I was recently watching a Hollywood TV series called Madame Secretary. The star is a woman Secretary of State who has considerable moral fiber and occupational courage, unlike the real ones. In a particularly interesting moment, the star, who had been in the CIA, has a flashback of interrogating a presumably Jihadist prisoner, emotively assaulting him and playing to an audience of millions of viewers. She screams that his militarily modest bombs have killed civilians but missed Americans, so what possible justification could allow him to see that kind of attack as worthy?
There is of course zero notice that Madame Secretary and her State Department, routinely obliterate innocent civilians on a scale the Jihadist could not even dream of, often hitting no military targets, just unleashing unmitigated terror.
What’s more, of the millions of viewers watching Madame Secretary’s castigation of what she deemed mindless murder, how many said to themselves, “hold on, isn’t what she just said a condemnation not only of this guy she is about to send off to be tortured and killed, but also of herself?”
Flash forward a couple of days and I am watching TV news, or reading any newspaper, or perusing the web —what have you— and we have another moment that feels more like an eternity.
Pundits, scholars, and officials all shout the same perfectly pitched prescription: the people in the streets in Ferguson, Missouri, must wake up to the necessity to abide the law and avoid violence or be punished. Once again, it doesn’t even occur to the pontificating pundits, scholars, and officials that their mantra should apply tenfold to the Police, the district attorney, and the State’s Armies of the Night.
Again, irony morphs into hypocrisy revealing pathology.
The events in Ferguson induced a flashback for me. Nearly half century ago, at the time of the Chicago riots post MLK’s assassination, in front of outraged demonstrators, the archangel of justice —then Mayor Daley of Chicago— preens into the limelight and pronounces that the forces of good must “shoot the looters to kill.”
Daley was announcing his strategy for dealing with everyday folks, who had pushed past passivity to outrage, and even —egad— to stealing commodities rather than merely wishing they could afford them; though they were mostly trying to protest against the horrific war in Indochina, where the slogan was everything that flies bomb anything that moves.
And I remembered thinking to myself nearly fifty years ago, “maybe Thug Daley has a point.” Maybe we should say, “okay, sure, Mayor, you practice your vicious shoot-the-looters-to-kill policy, but if you do, then surely the policy should apply to all looters, not just poor ones dissenting horrible policies.”
And so there arose the irony or hypocrisy or pathology —take your pick— because Daley’s norm, if applied perfectly consistently, would sanction him shooting not only himself, but his cronies and the rich and powerful sectors he lap-dogged for. All of them looters, albeit with pens.
We live in a world that is so morally, socially, and intellectually bent out of shape that plain old language is finding it almost impossible to convey just how degrading events are.
We are, each and all, so caught up in society’s maelstrom of mendacity that we only seem able to have norms and apply them —don’t loot, don’t be violent, be just, or whatever— when doing so is serviceable to our agendas, not universally.
This is unmitigated hypocrisy. It abounds when people talk about laws, justice, equity, fairness, peace, democracy, participation, and just about anything worth time and attention, though they never need these terms when using them would show the lies in their agendas, or benefit others.
Is there a tactic that can penetrate our rationalizations and mystifications? Some would say humor can do it and sometimes I think so, but, I suspect that, it can’t, not really.
People laugh at politically revealing sarcasm, sure, but they don’t retain the insights. Whether it is Russell Brand, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart or whoever else, audiences get most of the jokes, perhaps, but somehow the experience produces laughs but not actions, momentary but not lasting insights. Humor gets big audiences and so isn’t totally marginalized. It undoubtedly does some good. But ultimately, I think we have to acknowledge, has limited impact.
What about scathing analyses without the patina of humor? This seems to succeed more per recipient, but there are still two problems. First, the percentage who hear or read or see scathing analyses and who get beyond short term revelation and appreciation to lasting passionate insight and action still isn’t that great.
If Chomsky, Pilger, Roy, or whoever gives a talk to 500 or 1000 people, everyone seems, in the moment, to resonate with the message, but how many move from momentary solidarity to passionate action? Considerably more do per listener than Colbert can move, I would guess, but still not too high.
We need to educate through our actions. And it is true that seeing people taking action, and hearing or seeing reporting that reveals their motives, will push some into motion. Yet, look back over the years, and it is also clear that to date the impact of such “teaching moments” are ultimately rather modest.
Sometimes lots of people see others taking action, other times not so many, but in both cases, as with other avenues to communicating what ought to be self evident, the need for change rarely sticks in the mind, much less does it have the power to generate sustained involvement.
Think about some local picketing or leafleting —or if you prefer, think about something far more massive, such as the Occupy movement or global warming actions— when the dust clears on such efforts to educate by deeds, some folks who saw or heard about it are uplifted into a new stance, true, and good, but most fall back into familiar old patterns.
So a question arises: Could there be an antidote to persistent passivity in the capacity to comprehend hypocrisy while passively abiding it, or in the capacity to briefly partake in passionate dissent without becoming a sustained passionate dissenter?
Here is a possibility to consider: The commonality is hopelessness. The antidote is hope.
If everything seems to be horribly vile, one can choose to rebel and seek change in a sustained way, or one can perhaps get momentarily indignant, but in any event fall back to passively ignoring the injustice.
Perhaps becoming an activist is not bound up in the quality of the revelation of hypocrisy one encounters, nor even in the scale of hypocrisy or in perceiving the harm it can do, but instead in the prospects for successfully overcoming the hypocrisy. If prospects for success seem to exist, admitting hypocrisy and actively confronting it make sense.
Activism can lead to good outcomes, but if such positive prospects seem to not exist, then admitting hypocrisy and confronting it appears to be futile, painful, and purposeless.
If the above successfully explains the difficulty of generating sustained passionate dissent, then attempts to inspire resistance to injustice must not only reveal the injustice and display the associated hypocrisy of it, such attempts must also inspire confidence in the efficacy of resisting the injustice. That is where most energies need to go.
We need less effort going to piling up revelation after revelation. We need more effort going to motivating belief in the efficacy of overcoming our problems with positive gains.
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