Hypocrisy is a virtue

Do not sit up when others are lying down
unless it is to keep their feet in your lap
[Sorry, boys, this is just an illustration.]

“You’re a hypocrite,” an old mate of mine told me a few months back when I criticised certain practices of a religious community in a WhatsApp group of hostel mates. “You criticise the community and yet work in an institution run by the community.”

He was right. I left the WhatsApp group soon after that when I realised that there was an unbridgeable gap between most members there and me. But I didn’t leave my job. “I won’t be able to live without that much hypocrisy,” I explained to another friend who raised the same question this morning when he called me up to invite me to his daughter’s wedding. “Even a hospital in Kerala has a religion,” I said. There is no escape from certain facts and factors of the society. Hypocrisy is essential if you want to live in peace in any society.

“Think of the workplace as a kind of theatre in which you are always wearing a mask.” I would have found it extremely hard to digest that counsel of Robert Greene [in his book, Mastery] in my youth. These friends who accused me of hypocrisy knew me only as a young man. They are not aware of how much I have changed, how worldly-wise I have become especially in the last quarter of my life hitherto.

I who detested hypocrisy as a deadly vice in my youth am now not only a hypocrite myself but also recommend hypocrisy as a virtue to those who genuinely need that counsel. I wish someone had taught me this in my youth.

It is unwise and even dangerous to be what you are in most places especially if you happen to have thoughts different from those of the majority. The majority of people are conformists. They make groups precisely because they are conformists. Religion is the most sacred group for them. Other groups are no less sacred. The dominant culture at your workplace, at the club of which you are a member, in your village community, or in any other social group is a fabrication of these conformists. If you are markedly different from them, you make them feel terribly uncomfortable and insecure. Insecurity is a deadly thing; it brings out the demons within people. Why do you want to waste your time wrestling with demons? It is better to pretend to conform. Hypocrisy is a virtue.

You can share your dissent and the comic as well as traumatic experiences engendered by that dissent with your friends outside the group. You can write about them in appropriate places, as I do. But never be foolish enough to create unnecessary enemies in any social group. Do not stand up when everyone in the group is lying down.

The most dangerous people in any group, with whom you should exercise hypocrisy as much as you can, are the moral custodians of the group. Self-appointed moral custodians of any group are people who suffer from severe insecurity problems. Anyone who suffers from insecurity problems is best kept as far from you as possible. Beware particularly of moralists.

People who have insecurity problems will never attack you directly. They are like snakes that lie concealed in the grass. They will bite you stealthily. They have valid reasons for doing that. They can never stand up to your boldness and potentials. They don’t have it in them. That is precisely why they need to conform with ferocious loyalty. Their conformity, its ferocity, is a shield placed over their insecurities. Your dissent is an arrow you shoot straight into those insecurities. No one will forgive you for such inhumanity. Yes, they will project your deed – however noble you may think it is – as inhuman or anti-group or anti-national or anti-anything.

Practise hypocrisy. Anyone can learn it without much effort.

Next post will be: Jealousy: how to guard against it