As I muddle along on the journey through nascent middle age, I find myself regularly reassessing the peculiar habits of mind, patterns of personal humbug, and the hobgoblins that needle me at the uttermost edges of consciousness.
I disclaim from the outset that I have never been accused of being cheerful in my thinking. You have been warned.
We are social creatures, of course, and so there is always some level of self-censorship, some modicum of hypocrisy that punctuates our behaviors and interactions, whether we are fully aware of it or not.
Hypocrite at its root means to to play a part, to sift through our inner stores and give answer to another thespian upon the stage. It has always struck me as amusing that we reliably assume that everyone else is hypocritical, while ignoring that we are almost all hypocrites of some variety. All of us players upon the stage, delivering the lines we have learned by rote, comporting ourselves as expectation has dictated.
VANITY FAIR
Our lives are not infrequently a vanity fair, “a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.”
And, yet, we persist in believing that at least we — and the most belovèd of our friends and relations — are free from falseness, from pretension, from the deceptions of a mind that inclines manically toward deceiving itself above all else.
As Thackarey smartly and sarcastically puts it, the best advice for life is to,
Be shy of loving frankly; never tell all you feel, or (a better way still), feel very little. See the consequences of being prematurely honest and confiding, and mistrust yourselves and everybody… At any rate, never have any feelings which may make you uncomfortable, or make any promises which you cannot at any required moment command and withdraw. That is the way to get on, and be respected, and have a virtuous character…
Better yet is to disbelieve that this is, in fact, what you are doing.
Believe of yourself that you love artlessly, that you tell all you feel, that you are honest and confiding, trusting to a fault, comfortable with all things, and good for your assurances. Believe these deceits strongly enough and you can, without qualm or complaint, believe in your own respectability and virtue.
And then when the world sinks its teeth in, when people talk about “each others’ houses, and characters, and families — just as the Joneses do about the Smiths,” believe that you are faultless, genuine, unencumbered by such humbugs; safe from their scrutiny, that the peril is always someone else’s peril.
We shrink from disapproval and castigation, pruning away at the parts of ourselves that we worry are deformed, indecent, or too easily misunderstood. We ply and shape the clay of our masks everyday with little snips and censorships. And what’s more, we hardly even realize that this is what we are doing.
We have almost entirely abandoned the lexicon of shame, guilt, and all of their social attendants; and so we plod through a choreography we no longer believe exists but which has never released its thrall upon us.
We are all subjects of the people from whom we seek approval and inclusion. The social groups to whom we conform have narrowed, they have become smaller and more particular and, dare I say, more vicious, but we subject ourselves to them and their opinions, natheless.
And when we are found to be out of sorts with one or another, we are inevitably the recipients of accusations of inauthenticity and hypocrisy — the cardinal sins of a world that cannot acknowledge its stagecraft and scripting.
Or, self-defensively, we wield those accusations against others who draw attention by their missteps to our own hidden faults.
Before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.
We wish to be better than we are, we hope to be respected more than we deserve, and we ache to avoid whatever hellfires might singe us; — even if it means throwing others to the flames.
HYPOCRITES ALL AND NONE
Johnson wrote rather sagely on the subject of hypocrisy,
It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For, without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear, and is in the same state with him that teaches upon land the art of navigation, to whom the sea is always smooth, and the wind always prosperous…
It is easy to design. It is easy to say a thing, to purpose to do a thing; and then to ultimately fail in the deed itself — beset as we are by the vicissitudes of chance and circumstance.
We erect vast walls of principle and precept, towering parapets of finely honed identity; darksome enclosures of self-description within which we hide, protecting ourselves from the judgments of others. We often believe in these edifices with our whole hearts, with all our zeal, with every last fiber of being we can muster.
Just the same, the stones will frequently spall and crumble and the mortar more often than not disintegrates, a gimcrack mix of little more than mud and straw; we are never quite as good as we wish we were, never quite as constant as our designs would suggest.
Our sturdiest seeming façades have a way of tumbling down and exposing us at our most vulnerable; and the world and its votaries do what the world and its votaries do: flood in through every breach and consume us.
We are, therefore, not to wonder that most fail, amidst tumult and snares and danger, in the observance of those precepts, which they laid down in solitude, safety, and tranquility, with a mind unbiased, and with liberty unobstructed…
It is no wonder — no wonder at all — that most fail, that most of us are at some point revealed to be hypocrites of a kind. We understand this intellectually, but do we choose to employ the knowledge justly or with wisdom? Almost never. Instead, we try desperately to maintain our fictions and openly pick apart the fictions of others.
Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory.
It is the commonness of interpersonal injustice, the kind of injudiciousness which marks our insult-ready and reputation-demolishing culture; that intercepts the better impulses of our nature and snuffs them out; that enkindles instead a relish for another’s failure if it means that attention is diverted from our own.
However sincerely convinced we are of being our best, almost none of us have obtained the victory; and we are always a thin partition from the possibilities of calamity and defeat.
It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit…
Ah, but although we design, our designs are rarely deep and although we deceive our deceits are rarely studied. Mendacity is, frankly, quite uncommon; where our native incompetence and limitedness is legion. We promise and we profess, but rarely do we perform half so well as we would have wished.
We are hypocrites in the strictest sense, “but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world…” There is very little real hypocrisy, that is, very little intentional hypocrisy, very little hypocrisy motivated by conscious desire and malice. The truth is,
… [W]e resolve to do right, we hope to keep our resolutions, we declare them to confirm our own hope, and fix our own inconstancy by calling witnesses of our actions; but at last habit prevails, and those whom we invited to our triumph laugh at our defeat…
And it is in their laughter and by our shame, that we shrink and we grow vicious. We lash out most in our failure.
HUMBUGS ALL THE WAY DOWN
I suppose that it is here that we must land and try to wring some kind of resolution out of these admissions. We are a people that cannot simply live with the facts, we must always endeavor to transcend our unavoidable limitedness and tackle the problem until a solution emerges.
Let us decline then into the sort of confessional literature that our society has come to expect, let us mine our souls and combine our extractions into a concrete slurry, letting it cure under the heat of the madding crowd, an ossified monument of the towering humbug we feign to — nay, believe we— subvert.
I have spent the better part of two decades pursuing a tack of forthrightness and apparent vulnerability, that if nothing was told in the darkness, then nothing could be spoken in the light, “[f]or there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.”
If you have no secrets, then no secrets can be weaponized and wielded against you, right?
But the truth is, it’s all bullshit; it’s all just another layer of the façade, layers all the way down to nothing; in this case a layer which deflects away from the things we truly fear revealing about ourselves by using honesty and openness as a shield.
I have confessed to any number of failures, errors, misjudgments, and unattractive qualities:
To being vain and acquisitive, to being quarrelsome and distrustful; to being entirely too lascivious in mind and inclined toward a libertinism that I must actively restrain; to being contemptuous and intolerant of so many of our civilization’s under-examined conventions; to suffering from melancholy and the impulses to self-dissolution; to being disdainful of credentials over outcomes; to having vanishingly little time or care for our most frequent theological, philosophical, and social preoccupations.
These are all true, as true as they can possibly be, but are also omissive.
They leave out that beneath the vanity there is dissatisfaction with myself and fear that I am ugly and unlikable; beneath the acquisitiveness is a fear of dependency and reliance upon others.
Beneath the quarrelsomeness is an abiding sense that I am worthless, halfwitted, and unable to deliver on my promises and so I must be defensive and on guard to protect what I know I don’t deserve.
Beneath the lasciviousness and libertinism is the unspoken reality that while I am as weak as anyone, I am also astonishingly vanilla; that what I find most covetable is not my neighbor’s wife or my neighbor’s ass, but prodding the crevices of human beings’ most untrammeled impulses, turning them over abstractly and unarousingly in my mind, and rarely entertaining them very deeply myself.
The depression, or the attempts at and thoughts of suicide? Periodic, infrequent, and rarely acute anymore. I’ve been unusually content — despite my lackluster self-assessment — for long enough that mental struggles and traumas of earlier days barely even make less of an impression upon me, exert far less influence over me.
And yet, trauma is now currency and without it you lack precisely the resources necessary within the zeitgeist to warrant consideration. And, so, however untroubled I may now be by past experiences, they have become the fluff which couches anything that I wish to say with authority.
Yes, authority. The very credentials which I abhor, the measurable outcomes I prefer? Well, I take full advantage of that with which credentials have privileged me, whether they’re on record or they are more intangible. And past outcomes become a form of qualifier that is inevitably used to insure future outcomes against doubt and criticism.
Not wasting time with or caring about popular preoccupations? These are not infrequently based in a lack of confidence that I have anything cogent to say or an overwhelming cynicism that nothing can be done to resolve them.
But, lo, even these revelations betray some level of omission.
How deeply stratified is the bullshit of which we are almost entirely constructed? How profound is the native hypocrisy, the little concealments, the layers of deception? Who knows? I know a little, but I daren’t pretend I’ve seen the bottle of my own barrel.
THE GREAT END OF PRUDENCE
If we have gained some awareness of them, we are thereafter forever exercising judgment over these self- revelations and concealments. I am quite sure at this late juncture, that the single greatest form of such judgment is prudence.
Prudence takes many forms. It can appear, as it is conventionally understood, in hesitancy to speak or reveal more than is necessary. To be cautious, as it were; although I tend to think that this lacks precisely the foresight implied by the word. Better? It can manifest itself in precisely the opposite. One can exercise an enormous amount of prudence by speaking with little hesitancy, revealing far more than is necessary; and in so doing, ultimately leaving so little to the imagination that there’s hardly anything for ears to hear and shout from the rooftops, that has not already been heard and spoken in the streets.
And why be so prudent? Why accept that we are hypocrites to some degree and measure out our lives in coffee spoons? Acknowledge that we are all concealers of some level of nonsense? And that whether our masks are transparent veils or opaque palls, we must frequently choose how it is that we present ourselves?
Well, as Johnson puts it,
[t]he great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
To be happy at home is often the ultimate business of vanity fair, having navigated all of the capricious expectations outside, having secured the resources necessary to maintain it, having avoided the allures of splendors and acclamations that distract and endanger…
When we are finally shrunk down, the grossest ornaments stripped away, to something near our real proportions, it is the possibilities therein for which we truly pine. The calm, the acceptance, the security, the hope that we might traverse another day unmolested, until we reach our last.
It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them… Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.
We are all hypocrites, we are all humbugs, we are all falsenesses and pretensions, vain and wicked creatures, largely because we so hope. Because we hope to be loved, to be valued, to be understood, to be wanted. We hope to be true, as true as we may be, to be happy, to be finally at ease, in comfort, with compassion, and unalone.
And it is less dreadful to wear the masks, the paints, the yardages of apparel, to deliver the lines, in the shticks of our preferred genres — comic or tragic or psycho-realistic or fabulist or farcical, and live in the hope that we will not be found out, that we will not ultimately be discovered to be comprised of nothing else but this.