The End of Hypocrisy? (was: Why Does Self-Discovery Require a Journey?)

From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 14 2003 - 04:00:11 MDT

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    This thread seems to have bogged down into a largely fruitless discussion
    of what the word "want" should mean, and a potentially fruitful but slow
    discussion of whether it is good (or right) to give people what they want
    or what they say they want. Let me try a different approach and ask: what
    are the prospects for ending, or at least greatly reducing, hypocrisy?

    Humans seem to have evolved so that most people espouse "high" ideals while
    their inclination to actually follow those ideals is primarily driven by
    social pressure. People self-deceive enough so that they usually do no see
    the conflicts between their ideals and their actions. Others are better
    able to see through such deception, and may or may not use that as a basis
    of social pressure. Some people have less hypocrisy, either by raising
    their actions to their ideals, or lowering their ideals to their actions,
    but these are a clear minority. And the ideals of some are not the ideals
    of others; for example, some hold ideals of racial or cultural purity,
    uncompromising revenge against longtime enemies, or the restoration of a
    human-free nature. (Ideals seem to be less consistent than, and to vary
    more than, actions.)

    Three questions come to mind:
    1) To what extent might we expect humans or their descendants to reduce
    their hypocrisy?
    2) If they do, in which direction will the resolution be, toward current
    ideals or actions?
    3) Will such a reduction in hypocrisy be a good thing?

    One approach to reducing hypocrisy is preaching, i.e., pointing out to
    people how their actions fall short of their ideals. This seems to have
    mostly played itself out; preaching has been long tried and our ability to
    self-deceive seems robust against it. Perhaps such preaching will be more
    effective when aided by more detailed descriptions of how evolution helps
    us to self-deceive, but I see little evidence of this in the behavior of
    those who best understand evolutionary psychology and self-deception. The
    jury is still out here though.

    Another approach to reducing hypocrisy is social pressure enhanced by more
    transparency. Our tendency to hypocrisy evolved in small tribes where
    transparency is far higher than in our modern society. But perhaps a
    future society will be even more transparent, for example letting us see
    each other's thoughts. However, it is not clear that social pressure
    always reduces self-deception and hypocrisy; on some issues it may well
    increase hypocrisy.

    A third approach to reducing hypocrisy is a more totalitarian
    democracy. Democracy seems to induce people to vote their ideals, since
    there are almost no other personal consequences of your vote besides how
    that vote modifies your self-image. So the more kinds of behavior are
    dictated by a totalitarian democracy, the more such behavior might be
    dictated by shared ideals. This tendency might be restrained by
    international competition, if some ideals make nations lose such
    competition, but democratic world government might be less restrained.

    Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
    Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
    MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
    703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



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