You may believe that the sun rotates around the earth. You may believe in a phallic symbol of your ultimate release from the human body’s shackles. You may howl at the moon and drink its shine. You may believe that the earth is four thousand odd years old and that Aliens built the pyramids ten thousand years ago. You may believe that god put all those little critter bones into the ground to test our free will. You may believe that it is wrong to eat Pig, Cow and/or bananas on Wednesdays. If you want to stick voodoo needles in The Brain’s Puppet, be our guest.
Here is what you may not do – never, ever, never: You may not ever change your mind. You may not believe in one thing one day and something else the next. Changing your opinion is passé. It is gauche. It is so Enlightenment – and we don’t do that anymore. We choose one side out of our multitudinous options and we nail ourselves to it. Imagine life like a wheel of fortune. That wheel can keep turning, as long as we are nailed to one spot we don’t care whether we end up at the bottom or at the top. We are not afraid of being at the bottom because at least we remain consistent. But we are scared to death of getting flung of that wheel while changing positions.
Anything less than righteous inflexibility will make us ridiculous, make us loose face and let other people accuse us of the dreaded double standard. If you think today that it would be a good idea to give starving people a fish to eat, but tomorrow you want to give them a fishing net because you changed your mind and you think teaching them to feed themselves is better than feeding them ad infinitum, then you have committed the last remaining real faux pas in public life. You will have to wait for another chance in your next life, except that you will be reborn as a mollusk. You have proven beyond a doubt that you are not trustworthy. Really, who can trust a person who says one thing one day and another the next? Telling the truth may demand such mind acrobatics, but that is too complicated. Let us rather banish the truth and instead welcome the last remaining universal human sin onto our stage – Hypocrisy. There is hoping that it is the last act in this farce.
Taking a stand, any stand, gets you ahead. Inflexibility wins the day. Nothing else matters because everything is acceptable and nothing may be criticized. If you think drinking your own blood on summer solstice brings you closer to your own personal hippy god you may do so. Just don’t confuse your neighbor by giving her a bible next Easter. For hypocrisy is the one supreme sin left in our world. No, it is not the sin of being wrong or misguided or fallible or just plain old dumb that bothers us anymore. That stuff is all good. But if you want to bring your opponent down, if you want to win that election, get that multinational CEO post or run that religious outfit there is only one way to leave the other gal in the dust. You must catch him in a spider web of conflicting statements. You must dig through her background and find that deliciously salacious piece of contradiction. It’s ok that he snorted coke or drove his kids to school drunk as a skunk. That’s not what you are after. It is fine that she keeps switching jobs back and forth between government armament buyers and offense contractors, all the while taking bribes from both. That’s just the way things are. But when you find that statement, when you find that nugget of flipfloperism you have hit pay dirt, yes Siree. Joe Blow will explode in self-righteous fury, betrayed and hurt by the duplicity of another elitist: “What? First she voted for it, and now she is against it? How dare she?!?! That freaking whore. I will never vote for her again. I don’t care what she says, just keep it straight!” I guess we are just too stupid to hold two competing concepts in our minds at the same time. We can not fathom that a situation will change, that new facts will come to light. Since every opinion is justified by little more but its existence it is impossible to criticize it. Since everything is permissible it has become acceptable that political debates are nothing more than litanies of 30 second statements about a candidate’s position. It’s like watching a campaign add marathon. Nothing gets debated or argued over. Nobody is wrong anymore; everybody just has a different way of looking at things.
But if you are not allowed to change your mind on an issue how would you ever stay married, raise kids or hold a job? Some things are wrong and some things are right. The sun doesn’t come up in the east for example (gotcha). But we are not fed the truth by the spoonful at birth, and most of the time we need to find out by trial and error what is right and wrong. Usually that means we have to change our minds in the process at least somewhat. One of the great balancing acts of human history is how religions of the world constantly change their positions, usually only after years of burning heretics at the stake, while at the same time preaching a stark conservatism for their followers that does not allow for flexibility of thought. I still don’t get how they pull it of, but I guess that’s why they have shrines built in their honor, and I don’t.
I know the following cliché has been overtaxed, as opposed to the filthy rich, but remember how we used to have to eat our mammoth raw? Back before that fortuitous lighting set a Bush on fire (God, if you have any mercy, do it again) and the first steak was cooked up by accident. Well, that lightening sure would have looked dangerous as all the furies of hell to me. And that bush that it set on fire sure would have seemed like it was about to consume my mammoth fur tent in which the next 50 generations of my descendants were supposed to be born. So why should I get anywhere near the fire, just so that I can cook piece of meat that I and my forbearers have been eating raw all our lives? I guess something would have changed my mind – probably the better taste. It sure would have been funny though to see the two rival shamans of the tribe accuse each other of hypocrisy because they started liking the cooked meat better then the raw meat.
Since hypocrisy is the last remaining weapon in our public discourse it has become impossible to change one’s mind. So let me put down my vote for some contention in our public lives. Not just bipartisanship. Let’s call each other idiots a little bit more and let’s accept each other’s fallacies a little less. Let us be ok with someone changing their minds, we can still call them stupid if what they say is actually dumb. Let us light a torch for flexibility.
In the end, if everything becomes acceptable, nothing remains unacceptable. This in essence means that nothing is wrong. The sun rises in the west – somebody please challenge me! We need to fight over some real issues instead of over who said what when, and how they are now saying something else. That way what we say will be meaningful again.
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