As I listened to this opinion piece, by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, I was struck by its relevance to my life: as a parent of two teenage daughters, both with very clear and precise moral compasses, as the co-founder of Footdown – a business where we all try hard to keep our values at the heart of what we do – and as someone who’s concerned about the damage we’re doing to our planet, but who still drives a car, albeit a very small one, as well as a ‘gas-guzzling’ horsebox from time to time.
Through our leadership mentoring groups, we at Footdown seek to inspire, inform and free from isolation leaders of all types of organisation. I hope that de Botton’s piece, reproduced in full below, will resonate with you, as much as it did me.
Unadulterated hypocrisy – Alain de Botton
(Broadcast during a recent edition of Radio 4’s Sunday morning news and current affairs programme, Broadcasting House)
Nowadays no-one thinks you cynical or depressed if you sigh and say that we are living in exceptionally, hypocritical times. It’s become the norm to assume that of course politicians, sports stars, business leaders, chefs, writers and singers universally say one thing but actually do another. They claim virtues that they don’t possess, to get money and power they don’t deserve and, what’s more, if they get half a chance, they will ruthlessly muzzle the truth about themselves via the courts and pricey PR firms. Unless, that is, a brave, latter-day Bob Woodward, a Wiki Leaker or a Twitterer is on hand to rescue the unvarnished grizzly facts for the greater good of that noble collective, we the people. This argument sounds convincing enough but I want to argue it doesn’t always entirely stack up. So here’s a brief counter- intuitive defence of the so-called hypocrisy of many public figures.
For a start, the great majority of acts that end up described as hypocritical don’t spring from an attempt to deceive; they come from an aspiration to be virtuous that goes wrong. The background to accusations of hypocrisy is ambition and often very nice ambition, for example, to do good for your country, to be a kind and caring parent, to be a truth seeking broadcaster or a chef interested in healthy eating. The problem is, human nature is inconstant, we are weak and therefore, given enough time, gaps will always appear between our ideals and sides of our reality. A man intensely devoted to the ideal of family will have an affair on a business trip, a politician devoted to meritocracy will, in a moment of poor judgement, slip a job to an old chum, a chef who has talked so much about organic farming will stop off at a road side restaurant and eat a hamburger. A tempting response, to news of these incongruous behaviours, is to say that the ideals were therefore all a complete lie and a slip is the truth. The chef doesn’t care about healthy eating, the politician was just a power driven nepotist, and the adulterer couldn’t give a monkey’s about his family. But we could choose to reject this comforting cynicism and accept that it is possible to be both morally ambitious, and weak, and that it may be better to have a shot at virtue, than never to aspire to it at all.
It often seems as if people are getting more hypocritical than ever but the truth is that we’re all simply under greater scrutiny than ever. No man is a hero to his valet, wrote Montaigne, suggesting that the closer you live to someone the more you will notice discrepancies between their ideals and their day-to-day reality. Thanks to modern technology, the media give us all a ringside seat on others’ lives and under such a spotlight, as valets know, the reality isn’t always delightful.
Most super injunctions are a response to super intolerance. A moralistic response to the desire for super injunctions is to ban super injunctions. A more mature one is to argue against the moralistic atmosphere that makes super injunctions necessary in the first place.
We should also be aware that stories of apparent hypocrisy by public figures delight us because they let us off the hook. In an egalitarian society, where we don’t really do deference, it can feel humiliating that some people hold to high ideals. Their claims to virtue irk us, and make us feel small, therefore how pleasing if they turn out to be flawed after all. At last we’re not the only ones to sleep around, be lazy and vain, but my feeling is it is better to have an ideal to live up to 90 % of the time, than to have no ideal at all. So, let’s keep being ambitious about how we want to be, even if we can’t get there all of the time, and let’s not immediately beat up everyone who hasn’t conquered their passion or frailties, none of us have.