What the world needs today is a little more hypocrisy. Matthew Arnold pointed out that hypocrisy is “a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Our age follows the counsel of Voltaire, who said you couldn’t accuse him of hypocrisy because he never presumed to say he was anything.
Remember when virtue meant something?
Maybe not. It’s been a while. There was a time when you couldn’t reach any serious level of leadership if you didn’t convince people you were a man of virtue. This produced hypocrisy.
There are two ways to get rid of hypocrisy: to keep people from being bad or to deny the existence of virtue.
We gave up on the former since it can’t be done. But virtue and hypocrisy go together as thesis and antithesis, as head and tail, as feasting and indigestion.
Not wanting a world of hypocrites we chose something even worse: a world without hypocrites – the world we live in today.
A world without virtue.
