RULE 29

Learn to deal with hypocrisy.

Your parents may have smoked dope, fooled around, and done a lot of the things they tell you not to do. That’s not a license to ignore them: sometimes when we are young and dumb, we grow up and don’t want the people we love to do dumb things too.

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“Hypocrisy,” observed François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, “is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”113 (He would have known, of course, being French.)

What he meant was that hypocrisy doesn’t discredit virtue; it simply admits that it has nicer clothes, so it borrows them. A hypocrite is someone who says one thing, does another, but at least knows that he should sound like he is doing the right thing. In other words, his hypocrisy acknowledges that there is a right thing and that it is preferable to what he is doing.

Usually, the hypocrite is easily spotted: the priest who preaches chastity but also molests choirboys; the celebrity who flies around the country in a Gulfstream jet but also nags soccer moms in minivans about energy conservation; members of Congress discussing ethics.

But is it hypocritical for someone who drank heavily in college to warn you about excessive drinking? Or for a parent who engaged in casual, unprotected sex at your age to tell you that you ought to abstain until marriage? Or are they just drawing on hard-won experience, including the experience of seeing people they once knew screw up their lives, if they survived at all? After all, who understands the dangers of binge drinking more than a recovering alcoholic, and who has more insight into I-want-to-share-my-love-with-you postprom sex than a thirty-two-year-old single mom with a sixteen-year-old daughter? (Do the math.)

If the flaws of the messenger don’t discredit the message, the flip side is that sincerity doesn’t substitute for facts, logic, and a connection to reality. The earnest, pure sincerity of the speaker doesn’t transform a bad argument into a good one. If it did, we might actually have to listen to Hollywood types when they talk about world economics.

But in our nonjudgmental society, hypocrisy remains one of the last really horrid sins, often treated as worse than lying or corruption. “Hypocrite” remains one of the worst things you can call someone—worse even than “neoconservative zombie.” As a result, the charge of hypocrisy is often used as a trump card to win arguments by discrediting one’s opponent. Unfortunately, it is also used to blow off a lot of good advice.

Dismissing an argument because of the speaker’s hypocrisy is an easy way to score points, but it is what’s known as an ad hominem argument—an attack on the individual rather than his ideas. It’s tempting, because it allows you to seize the moral high grounds, but it’s a lazy tactic. Lazy because it substitutes moral preening for asking whether the argument actually makes sense. It’s also lazy because it allows you to effortlessly ignore almost everything grown-ups say since, as a rule, none of them meets the standards of perfection demanded by idealists who apply the hypocrisy label like a scarlet letter of shame.

The problem is that people are not easily divided into saints and sinners. Most of them are more complicated and more interesting, a mixture of strengths, weaknesses, insights, and blind spots. If you demand perfection, you’ll be disappointed. If you decide only to listen to perfect people, you’ll find that you are pretty much on your own.

On a related note: Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, says that “hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.”114

One of the worst ideas to come out of the sixties is the belief that good manners are phony because they are inauthentic and insincere. Oddly enough, this is treated as a profound insight, even though it should be obvious that manners are the oil that allows society to survive the frictions of having to be in the same room with people you can’t stand.

Good manners include being polite to people who annoy you, smiling and shaking the hands of people you think are jackasses, pretending to be grateful for presents you don’t like, and acting interested when your uncle tells his boring stories and lame jokes. They also mean being kind to people we do not know and putting guests and strangers at their ease.

Is this hypocrisy? It is civilization, and you ought to try it.