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writing for godot

Fair Play for Hypocrites

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Written by D. E. Tingle   
Wednesday, 29 January 2014 10:23

An age of transparency looms, and people and institutions everywhere are terrified. Private citizens have only as much privacy as may remain to them through the indifference or the ineptitude of hucksters and authorities bent on collecting every scintilla of information at large in the virtual and physical environment. Secret philanderers and solitary onanists are in constant danger of exposure by wire and camera. Corporations and government agencies are revealed as criminal enterprises. No human activity traditionally carried out behind a veil can any longer be assumed to be the sole property of the actor or actors.

I find I couldn't be more pleased. I was tired of the bullshit.

But the full disclosure of everything, and the enforced accountability that ensues, creates a major difficulty for the survival of the oldest, most widespread, most frequently charged and reactively denied human appurtenance of them all: hypocrisy.

We're all going to have to come to grips with this problem, and soon.

At the same time universal awareness of everyone's secrets renders blackmail impossible, it will also expose every apparent or obvious hypocrisy to the light of day — and most painfully, I should think, for the hypocrite hermself*. As a hypocrite of long but surely modest standing, I'm less daunted by the thought of being unmasked to fellow citizens, who probably have suspected me all along, than by the thought of having to come clean by giving up hypocrisies that have made my life supportable. If I were required to put up or shut up on any number of noble pretensions, I think I might have to kill myself.

Accordingly, I'd like to propose that all of us cut all of the others a break. If the default answer to the charge "You're a hypocrite!" necessarily becomes "Well, duh!", then the charge loses its currency, and we can hope it'll go away. Once our hypocrisies are a matter of public record, we'll all feel obliged to do better. Just imagine the benefits.

Unfortunately, the cognitive dissonance that will prompt potential saints like you and me to reform, will not do so with corporations, which, while persons under the law, by their fiduciary duty to maximize profit for their shareholders are of necessity sociopathic persons. In their case, coercion may be required.

As for governments, we'll have to take those back. For that we have whistleblowers.

___________


*Gender-neutral yet grammatical pronoun.
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