One of the aspects of the contemporary world that bothers me the most is the tendency for people to want others to do as they say and not as they do. For me, if someone is unwilling to live according to the standard that they wish to enforce on others, I consider them to be completely unacceptable and will actively push back against the standards that they wish to enforce upon me. I think this has always been a personal tendency of mine, but it became more noticeable in me after 2020 when I would see people seeking to enforce draconian and completely ineffective restrictions on behavior who themselves viewed their own convenience and pleasure as being more important than needing to follow the same restrictions for themselves. Elites could meet in large numbers without masks and celebrate the rarified air of each other’s company but woe be to the peasant who wanted to go to church or to a family event with more than ten people or they might have the police called on them if a snitch reported on them to the authorities. Similarly, it angers me to a high degree to see and hear elites buy houses in coastal locations like Martha’s Vineyard or Maui and fly to Davos (and other places) on private jets while opining that common people need to get used to going without gasoline-powered vehicles, air conditioning, refrigeration, and eating meat. I cannot print the words that come to mind on such a family friendly blog as this one, but such people are accursed and I look forward to the judgment they will receive in the world to come for their hypocrisy and for the misery they seek to inflict upon their moral superiors.

Occasionally, though, I see these tendencies on a more mundane level, and I find it still bothers me. Knowing that people are most irritated and bothered by those problems that they themselves struggle with, I wonder to what extent I struggle with the urge to be a teacher of wisdom and obedience to law without being so. To what extent does my own life carry the divide between virtue praised and a lack of virtue practiced? It is easy, I suppose, to recognize that it is a common failing among people who find themselves to be knowledgeable to know a great deal more than they actually do, and that it is very easy to read and apply principles of wisdom and righteousness in the lives of others while not being faithful to doing so in one’s own life. The danger of hypocrisy is never one that can be safely pinned on others alone. It is of vital importance for us to understand how we ourselves fall short of the standard that we wish to apply on others. Few of us, I hope, are hypocritical enough to claim to be environmentalists because of the harsh standards we think other people ought to be subject to while exempting ourselves from such standards because we are elites, but to what extent do all of us consider ourselves to be above the laws and standards that we hold others to? It is easy for us, knowing our motives and plans, to justify deviations from practices we more strictly hold others to, since we do not know what they were thinking or feeling and cannot always be bothered to ask.

To what extent can we struggle with obedience while retaining the credibility to urge others to do what is right? Surely, none of us are perfect in our obedience, and someone who is uncharitable will view any shortcomings as a means of disqualifying us as moral authorities. Yet a more fair-minded person who does not wish to consider someone to be unworthy of being an authority simply for being an imperfect human being must still struggle with how one draws the line between someone who conscientiously struggles to do what is right and sometimes falls short–sometimes even conspicuously in some areas of life–and someone who is an out and out hypocrite. It is by no means an easy or straightforward thing to determine the line between the two, especially because we do not always know to what extent people are aware of or struggle against the shortcomings that might be seen as hypocritical by others. To be sure, it is easier for us to show mercy to those who are merciful in their use of authority and who do not think of themselves as being above and beyond the struggle to do what is right while having struggles which are obvious to others who are not so blinded as self-deception as we all tend to be when it comes to examining ourselves and comparing ourselves to others.

Twice within the last few days I have seen striking cases to me of people who thought of themselves as people of great spiritual authority who had to me obvious examples where they fell short of basic moral standards of what was right, and it angered me to see people who themselves behaved so unrighteously be so hard on others and so blind to their own failings. What gives people who cannot behave towards others with the respect the supposed authority to claim that other people who think and feel differently from them struggle with familiar demons? What is it that makes people think that their own knowledge and search for power as a patriarch or spiritual person makes them exempt from treating others–even their own parents–with proper respect? It is hard to understand how people can be so dogmatic as to deny that anything could cancel out their own authority or their own position but that their own obligations are things that can be canceled without any kind of difficulty whatsoever. Is it so hard to see that our rights and our obligations spring from the same source, and if the one is without exception than so is the other? If we have God-given rights and privileges that none can deny, so to our obligations are also without exception, for God is just and without partiality, and because we are explicitly told that by the same standard we judge we also will be judged. It is easy to mouth the words, but how much do we take them to heart and allow them to modify our conduct accordingly?