Comment by thesuitonym

Comment by thesuitonym 16 hours ago

The worst part about this trend toward hypocrisy acceptance is that nobody cares when you point it out. This empowers the hypocrite to answer with "So what?" because they know they will face absolutely no consequences. In politics, business, and even personal life, most people have everything to gain and very little to lose*. And our current hyper-individualistic society has only exacerbated the issue. "Who cares if the people around me don't trust me? I'll just get what I need from some faceless computer system."

* You actually have a lot to lose, but it's not tangible or very directly measurable, and the effects compile over a long time, so the results are not easy to see.

cwillu 7 minutes ago

A lot of “hypocracy” is nothing of the sort. Selectively using the rules that are derived from a moral concern is not hypocracy, unless they argued for those rules on those moral grounds. Chinese companies aren't known for their fervant declarations of support for american values, and so it is entirely fair that they play according to the rules-as-written. Now, if they're espousing communist ideals for all people, _then_ there would be a valid claim of hypocracy, but the arguments I see are basically never this nuanced.

Which is not to say that there is no hypocracy these days, just that the word is so frequently misapplied that its use is little more than a signal of emotional valence.

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simpaticoder 13 hours ago

Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact, considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the better question is how did we get it and maintain it in the first place? In an ideal world you get to do tests, where one group's values are tested against another group with different values to see which group is stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not measured against an alternative?

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satvikpendem 4 hours ago

I too had been thinking of such a similar blog post, of why hyprocrisy even matters. In most of human history, might had essentially made right (or rather, power did not care whether it were hypocritical or not). However, we did indeed cooperate before modern liberalism as well, so it's hard to say exactly what effect this modern-day obsession being non-hypocritical creates.

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