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