Sarci Sense: When Did We Stop Being Embarrassed by Hypocrisy?

There was a time when being caught in hypocrisy was embarrassing. You might still do the thing, but you hoped nobody noticed, particularly nobody who had heard you condemn it yesterday. Hypocrisy had a social cost. You could be inconsistent, but you were expected to look slightly uncomfortable about it. The hypocrisy was allowed. The evidence was not.

That small discomfort seems to be disappearing.

We have always been capable of impressive contradictions. We admire simplicity while admiring luxury even more, demand honesty from others while giving our own achievements a little editorial assistance, and speak reverently about values while making practical exceptions for ourselves. The uncle explaining the moral decline of the country may, ten minutes later, be forwarding gossip about a neighbour. The person complaining about corruption may know exactly whom to call when a rule becomes inconvenient. None of this is particularly new. Contradiction has long been a feature of much of our daily lives, rather like dust on a ceiling fan.

What has changed is our reaction when somebody notices.

We have become remarkably skilled at separating the person we believe ourselves to be from the person other people actually encounter. Parents who spent years warning children that screens would destroy their attention now sit beside them scrolling through messages. The child’s phone is apparently ruining his concentration. The parent’s phone is being used for something important. The distinction usually survives until somebody asks what the important thing was.

The same adults who tell young people not to define themselves by work now treat exhaustion as a status symbol. “I’m terribly busy” has become one of the safest ways to announce importance without actually saying, “I am important.” An empty Sunday can now create mild embarrassment. One must have a wellness retreat, a family commitment or at least a pending email to justify it.

We have also learnt to perform virtue at an industrial scale. Social media did not invent hypocrisy. It gave hypocrisy distribution.

We can complain about privacy while forwarding somebody else’s private message. We can celebrate authenticity after taking forty photographs. We can condemn misinformation and send an unverified message because it confirms something we already believe. We can announce that we don’t care what people think and then check who viewed our status.

Even our principles now have engagement metrics.

The peculiar thing is that none of this requires us to believe that we are hypocrites. Human beings are remarkably generous towards themselves. We want to be ambitious without appearing greedy, wealthy without appearing materialistic, successful without making others uncomfortable and admired without seeming to seek admiration. Indian society has developed an impressive vocabulary for making these desires sound virtuous.

We call ambition “hard work”. We call status “success”. We call curiosity about other people’s lives “concern”. We call interference “advice”. We call social anxiety “respect for what people will say".

The old embarrassment was useful because it interrupted this linguistic exercise.

If someone caught you contradicting yourself, you might laugh, become defensive or mutter that you had been caught. At least there was a pause in which the contradiction existed in the open. Today the more efficient response is to question the person who noticed it.

Why are you pointing this out?

What about your hypocrisy?

Who are you to judge?

It is a beautiful little manoeuvre. The contradiction remains untouched.

Our enormous appetite for moral instruction makes this particularly entertaining. Every family has someone who knows precisely how society should behave. The speaker rarely includes himself in the society under discussion. “People these days…” is perhaps the most successful phrase in the Indian language of self-exemption.

We tell children that character matters more than achievement, then compare their colleges, salaries and careers with the children of relatives. We say happiness matters more than status, then notice who arrived at the wedding in a new car. We tell young people to be themselves, provided the resulting self is sufficiently impressive to report to the family WhatsApp group.

The group itself is a small laboratory of national character. Privacy is defended, gossip is distributed, misinformation is corrected and misinformation is redistributed, sometimes by the same person before lunch. It is less a communication platform than a place where our contradictions enjoy excellent connectivity.

Yet hypocrisy is not the real problem. Some contradiction is unavoidable. People want to be decent and selfish, generous and ambitious, principled and comfortable. Life has never required these impulses to agree with one another.

The useful thing was embarrassment.

Embarrassment was a tiny form of self-knowledge. It told us that our behaviour had collided with our self-image. It was the moment when the sermon unexpectedly included the preacher.

We seem to have become less interested in that moment. We explain ourselves instead. We find context, motive, comparison, precedent and, if necessary, somebody else’s worse behaviour. There is almost always another hypocrisy available for deployment.

A society does not need perfectly consistent people. It needs people capable of occasionally catching themselves being ridiculous. The ability to laugh when the mirror catches us behaving exactly like the people we criticise may be a more useful moral quality than another speech about values.

So perhaps we have not become more hypocritical. We have simply become better at defending hypocrisy.

And that is a rather serious loss.

Because embarrassment, for all its discomfort, was evidence that we still knew the difference between the person we claimed to be and the person we had just been.

The easiest person to criticise is society.

The harder thing is remembering that we are members of it.