We're all hypocrites, and that's okay

We forgive ourselves for our chronic hypocrisy, maybe we can be less judgemental of others and their chronic hypocrisy too

Ugh. Bikers. Photo by Paul Green on Unsplash

When I’m driving, you know who’s annoying? Bikers. Stupid bikers. Never staying in their lane, not stopping at stop signs, sometimes darting out a bit into the road, sometimes there’s no bike lane and they slow an entire line of traffic. Oh, you want us to share the road? Oh look at you and your low carbon footprint, aren’t you special! Shut up. Stop being a road hazard, bikers.

When I’m biking, you know who’s annoying? Drivers. Stupid drivers. Making turns without looking, not signaling, passing dangerously close, with their multi-ton metal death machines. Share the road! Stop polluting the environment! Stop being a road hazard, drivers.

Because we’re always the heroes of our life story, it’s generally hard to see how often we do things that we don’t like when others do. We give advice that we don’t follow ourselves. We unfairly judge others while expecting others to fairly judge us. This is universal - and no one enjoys being called out, so there might be some bubbling desire to defend yourself when reading this. “Not me! Others are the hypocrites! But I am super awesomely rational and objective, and I always think of and treat others the way I would like to be thought of and treated.”

Nope! You’re a big ol’ hypocrite. And delusional. No worries, I am, too! It’s a delusional hypocrite party! Whee! But it’s okay. Ego-protection is just part of being human! Yay.

Hypocrisy and social media

Social media rule #14: Always call out hypocrisy, except your own

Something I see frequently on social media are these very stupid moral grandstanding posts with many thousands of likes, smugly declaring “The OTHER TRIBE got all angry when OUR TRIBE did this thing X, and yet they did this similar thing Y! Those hypocrites! We are the good guys! Give me money and attention! Like and retweet!" And for whatever reason a bunch of people gobble it all up, get their moral grandstanding dopamine hit, and feel great and justified about being annoying smug internet idiots.

But inherent in those kinds of posts is hypocrisy - stated another way, they are saying “When OUR tribe did the thing, it was totally okay, and we didn’t like getting called out about it. But now that THEY are doing it, it’s not okay anymore, and we’re calling them out. Checkmate. Give me money and attention!” Of course, it makes total sense - it sucks to get called out for doing bad things, and it feels great to call others out for doing bad things, and everyone likes money and attention - but it’s inconsistent. Logically, it’s either bad when “the good guys” did it and bad when “the bad guys” did it, or fine when either did it.

But no one thinks like that. Everyone’s a hero.

So how do we stop being heroes so annoying and dumb? …Or, well - not stop, we’re not gonna stop, it’s built into us. But how can we mildly reduce our tendency to be annoying and dumb?

Understanding cognitive biases

Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill

Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A new paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias. doi.org/10.1177/174569…

Cognitive biases are simply how our brains are wired. We like to think we are rational and fair, but we’re aren’t - we’re rationalizing and not objective at all. Our brains are wired to be storytellers, and our stories make us and the people we like the heroes and those who we believe threaten our worldviews or way of life the baddies.

And sometimes, we strongly judge people who aren’t bad at all. Let’s say your friend is in a relationship and it seems to have been great, but suddenly out of the blue they’re telling you how crappy and awful their significant other has been the whole time. Is it totally true and fair? Maybe… But it’s more likely your friend is in the process of rationalizing leaving them. It could be because they found someone else they like more, it could be because they want a lifestyle their significant other doesn’t, it could be their significant other really is crappy and awful even though they’ve been with them for years. But whatever the true, complicated messy reality is, they need to rationalize doing something very drastic and hurtful to someone else, and in order to do this, their brain has to construct a story to justify it - and that makes them the hero still.

The brain does NOT construct these stories in an unbiased way.

The above tweet references a recent paper that asserts that many of our weird brain issues come from a handful of fundamental beliefs that we all share, combined with the ol’ faithful confirmation bias, which strengthens any belief we already have and dismisses any counter-evidence of those beliefs, those fundamental beliefs being:

• My experience is a reasonable reference

• I make correct assessments of the world

• I am good

• My group is a reasonable reference

• My group is good

These sound fine by themselves, but it causes us to far overestimate our own moral goodness as well as our tribes, and judge others and their tribes much more harshly than deserved. It’s nice for maintaining our egos, but not particularly great for being objective.

It causes us to see hypocrisy everywhere, except where we would run across it the most if we weren’t blind to it - in ourselves.

The “mid” perspective

Mid is being used as a word to describe something that is mediocre. Not bad or good, just fine. Average. Mid. - socialpubli.com

So then, what’s the solution? Eh, who knows. It’s not like we’re gonna fix the thousands and thousands of years that evolved our brains into this broken state overnight.

But, we can do a thought exercise of changing our fundamental perspectives. Instead of thinking how super great and incredibly reasonable we are and our tribes are, we can put our perspectives closer to reality - we’re okay-ish.

• My experience is a reasonable reference → My experience is a mid reference

• I make correct assessments of the world → I make mid assessments of the world

• I am good → I am mid

• My group is a reasonable reference → My group is a mid reference

• My group is good → My group is mid

We’re alright. Our tribes are fine, I guess. I mean, we’re just insignificant specs on an insignificant itty-bitty blue planet in the middle of a big giant unfathomably large nothing. We’ll hang out consuming a bunch of resources for a number of years - a blip in time - only to be forgotten not too long after.

There’s no real point in acting like we know everything, that we’re the most moral and righteous people ever, cuz we aren’t. We’re broken-brained hypocrites, we’re emotional, irrational bags of meat, we’re panicky, selfish animals - but we’re also capable of great kindness, empathy, and caring, and can work together and do some really incredible things. Or just yell at each other on the internet.

We’re just humans. We’re pretty mid. And we can try to be less judgemental of how mid everyone else is, too.

Except for bikers. Screw those guys.