What’s My Problem?
No. 003 14 min

On the man who can name his own hypocrisy and changes nothing

A small inventory of the things I see clearly and continue to do.

There is a particular flavour of self-knowledge I have grown to distrust, and it is the one I rely on most. I can describe, with a precision that would impress a stranger, exactly how I am being dishonest in a given moment — to a friend, to myself, to whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the room — and then, having described it, I proceed. The description is offered as a small, almost generous tax, paid in advance, that buys me the right to continue.1 I do not know when this began. I know that by the time I noticed it, it had already become the principal way I move through the day.

This is, I am told, an advance over the alternative. The unexamined hypocrite at least has the dignity of his confusion. I have no such dignity. I am the examined hypocrite, which is to say, a hypocrite who has read about hypocrisy and intends to keep being one anyway, only now with footnotes. There is something almost industrious about it. I work hard at the explanations. I sometimes think the explanations are the real product, and the behaviour they are explaining is just the raw material I keep producing to feed them.

The cleanest example I can give involves a friend whose calls I do not answer. I have, in my own head, a fully worked-out account of why this is bad, of what it costs him, of what kind of man it makes me, and of how easy the alternative would be. I rehearse this account most weeks. I have never once, in the rehearsing, picked up the phone.

There is a school of thought that says the problem here is shame, that I am punishing myself with the description in order to avoid the smaller pain of acting. I have considered this and I do not think it is true, or rather, I think it is true in the way that everything is true if you squint at it the right way. The honest version is closer to this: I enjoy the description. The description flatters me. It tells me I am the kind of person who notices, and the noticing has come to feel, in some quiet wrong place inside me, equivalent to acting.2

I write this knowing perfectly well that publishing it changes nothing about the underlying behaviour. I am aware that the publishing is itself a continuation of the pattern — another, more elaborate description, paid in advance, against an unchanged future. If you are reading this and you are tempted to admire the candour, I would ask you to resist. The candour is the trick. The candour is what keeps me, this month, exactly where I was last month, only better at explaining it.

What I would like, and what I have so far failed to find, is a kind of self-knowledge that costs me something — not in articulation, which is cheap, but in motion. I do not yet know how to manufacture it. I suspect it cannot be manufactured. I suspect it can only arrive, and when it arrives I suspect I will not greet it warmly, because by then I will have spent so long arranging the furniture around the problem that the room will look, to me, like home.

Footnotes

  1. I notice, even now, that I have written this sentence in a way that makes the tax sound regrettable but reasonable. It is not reasonable. It is, in the strict sense, a bribe, and the person being bribed and the person paying the bribe are the same person, which is the only reason the arrangement works. ↩

  2. The Russians figured this out a hundred and fifty years ago and I am, embarrassingly, only catching up. It is humbling to discover that one’s deepest private discovery is a footnote in a novel one has owned for ten years and not finished. ↩