...have to allow spirituality to dictate our conduct and to understand that we must be honest and truthful" - place Ramesh squarely in the first category of hypocrite. For me, though, the real puzzle is not his boldfacedness nor even how he has escaped evolution: it is how he avoids laughing out loud when he says things like that.
Copyright ©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh