Why do we have hypocrisy? Why is hypocrisy so prevalent? Am I wrong to say that most people are ethically harder on others than they are on themselves? Sometimes it may be the reverse but not very often.
I like religion to be defined not by 'how loyal you are to whatever your image of God may be' but rather by how good you are to other people, and to 'the protection, the salvation, and the re-generation of all God's creations, including the Earth and the Universe as a whole. If God helps you get there -- i.e., towards treating other people better -- then great! But if God is leading you down a path of righteousness, unbridled narcissism, nastiness towards others, and destruction, then I challenge your image of God and what you believe HE/SHE is demanding of you...Or you are a hypocrite.
I see some people dressed up in all their religious garbs -- and/or simply regular church goers without the garbs -- and I see these same people cheating and squeezing their employees at work all week long between religious sessions -- and I say 'that isn't religion'....Or at least, it certainly isn't anything close to the type of religion I believe in.
I would trumpet the words and the deeds of a 'humanistic atheist' while ignoring and/or 'deconstructing' the words and deeds of a 'narcissistic Church-goer and/or supposedly religious person' -- a person who spouts off and/or professes to believe in a particular religious philosophy/ ideology that he or she defies and aborts in every action that he or she presents to the world for others to look at, interpret, and evaluate' -- again, the hallmark of hypocrisy...
Hypocrisy basically comes down to either the 'un-integration' of a 'split ego' and/or the workings of a 'narcissistic ego' that is attempting to hide -- with a show of 'smoke and mirrors' -- his or her 'narcissistic activities'. At the extreme, this is the hallmark of the 'psychopathic and/or sociopathic personality'. In greater or lesser degrees of moderation, this is the rest of us.
Except for the case of what might be called 'white lies' (i.e., lying in order to not hurt someone's feelings) -- most forms of lying, cheating, hiding, covering up, non-transparency, hypocrisy, greed, unethical behavior -- these are all the calling cards of the 'unethical, narcissistic personality' at work...
Self enhancement through the 'putting down' and/or 'disrespect and debasement of others' is not a very 'religious' activity in my mind. I see it every day I go to work.
There are good 'employers', bad employers, narcissistic employers, altruistic employers, ethical employers who aim to split the difference between narcissism and altruism, employers who spout an ideology that they cannot, will not, and/or choose not, to live up to, employers who break promises, break comittments, who tell you one thing with 'rose colored glasses on', and then the rose-colored glasses quickly disappear into Never, Never Land....and of course, the same can be said for 'employees' as well...
'Unions' were created to protect the worker from bad employers....and 'free trade' was created by politicians via employers to 'break unions'...
There are 'good unions', 'bad unions', and 'no unions' which is the direction we are going now with 'free trade'. To have 'free trade' with 'third world countries' where workers get paid a dollar an hour, if that, in dehumanistic conditions where they could be working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, that defy any sense of the word 'humanity' ('sweat shops', they are often called) -- a situation that we here, in Canada, are 'following suit' with in order to 'compete' with these third world countries, and in order to just personally 'survive' in a 'country of diminishing wages coupled with rising prices' -- this is what we got with 'free trade'.... a country with 'rising sweat shops', cheaper labour, and a stressed out, overworked, disappearing middle class, at least for those who are a part of the 'plummeting wages scene' and the 'rising competitiion amongst low income earners' who are willing to be paid less and less, and work more and more, just to have a job in a context of high unemployment...
The unscrupulous, narcissistic employer takes advantage of this scene -- and/or is forced to -- in order to compete with the 'cheap goods' coming in from foreign, third world markets...
North America -- as a consequence of 'free trade' -- has become a continent with 'little to no manufacturing' as the 'cheapest goods are coming from foreign markets' in a foreign labour market that North America cannot compete with (at least without tariffs -- gee, I wonder why 'tariffs' were around for a hundred years before 'free trade'?) unless our wages keep tumbling, and/or the wages in these foreign markets start to go up...That is not likely to happen in our lifetime...at least without intervention....
What we need is a 'universal, international minimum wage' where all countries can compete on the same footing...Failing that, if we ever want to see 'manufacturing' in this continent again, we need to re-introduce tariffs...
'Free trade' was presented to us in a spirit of 'Adam Smith Idealistic Capitalistic Ideology'. Back when Mulroney introduced this idea to the Canadian people, I didn't have a clue as to what the ramifications of it would be....
All the talk at the time was about a 'big, bad America' crushing and 'taking over' a much smaller, weaker Canada...
Little did we know that 'free trade' would be a law that would 'favor the weakest economic countries in the world' -- plus the 'multi-international corporations' who were big enough to close down their manufacturing plants in North America and open them up in all these 'weaker economic countries' with a hugely 'cheaper work force'...
A free trade agreement between America, Canada, and Mexico...Gee, who is going to win that agreement? America? Canada? Try Mexico -- and all the American and Canadian Corporations who have enough money to move their manufacturing plants down there...Sorry, all you American and Canadian workers -- particularly, those of you who were a part of a big, bad 'corporate union' -- but you just lost your jobs.
The 'unions' that are left in North America have much less power than they used to which is partly a good thing and partly a bad thing. On the one hand, some corporate unions were becoming increasing 'narcissistic and pathological' in their own management style...leading to 'out of control labour costs'.... Eg. the auto industry....But on the other hand, these unions were the only bargaining power that workers had to protect themselves, and enhance themselves, in an otherwise overpowering context of 'big, bad corporate management wolves'...
Today, it is hard to tell whether some unions are actually working for the workers or 'colluding' with the 'bad corporate management wolves' in their mutual aim to suppress and dehumanize the workers...
Six suicides amongst nurses in a Quebec hospital. The spokesperson for the union said that the nurses all had 'personal family problems'. Interview other 'still living' nurses at the hospital and you find out that the nurses were/are all being forced to work 'unGodly' hours where they had/have no time for 'family' -- no wonder why the six nurses all had 'family problems'. In this context, you have to ask the question: Who is the union working for -- management or the workers?
You have a problem with your phone in Canada. You phone an operator -- and you find that the operator lives in India...
You go to Wal-Mart and you are lucky if you can find a single manufactured good that is made anywhere in North America... For that matter, it is hard to walk into any retail outlet and still find a manufactured good made in North America... Unless the manufacturing -- or 'service' company for that matter -- has either 'imported cheaper labour from other cheaper international work force markets' and/or the 'local labour market wage prices' have been 'forced downwards' by the high unemployment rate and/or the existence of a sufficient body of workers who are 'willing to work for less' than what used to be the going rate...
When it gets to the point where even graduating teachers and lawyers are having a tough time finding jobs and beginning their careers....you get the idea that something is wrong with this picture...
What you have basically is a 'cheapening of the Canadian job market'....
With all due respect to immigrants and refugees, immigrants and refugees should not be let into this country -- except for perhaps a bare minimum -- in a time of a bad recession and high unemployment. Otherwise, you are just putting more and more stress on the backs of Canadians who already live here. Canadians are overtaxed, underemployed, many underpaid, being forced to work longer and longer hours or work two or three jobs to meet inflationary Canadian prices, our Seniors are not sufficiently protected from falling under the Canadian Safety Net -- with pensions that are not sufficient to support them (unless you have the support of a private, corporate or government pension plan...)
A single male (and I presume female) in the 'Employment Works' (Social Assistance, Welfare) Program gets a cheque each month for $585. That is barely enough to cover their rent, let alone their food, transportation, hygiene, clothing...That type of cheque basically puts them under 'house arrest'...
Meanwhile, our federal MPs don't want to disclose their expense accounts.
Does the NDP have a political voice -- and/or an 'idealistic mission' -- anymore?
Jack Layton has been pretty quiet on the political front for the last year or so -- maybe because of personal health reasons -- and no one to really step up in his absence. Just one 'deal with the devil' (i.e., Harper) to give more people on (un)employment insurance more time on the back end to find a job...How about all of the unemployed Canadian workers who have been paying into their federal (un)employment insurance their whole working lives -- and don't even make it 'through the front gate' of UI because of the many 'stipulations' that the federal government puts on 'who qualifies for this insurance' once they become unemployed? If you are 'fired', you are ineligible..
If you 'quit' or 'resign', you are ineligible...If you are 'downsized', you are eligible...The federal government is supposedly trying to 'screen out' unscrupulous, unethical ex-workers here but who in the federal government from this same (un)employment insurance department is looking at 'corporate ethics'....
I call that 'worker profiling' and 'federal government prejudice and discrimination' on who does and doesn't get (un)employment insurance. The only thing that should matter is whether you have paid enough into your government insurance plan to qualify you for drawing it back out when you need it...
I am not a socialist or a capitalist in their respective solitary one-sided perspectives, but rather a 'dialectic-democratic-humanistic' who operates in the context of wanting to integrate the best of capitalism and socialism together in a way that creates a good employer-employee labour situation -- a 'win-win' situation where both parties can work and prosper together, not aim to ravage and pillage each other...
A political and/or corporate hypocrite is someone who professes a particular idealistic ideology on the one hand, but operates by a much 'shadier' set of rules 'under the table' and/or 'behind closed doors' or 'in back alleys' perhaps with 'brief cases full of money'...that won't leave a 'paper' trail behind him or her...
Like Prime Minister Stephen Harper who campaigns on a platform of 'political, democratic transparency' and 'ethical accountability'....who hated the practice of previous Prime Ministers 'stacking the deck' with 'partisan' (read 'Liberal) Senators but had absolutely no problem with 'stacking the deck' with 'Conservative' Senators...I guess 'two wrongs do make a right'...as in a Senate full of 'right' leaning Senators...
And we have our 'Wanna Be Toronto Mayor' -- Mr. Rob Ford -- who seems to have found the right voter audience in his aim to lower Toronto debt and taxes at the same time (doesn't almost every campaigning politician say that?) Mr. Ford has been very outspoken -- even calling City Hall 'corrupt' which obviously didn't go over too well with the existing mayor, David Miller and his Council -- and has supposedly charged ahead in the race to be the next mayor.
Mr. Ford yelled loud and righteously about the wrongfulness and corruptness of an 'untendered, exclusive long term city contract' to an existing restaurant vendor operating on Woodbine Beach... And yet, Mr. Ford turned around and supported the same type of untendered, exclusive long term contract to a restaurant vendor on Sunnyside Beach...The difference...it seems like perhaps the first vendor was a 'lobbyist' who 'belonged' to a competing politician whereas the latter vendor was one of his 'own lobbyists'.... I would definitely say that this discrepancy in Ford's political perspective depending apparently on 'who' exactly the lobbyist/vendor was/is
-- is a big warning 'red flag' to all Torontonian voters...
Let me finish this essay by moving to psychology from politics...
Again, 'hypocrisy' can be -- and usually is -- a sign of 'underlying narcissitic bias'...
We all have to walk a day to day line between how much 'personal narcissism' we are going to let 'surface from the inner depths of our personality to 'outer social (or anti-social) behavior.
And how much narcissism we are going to 'push back down' into our 'inner depths' again....unplayed out in our social (or anti-social) behavior...
Where we draw the line between 'acceptable and unacceptable narcissistic behavior' is probably the truest indicator of our personal 'state of ethics'...and whether our professed 'idealism' and 'idelology' actually matches with, and is 'congruent with', how we actually behave...
As the police credo states....'Deeds speak'...
Freud definitely made some serious 'epistemological mistakes' in my opinion...
And he probably made some serious 'ethical mistakes' as well...
Or his so-called epistemological and ethical mistakes -- like his rigid interpretation of The Oedipal Complex -- may not have been 'mistakes' at all...They may very well have been 'narcissistically motivated'....Like most of the rest of us to differing degrees -- it is possible that he may have simply decided to 'step away from a political, legal, and therapeutic can of worms'...in order not to be 'politically incorrect' and/or have his career jeopardized....Nobody around him at the time apparently wanted to talk about 'childhood sexual assault'...so why should he stick his neck on the line and risk the future of his career? But would he actually intentionally change his Psychoanalytic theory 180 degrees in order to stay out of this can of worms? That is rather mind-boggling and definitely hard to believe...That would indeed be a first degree 'breach of theoretical and therapeutic ethics'....and I don't think I would personally believe Freud capable of that...
Finally, to finish here, there is the relationship between a 'split ego' and 'hypocrisy'... This is the other major reason (besides personal narcissism) for human hypocrisy.
Let's take Freud's first conscious memory again as an example of this type of 'traumacy and transference based, 'split ego' hypocrisy'...
Little Freud at about 3 or 4 years old bursts into his parents bedroom while they are having sex together....He is in shock -- and completely at a loss -- as to undestanding what is happening in front of his eyes with his father probably perched over his mother, in what looks to the little Freud like his dad in a 'power' position 'debasing' his mother... His irate father angrily evicts the little Freud from the parental room, from this 'primal scene'....
This is the moment of most radical change in the little Freud's personality -- the beginning of his 'Primary Transference Complex' (PTC) if you will...The little Freud's ego -- his 'wholistic ego' -- is radically 'split into two' by this shockingly traumatic event...
One side of the little Freud's character at that radical moment in time, in the exact ways remembererd by the little Freud in his memory (which Freud never fully articulated in any kind of detail but which a good psychoanalyst, if he or she knows what to look for, can 'reconstruct' by the many, many essays that Freud wrote about one of his favorite subject matters most intimately connected to his 'PTC' -- specifically, the subject of 'primal memories/phantasies'...) became like the little Freud's father -- 'anally rejecting', 'very private', 'pushing people away from his most personal, private life', and at the same time 'wanting to powerfully possess and dominate/demean/perch over his wife'...
This universal feature of human behavior and 'human transference complexes' has been given the name in Psychoanalysis of 'identification with the aggressor'...I also call it 'identification with the rejector, betrayor, abandoner...' depending on the exact details of the 'primal transference memory'....Sometimes I will also call it 'transference reversal' as one of our 'primal transference phantasies' becomes in effect, the 'transference switching of roles' of our main transference rejector and ourselves...(little Freud and father Freud) and also in this case, the 'winning of his mother' over his main 'Oedipal' rival -- his father -- which means that Freud essentially 'invented' the 'Oedipal Complex' not after 1896 but rather when he was 3 or 4 years old, i.e., as a part of his Primary (or Primal) Transference Scene...
Thus, the second part of the little Freud's new 'split ego' is the 'rebellious child', the deconstructionist, the boy who wants to usurp his father in terms of power, and in terms of power over his mother...The 'little rebel' Freud wanted to 'know absolutely everything that was happening in his parents bedroom that the little Freud did not understand' -- and that his own father would not properly explain to him. In this regard, the little Freud essentially spent the rest of his life pursuing a 'perfectionist's understanding' of anything and everything that could and was happening in 'the primal bedroom'... This he eventually called Psychoanalysis and the study of Psychoanalysis eventually came to include not only the study of 'adult sexuality' but also of 'childhood sexuality'....and the inter-relationship between 'childhood and adult sexual desires and fantasies'...
Thus, the underlying 'hypocrisy' of Freud's character is that he wanted to know anything and everything about everyone else's personal life and yet he didn't want anyone to know anything about his own very private and personal life. This is what I call 'split-ego hypocrisy' the paradox and discordance between that part of his character that 'introjected' his father's attitude of wanting his own 'personal space and privacy' and the other part of the little Freud's character that wanted to know 'absolutely everything about this father's most personal, intimate business'...
The little Freud knew that his father was 'lying' to him, he knew that his father was 'resisting' the truth, he knew that his father was 'defending against' or 'covering up' the 'truth' of what was happening inside his parents' bedroom....and later, with more awareness, the little Freud would come to know that the truth behind 'bedroom doors' was about 'hidden sexuality and hidden sexual impulses'....and Freud was absoutely intent on finding anything and everything about all these 'hidden sexual impulses'.....They would become his life adventure...
Thus, the hipocrisy within Sigmund Freud's character was between the 'voyeur' (the little Freud) and the person who 'didn't like to be watched' (his introjection or identification with his dad)...
And another hipocrisy within Freud's character was between the little Freud who essentially wanted an 'open bedroom policy' and 'the truth that lies behind closed doors' on the one hand and the other part of Freud (his 'topdog' or 'superego' 'rejecting dad') who was 'covering up the truth' and who wanted to 'run a secret society behind closed doors'...
If Freud had really understood his own 'transference complexes', he would have better understood his most important one -- which he didn't....and thus, he couldn't properly see through his own 'transference hypocrisies'... Thus, his 'character flaws' became the 'transferred and/or 'projected' flaws of 'Classical Psychoanalysis'.
For those of you -- whether you be a politician or a philosopher or an economist or a corporate leader, or a scientist, or a psychotherapist, or a therapeutic client -- who really want to properly investigate and understand all the immense potential creative insights of Psychoanalysis -- at its best -- and who do not want to be 'hypocrites' and or 'silenced lambs' who profess to one idealistic ideology while behaviorally subscribing to something else entirely -- for all of you who really have 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' in mind -- in your mind -- I offer you a study of a type of Psychoanalysis that takes the best 'Classical Psychoanalysis' has to offer us -- while eliminating the flaws in Classical Psychoanalysis that were caused by 'the neurotic transference symptoms' in Freud's character....that have been 'transferred again' onto the power brokers and the 'silenced lambs' of The Orthodox, Anal Psychoanalytic Establishment...
I offer you a 'wilder', much more 'unothodox' brand of 'underground' Psychoanalysis...
And I call this brand of 'underground' Psychoanalysis...
'DGB Quantum ('Post-Hegelian' or 'Multi-Dialectic-Democratic) Psychoanalysis'
Shorten it as you wish...
Have a good evening,
-- dgb, Sept. 4th, 2010,
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
