Hypocrisy

I am a hypocrite.

Several clear beliefs exist in my mental world, which appear to have no bearing on my actions.

The discrepancy between my beliefs and actions can probably be summarised simply as laziness, usually taking the form of procrastination. I lay plans for myself, and proceed promptly to not execute them.

The first specific item of hypocrisy I hold myself accountable for is consumption of entertainment. I believe, and have alienated friends with this belief, that almost all forms of entertainment are pointless escapism, and that consumption of entertainment - although in small doses undoubtedly essential - displaces ones' own intrinsic productive drives, and dulls and dilutes ones' own impulses toward exploring, and changing ones' own situation. If you're soaking up someone else's creation, you're not creating anything yourself. I have on many occasions had powerful impulses to, say, write an article, create a composite video, collate pictures of a trip to tell a story to those who weren't there... and then never followed through with it. "I haven't the time", I tell myself, which is simply to say: "I didn't make the time": I chose to do other things. I chose to watch a movie, to watch a show on TV, to watch 10 youtube clips back-to-back, to read the news, to play a banal game on my phone.

The consumption of entertainment is in itself not a bad thing - there are many good arguments for it. The most self-evident being exposure to others' thinking - a broadening of ones' own scope - and I hold this especially to be the case with literature. I am old-fashioned in this regard and concede that there's no clear reason why TV is necessarily more escapist and destructive to ones' intrinsic drive than books, but I believe this so none-the-less. Is it that the direct stimulation of visual and auditory cortices precludes the activation of the machinery of imagination? Perhaps it is simply that it is too young a medium! In any case, most moving media is vending-machine bubble gum, mental fairy floss. And I chew it! I frequently spit it out, too (usually in the laps of those I love), but by then my mental teeth are a bit more rotten, my digestive system of ideas a bit degraded, and a little piece of my ticking time is lost forevermore.

A second domain of hypocrisy are my political beliefs. There are several specific examples here of how easy it would be to look at my behaviour and the structure of my life and come to entirely wrong conclusions about my beliefs.

I usually allow myself a little credit for abstaining from meat. Consumption of it is one of the most subtly nefarious activities of humankind because of the ecological effects of mass farming of animals and their production-line slaughter - it's clearly the most evil thing good people do every day. For once, I have altered my own behaviour to reflect - in part - this belief. I generally abstain from meat. And that's the extent of it. That tiny sacrifice is really all I have to offer my own guilty conscious. Every few months, usually when alone, I'll eat a stick of salami or a chicken drumstick, but this doesn't go against my belief that it is the proselytizing force of my boycott that may have an impact for the better. My hypocrisy creeps in rather with how unwilling I seem to be to take this sacrifice further. I continue to consume milk, butter, eggs - derived products that continue to support the mass production of animals. I consume single-use packages.

I consume, and consume.

And, I despise our consumption culture. I despise and support the discarding of items that took much energy and creativity to make. This exists from the simplest - glass jars - to the most mind-bogglingly complex - phones that fit in our pockets and talk to satellites in space. We buy a jar of pesto, ladel the stuff out for one dinner, and throw the glass away. We buy a smartphone - a culmination of human intellectual achievement - and when it gets a scratch or goes out of date, we throw it away! The cheapness of these items is shocking, and so full of externalities that we're essentially being subsidised to rape the poorer people of this planet and the planet itself. And I use it. I have a Sony, not a fairphone. I have a lenovo Yoga Pro, not a carefully preserved 15 year-old laptop. I recycle, when it suits me. I reuse if it doesn't piss me off.

I am a hypocrite.