A new kind of hypocrisy

The Backstory

Politics exists always at two levels: personal and corporate. It's either the combined similar personal views that build a corporate view, or a corporate view that influences a personal view that feeds the strength of a corporate one. Both these processes run parallelly. Though not in proportional consistency, it's never only the one and not the other. What's important about this idea is that it's the personal politics that drives anything remotely political. It's always personal to corporate, or corporate to personal to corporate. 

Both politics differ in essence. One is concerted, organised, comes from a place of good self-awareness of what you stand for and an idea of what it is you're supposed to/should do about it. The other is the opposite. It is none of those, and something that fits like hand in glove in a way that you don't know even know that the glove is on. Like you get up in the morning believing in something for no apparent reason and that something is completely and totally you. You know nothing else, will believe nothing else and will fight for nothing else. That's your whole primary universe. Anything new causes enough cognitive dissonance to behead someone who threatens it (if you choose to give in), and it can take any shape. It decides your views on gender equality, soceital norms and every other subject important at the time. It's like a beast that controls you, and you have no clue it does. You just puppet along.

But that's the extreme version. There's a milder version of personal politics that far more self-aware. It's more rationalised and is open to other ideas and evolving. It absorbs the intricacies of the nature of differences between different people's ideas, wishes and wants. It submits to contemporary reality and accepts that we function within it. You find it proportions, sometimes less, sometimes more, all over. It's quieter and not pre-decided. 

For a long time, personal politics (both varieties) and its corporate variety had a safe distance. Off late, it's closing in. Soon it's all becoming one. Now, personal is corporate, and there's no more corporate. It's all just way too personal. If it's the less crazier kind, there isn't much of a danger. With the other one, it just explodes. Owing to the fact that it's the whole Universe for those who stand by it, they explode when it's attacked by any other Universe, even inadvertantly.

The confusion

This mixing of personal and corporate politics has been evident over the past few years. A personal

view stayed at home, or stayed fringe but a corporate view made it to the front and found its place and base, after due development and weighing as a complete, balanced one. This equilibrium has been destroyed. These days, personal politics influences and becomes its corporate form without a vetting process making it personal in vengeance and corporate in execution and acceptance by society-a dangerous combination. It's like a child being allowed to freely wield a knife. The idea is not to restrict anyone's freedom of preferences, but to allow everyone else's too at the same time in a respectful environment. The basic principle is that if it's how any citizen gets up and feels in the morning, it deserves space unless it is destroying someone's else's similar privilege.

The net result is that, today, almost everyone heard seems to be an expert for their opinion, whether it's naive, sensible or crazy. Most of it is just how they feel. Very little is invested political thought. There's less reason and sense applied. It's full of instant reactions and less thought out while being heavily emotional and identity based. Mere thought becomes institutionally valid and automatically right. 

It is perfectly legitimate opinion but, in all the mess, there is, obviously, no reasonable standard except for self applied ones i.e. the ones that say "I am right because I have a right to believe and assert so. Therefore, everyone else is wrong unless they completely agree with me amd that's my right to have." How everyone can be right and everyone else be wrong at the same time is another discussion altogether, that we can easily ignore. But this isn't the best place to apply logic so we'll just skip that thought. 

Meet hypocrisy

One such specific standard is hypocrisy: one that can hit you from any end, depending on where you're standing (that is its defining quality). It demands a few things of an allowable political opinion. One, and most important, is that you should not be (or come across as) selective. If you speak against, or for, one thing, you should speak similarly about the entire spectrum of issues that come along with it (and that mainly depends on where your accuser stands). So if you are against X, and for Y, you'd be a hypocrite to also not point out the same, similar or equally wrong flaws in Y, for example. 

As we now have been reminded, with small Universes come smaller minds and understanding. So even if you stand at a slightly different angle to the anyone in India, your sight is clear, your mind's noted all the details and you're aware of what a majority of people feel and think about what you see and hear (and why they do so), you're in for a barrage of accusations just because someone stands at an angle to an issue that's not yours and insists on the privilege of his tiny Universe as his right. You could also be aware that you are playing close to this risk, but with tightropes everywhere you really don't have an option. The only one you do have is zipping it. Anything you say will suffer from the wrath of the one who has a different angle.

With personal becoming corporate with their views, they assume a morning feeling, indiscriminately turn it in to a valid concerted effort and unleash. All that actually happened is that somebody felt like they got up on the wrong side of the bed but they realised it was the right side but just refuse to admit it.

Given that others don't mix personal and corporate, some seek to understand differences in views and their roots. But the others don't. Here are a few eye-openers to some sense in the nonsense.

1) When you keep personal politics personal, it's a side to actual real life where you live a life that takes up your time. You make yourself heard because of conviction, i.e., when something happens that threatens/can threaten something that you hold close to yourself. You need to, primarily, for your own safety, and then for your own human (or national) brothers' safety. But that's just your Universe. It needn't even match someone else's (which you understand, but they don't know). So when you do speak out, and different universes rub shoulders, you're automatically in line to be charged with hypocrisy. 

2) With an insecure personal Universe, they feel a need to want to be spoken to all the time, much like an insecure identity (even if somebody isn't talking directly at them). But their in-horizon problems will not be everybody else's, nor will the things that trigger your responses, empathy and sympathy. The immediate sensitivities everyone inherits by upbringing and influence simply isn't the same.

3) No one has to be right. If everyone was, as we'd like to assume, the world will be a bigger mess than if we all we're as clueless. Everyone needs to be sensible and respectful, first and always. We can be anything else later. We need to learn from those we are not able to identify with, rather than target them. 

A few other tricks up sleeves: 

Where were you when?: This is something people are asked when they represent a thinking that inspired clear wrongdoing in the past, but not necessarily now. To this, you answer the question as you best can and tell them where you exactly were, if you remember. It could be anything from the fact you weren't born yet to you playing cricket in the gully at that point in time.

If they seem like they'll listen, explain to them the point of political awakening, that everyone doesn't become born a activist one side of the political spectrum. Experiences have to move them to give birth to their own personal political convictions, and that took its own time with you, as it does with everyone. Tell them that the process is critical to how well you understand it and defend it making sense at the same time. 

What about...?: Also known as whataboutery, this is a comeback when you point out a wrong and they respond with an equal wrong from your side as if to say that they're not the only ones doing something wrong. Explain to them that the fact that what you've done is wrong does not change the fact what they've done is wrong too, and that two wrongs make don't make either right! Stress that the claim here isn't sainthood but the correction of wrong where it is, wherever it is. 

So if we are going to trade hypocrisy charges, we may as well as well trade them at the right people. Open rank hypocrisy is another topic completely.