Mainstream, normal, modern Western people are atheist materialists, who believe (assume) that there is neither purpose nor meaning in the universe - and that death mean annihilation.
This strongly implies that nothing really matters.
Yet they behave much, much better than would be implied by their assumptions would entail. Indeed, some of the best behaved and most virtuous people are atheist/ materialist/ nihilists.
In other words, they are reverse hypocrites!
That is: they fail to live down to their beliefs!
While this is, of course, overall A Good Thing - it is in tendency a bad thing.
Because over time this reverse-hypocritical atheist materialism has no principled grounds on which to oppose the continual erosion of morals and values.
And therefore morals and values have not just become corrupted, but in many instances inverted: such that evil is advocated as good, and good demonized as evil.
Furthermore; reverse hypocrites see no need to revise their beliefs; because at any moment in time they can plausibly deny the implications of their own assumptions.
They can argue (to themselves) that (for instance) although they have no reason to refrain from lying and exploiting 24/7; they often tell the truth and genuinely try to help people.
They always behave much better than they need to ("need" according to their beliefs) - from which they infer that it doesn't matter that their own asserted values permit, or even encourage, short-term selfishness, and justify living for personal gratification here-and-now.
Probably it is this reverse-hypocrisy of the Godless majority that has helped make ordinary hypocrisy into something regarded as an extreme form of wickedness...
Such that mainstream modern media stories have a common narrative trope; that excoriates "respectable" religious people for failing to live up to their public spirited high ideals; while heaping praise upon selfishly hedonistic people when they - very occasionally - behave altruistically.
Thus: an habitually altruistic and hard-working individual who preaches idealistic honesty but lapses from it into a selfish lie is a common villain of hypocrisy; while an habitual con-trickster or thief can become the reverse-hypocritical anti-hero by a single courageous act of truth-telling at the climax of the tale!
In other words, reverse hypocrisy has become a cardinal virtue, while the hypocrisy of having higher ideals than can be reached in practice is treated as a cardinal sin.
What is needed is for the reverse-hypocrites to do a bit of hard-thinking about why they behave so much better than their beliefs; and whether this is a good thing, or not.
Because if we really do regard our good behaviour as really a good thing; then surely we ought not to embrace fundamental beliefs and assumptions that actively contradict our good behaviour?
4 comments:
I've been reading books about the history of the hippie and punk movements, and an oft-expressed sentiment is, "A hippie is a mean person pretending to be nice; a punk if a nice person pretending to be mean." In other words, the "peace and love" hippies were hypocrites, but the explicitly nihilistic punks were reverse-hypocrites.
I think we need to distinguish among three different things:
1. What a person ought to believe and value according to his "official" beliefs
2. What he actually believes and values
3. His behavior
Reverse-hypocrites have a mismatch between 1 and 2. Ordinary hypocrites also have a mismatch between 1 and 2, while weak-willed believers (often incorrectly viewed as hypocrites) have a mismatch between 2 and 3.
When I was an atheist, I was a weak-willed reverse hypocrite, with both mismatches. I had moral ideals which didn't really make sense in the context of my atheism, but I also often failed to live up to those ideals, and my atheism (offering no firm ground from which to resist temptation) obviously contributed to those failures.
@Wm -
That's a neat joke about hippies versus punks.
I agree with your distinctions, and I think that they have probably been discussed somewhere in the earlier posts I linked - however, I am here casually grouping the weak-willed believers with the correctly-defined hypocrites; because that is what "most people" do, all the time and systematically!
There have been times in my life when I had something the punk attitude in some respects, in that there were times when I tried to live *down* to my nihilism (when this was expedient or gratifying) because I could "see no reason" why I should not - but I was too naturally puritanical for this to be valid, or even gratifying.
But the genuine fact that so many people are "gratuitously" much better than their beliefs tell them they ought to be - does, in my experience, serve as a serious block against them doing anything about the mismatch.
It provides a reassurance about themselves that, while true in the short term, is false in the longer term.
In other words, the lack of a belief-assumptions basis for good behaviour *almost guarantees* that such people Will Be corrupted over time, when social pressures are even slightly in that direction.
It is a source of disappointment that extremely few people I have known over a long period will acknowledge to themselves their own very Very obvious corruption from this cause. I suppose it is so statistically normal to be thus corrupted, that it has become morally normative.
I think this especially when people who are theoretically signed up to woke and political correctness actually have a sense of humour, proportion, and respect for tradition.
@M - yes indeed.
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