Friday, July 06, 2012

On Hypocrisy..

If Patriotism is at the center, then liberalism is to it's left and jingoism to it's right. I've come across situations where liberals turn out to be smug illogical schmucks and others where jingoists are plain idiots. There is no generalization that works!
The problem is that patriotism needs a context to manifest whereas the other two can be flaunted on a whim. The complication is that in real life there is a space and time for all the three to exist - within the same person!
But the combination of genes, environment, experiences and personal priors conspire to make us 'adapt' just one of the above. We lose sense of the context.
A person swinging from one end to the other is prone to be deemed a hypocrite in the real world. IMO, the person who changes his opinions or views depending on the circumstances is actually more committed to the cause on hand than the more rigid ones..


We should probably rest assured in the safe knowledge that one's a hypocrite only when one acts differently under the same framework - subject to the granularity of the evaluation of the framework.

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