YOU CAN´T HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT, TOO

If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times. “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” It was one of my mother’s favorite expressions; and it was my introduction to the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not bad behavior. There are no norms, rules or laws that prohibit it. It is just ignorant behavior because it defies logic and logic is one of the cornerstones of human intelligence. Hypocrisy is holding two mutually exclusive ideas at the same time, which you can't reasonably claim to do. Mutually exclusive means if you have one you can’t have the other. They cancel each other out. So, no reasonable person is going to believe you or take you seriously if you are being hypocritical.

If you eat your cake, you don’t have the cake anymore. You ate it. It’s gone. Having your cake and eating it are mutually exclusive. That makes claiming you can have your cake and eat it, too, hypocritical.

You can’t claim you are against abortion because you believe in the sanctity of human life and then support capital punishment and expect any rational person to believe you actually care about the sanctity of all human life.

You can’t claim you support the freedom of speech because you believe it is essential to preserve our democratic republic and then shame and persecute other people who say things that don’t meet your standards of “political correctness” and expect any rational person to believe you actually care about anyone’s freedom of speech but your own.

Holding and expressing mutually exclusive beliefs makes you a hypocrite and being a hypocrite is ignorant.

There is a lot of hypocrisy going around in the United States these days, on both sides of the political divide. I blame this widespread ignorance on what has been called the Dumbing Down of America. It has been deliberate. It has been systematic, And, it has been going on for almost four decades. Back in the day, when I went to school, we were taught how to think... because our parents and our government wanted us to grow up to be independent, responsible citizens and you can’t be an independent, responsible citizen if you can’t think for yourself. That has been gradually changing and today, under the guise of “standards-based education”, young people are taught what corporate America wants them to know - and nothing else - because corporate America wants our children to grow up to be predictable consumers who can be easily manipulated into buying stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have so that the 1% of Americans who control almost all the wealth in the United States can accumulate even more wealth.

The good news is ignorant and stupid are two different things. Hypocrisy is ignorant, but you can fix ignorant with learning. You can’t fix stupid.