(This is from my book of essays being released later this year).
Everyone has to convince themselves that what they are doing is the correct thing to do. Or if they’ve already done it, it’s in their best interest to trick themselves that it was the right choice.
This is the case for pretty much everyone, from criminals to the religious. What I mean is probably referred to more often as cognitive dissonance, but I’m trying to explain this condition a bit deeper than that. As a human being, it feels like it’s a way of life rather than a character flaw. It is almost the only way to move forward.
You can see this through the passage of time. When you’re older, if you’re intelligent in any way you probably regret a lot of the things you did as a younger person. It’s sometimes a natural result of progressing, and learning more about life. An older person might regret things they did in the past due to the benefit of hindsight, but it doesn’t change the fact that they still did them. So they basically have to convince themselves that because they did it when they were younger and it was so long ago, they’ve since become a “new person” and it doesn’t even count. Because they happen to feel like different people that year, it’s like they didn’t even do it.
As an example, think about former drug addicts. There is a common refrain among recovering addicts that they “had to get to that place in order to get to a better one.” This is a statement that isn’t necessarily true, they could have technically stopped doing drugs whenever they made the attempt to do so. But it’s something they have to convince themselves so they can eventually move forward and make peace with the past.
Or consider the fate of divorced people: they are a couple that were once in love. Once the relationship is over, both people have got to convince themselves that the decision was for the best or they’ll go crazy. They once tricked themselves into thinking they were in love years ago, and now they’ve got to trick themselves into believing they have fallen out of it or were making a mistake for all that time.
This is a weird thing to try to describe; it can also be understood more simply as hypocrisy. That might be too harsh of a word for what I’m trying to say, but it fits. Everyone is a hypocrite at some point or another without really knowing it, and this phenomenon is situational throughout various points in a person’s life. Even me: I probably swear at several times throughout this book, and yet there’s also an essay in which I discuss that I think coarse language is actually an immature character trait to have.
Another example of this would be the ways people hate others for doing the same things they themselves do, but at different times or in different ways. George Carlin’s bit about road rage depending on your situation comes to mind, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” People are constantly playing this delicate high-wire act of always convincing themselves that they’re in the right depending on where they happen to be that day.
Sacha Baron Cohen famously used Kazakhstan to make fun of American culture in 2006. Years later, when doing interviews for the Borat sequel, he spoke about how it’s a very careful strategy because he hates intolerance and wanted to poke fun at the Trump administration for being dangerous etc. He is of course saying all the right things, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that his own portrayal of Kazakh people was intolerant to say the least. His entire career is essentially built on racial stereotyping and the inaccurate depiction of Eastern Europeans (and blacks: Ali G is another racist character that people love because of the conceit that it’s meant to be ironic, which was less unacceptable in 2004).
In other words, the intolerance was only okay when done his way. I’m not using Cohen as an example because I’m trying to say that I’m some kind of a good person here who is never racist, or that I have anything against him (the first Borat is one of my favourite movies, and Ali G is hilarious), but to illustrate my point that everyone is full of shit. Borat is clearly a racist caricature, but it’s somehow acceptable because of Cohen’s moral positioning in real life. He has an English accent and he’s an industry darling who makes a lot of people money, so he’s painted as a thoughtful guy who isn’t at all racist. It is generally accepted that he’s a “good comedian” with the “right intentions,” despite the fact that he uses countries and people as collateral damage.
The creators of South Park were both similarly able to navigate this situational hypocrisy in the early 2000s through the careful use of what they called being, “equal opportunity offenders.” Once again, I have nothing against these guys and have enjoyed their work in the past very much, but bullshit is still bullshit. People say and do certain things but look the other way for other things if it depends on their own advancement.
You can see this concept play out in how people convince themselves to be complicit in such an awful world in general. The system we live under is so competitive, cutthroat, and dog-eat-dog, that in order to survive you have to make money somehow. This means that whatever you do, it is at the cost of someone else somewhere not making it somehow. If you happen to get a job somewhere that pays a decent amount of money, in order to get through your day you have to convince yourself you were the best person for that particular job or you’ll feel like a bad person.
It’s the same as the world situation right now all over: we are all technically complicit. Everyday I get to wake up and have access to clean drinking water, and while I’m drinking it I’m fully aware that there are other people across the world that don’t get to do the same. It’s just a matter of happenstance and luck that I was born where I was and I get to drink clean water at the moment. I convince myself that I can’t do anything to help the people who don’t have access to water in order to get through my day. It’s crazy when you realize pretty much everyone is doing this on some level.
There is no way to not participate in our society at all that I know of, so nothing we do is really exempt from the nature of this beast. I hesitate to say “capitalism” here, even though that is partly what this is, because it is also more than that. It’s a systemic problem we could try to fix to a certain degree if we worked hard enough, but I do think it’s ingrained in humanity permanently. People are flawed and this trait would appear in any system: communism, socialism, etc. Our situational hypocrisy comes and goes, we live our lives like we’re all good people, and the world turns and burns.
People are arbitrary creatures that don’t really follow any kind of strict system or moral code, but rather fart through life and convince themselves they’ve made the right choice based on where they’re currently at in life. You can see this across every demographic: losers have to make excuses for why things never worked out for them or they might feel bad for not trying hard enough in life, and CEOs have to believe that they’re geniuses and things worked out for them in a fair way because they deserve it and not because of the exploitation their company is built on.
