I am generally quite aware of what I’m saying, and I work hard on maintaining what I refer to as the integrity of my internal monologue. If I do things that contradict what I say, then I tend to work out whether it’s the thought that was wrong or the behaviour, and then I try to modify one of the two to eliminate the contradiction to my satisfaction. I’ve been doing this all my life and, naively, assumed that most people did the same thing.
Then, sitting in a psychology class at university, one day, I found out that psychological studies showed that the correlation between behaviour and ‘expressed beliefs’ in the general population averaged around 0.3 – meaning that people only behave as their expressed beliefs would imply about a third of the time. A third. In other words, people explicitly contradict themselves around two-thirds of the time.
Hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.
Our minds are either too young or too old, we are either completely unaware of what we’re doing, or we’re too jaded, exploitative, manipulative, self-deceptive. If we’re too young, then I guess there’s hope that we’ll grow past the cognitive dissonance we inflict upon ourselves, but if not, if this is a sign that we’ve grown too old, too poor in thought and too desperate in our behaviours, then we might as well pull the plug, and leave the stage for something better…some other kind of animal for whom lying is not so much the norm…
