An essay on phoniness

Should we assume it's a given in human affairs?

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And now, on to today’s newsletter:

It’s time to take a look at the broad subject of insincerity.

It comes in several flavors. There’s outright mendacity. There’s duplicity, which is a little different. Duplicity leaves a little wiggle room on the part of the liar to lay claim to a nobler motive, as in, “I was gaslighting that person so as to steer him or her away from a bad decision,” although it more often than not is done in the service of the liar.

There’s hypocrisy. My view of this one has evolved a bit. I used to say that hypocrisy didn’t bother me much, because it has no bearing on whether that which the hypocrite is spouting off about has any veracity. A true fact remains true even if it’s subjected to widespread hypocrisy. But, as I shared in my newsletter “An Interview With Myself,” I came to see that in at least one instance, it has implications for societal perception that can take us far afield from the truth:

You have said that you’re really not too worked up about hypocrisy, since someone being a hypocrite doesn’t prove anything about the veracity of the principle they’re being hypocritical about. Are there any exceptions to that? 

Yes. Climate alarmists. The fact that they use apocalyptic rhetoric to try to drum up fear among the public and then hop on private jets to go to conferences in fancy locales indicates to me that they’ve calculated that they can live in a way that runs counter to what they’re peddling, and the cattle-masses will still buy their phony vision of doom.

I’ve also been thinking about how often Jesus lays into hypocrites in the Gospels. If the Word Among Us wanted to stress its status as a sin, attention must be paid.

What’s. been on my mind lately, though, is phoniness. Again, I think it’s a distinct type of insincerity. It seems to me it’s marked by a fundamental inconsistency. It’s a trait of those unwilling to spend significant time examining what they really stand for. It stems from the mindset that says, “Yeah, I guess I believe this, or at least enough to come across with conviction in this situation on which my advantage depends, but who knows what I’ll need to espouse tomorrow?”

The obvious example of a phony is a braggart who claims to excel at something and hopes to high heaven he’ll never be called on to demonstrate that he does.

Some phonies truly wish they weren’t. In moments of doubt, I’ve considered that I might be a phony about my Christian faith. That may actually be a healthy way to spur ever deeper levels of consideration. Why do I want to not be a phony about this? Why does it matter what I believe? To what extent am I driven by the need for self-congratulation, and, on the other hand, to what extent have I concluded that the Christian cosmology provides the only complete explanation of reality?

What’s really spurred my focus on phoniness of late is the inescapable presence of politics in our daily lives as Americans.

The last week or so - the run-up to last night’s Super Tuesday primaries - has seen a fevered offering of takes on how to proceed depending on one’s declared principles. It’s gotten quite convoluted. Among Democrats, there’s the question of where to pledge loyalty based on the degree of governmental presence in American life. Bernie Sanders, of course, represents the repository of one’s hopes if the answer is “maximum governmental presence.” (The question of whether Sanders is a phony is interesting to ponder. On the one hand, he’s walked the hard-left talk since he was a young man. On the other, he surely knows the price tag for what he’s proposing is impossible to pay.)

It’s interesting that, among remaining (as of this writing) candidates, the next most overtly socialist (although she refuses the label; does that make her a phony?) figure is Elizabeth Warren, and the difference between Sanders’s delegate count at this point and hers is like a drop off a steep cliff. At the other end of this now-narrowed spectrum is Joe Biden, who is being called a moderate by a variety of people. That’s a marked shift in the Overton Window, given his commitment to abortion as a “right” and his pandering to identity-politics militants.

Recall what I said a couple of paragraphs above about some phonies wishing they weren’t. That strikes me as being applicable to a large percentage of Trump supporters. They’re aware that tariffs have eroded all the good that the tax cuts did. They’re aware that the recent deal with the Taliban and the pullout from northern Syria do not extricate the US from “endless wars,” and that appeasement of North Korea did not move the needle regarding the tension between the Hermit Kingdom and the civilized world. Still they’re so invested in the vision to which they’ve signed on that acknowledging these things can’t be considered.

And then there’s the object of their devotion: Donald Trump himself. It’s quite obvious that he’s a phony. He’s been all over the map in terms of policy and basic ideology all his adult life. He has quite forthrightly said that, of course, he’s donated money to competing candidates for a given office, so as to hedge his bets should he need favors in some real-estate-development situation. He had an extended phone conversation with Bill Clinton in the spring of 2016 regarding whether he should jump into the political fray on the Republican side. In the past, he was staunchly pro-choice and advocated universal health care. Given that he’s never backtracked from his assertion that he doesn’t need forgiveness, his chumminess with certain pastors is obviously phony.

The Trump phenomenon raises an uncomfortable question for me. Ted Cruz was my candidate, right up to the moment that terrible night of May 3, 2016 in Indianapolis when he stepped before the microphone to formally drop out. He admirably exhorted delegates to that year’s GOP convention to vote their consciences, deliberately leaving Trump’s name out of his remarks. He came in for a fair amount of opprobrium over it, which boosted my already-high estimation of him. I would like to have seen him say forthrightly that no one who treats his wife and father the way Trump did can expect an endorsement, and can in fact go to Hell, but there was a lesson for me to learn about graciousness and maturity in the fact that he didn’t.

But as early November approached, and in the years since, he’s been disturbingly willing to “work with the President.” I’m not sure what he could do to ameliorate my dismay at this point.

For that matter, do we need to conclude that Mike Pence is a phony? Pence had breakfast with Cruz at the governor’s mansion the morning of that awful primary and gave Cruz his public support. More broadly, Pence has said repeatedly, gong back to his days as an Indianapolis talk-radio host, that he is a Christian first, a conservative second and a Republican third. Since becoming Vice President, he’s compromised that formulation regularly.

All this leads to a question worth exploring: Do citizens need to form their assessments of politicians assuming from the get-go that phoniness of some degree is baked into all of them by the very nature of that occupation?

In other words, do we need to put up with phoniness to be about the business of participating in our national life?

Let’s take it out to a wider sphere of consideration. Do we need to put up with some measure of phoniness in out dealings with others generally? How about spouses and other family members?

It’s probably the case that an acceptance of any human’s fallen nature necessitates cutting any and all folks in one’s life at least a little slack.

The challenge may be in convincing them that you’re not being a phony about it.