The Root of Hypocrisy

In the movie Cocktail, Tom Cruise works as a bar tender by evening, and is also finishing up a business degree in a local New York City College, and has high aspirations to make it big in the world of business. In one of the scenes, the teacher gives an assignment to the class to hand in a business plan. When the results come, Tom Cruise’s character Brian Flanagan finds himself with an F for his proposal of a bar franchise business. In his angst at the professor’s disapproval, he accuses to the teacher as being in academics due to lack of guts to face the outside world.

If you’re working in corporate, and for one reason or the other you do move into the academic world, the protective cocoon of the later can feel either warm and fuzzy or completely alien and unchallenging. Though both these reactions are skewed, the truth lies somewhere in the middle and can be attributed to the fact that each ecosystem comes with its inherent set of characteristics.

The corporate world attracts people from all walks of life. While many treat it as a rote job, a hungry handful pursues life here with a one-eyed maniacal focus on career growth. But in between these two extremes again are all the grades of people. If you stop and observe the behavior of folks in the rank and file of a corporation, you’ll need less than two minutes to understand that the whole system is management driven. When you begin to start managing a group of people, the black box in the picture is the passion and commitment of the members involved towards their field of work. And often, if a person isn’t passionate or committed to his work, chances are their work ethic is poor. From this you invoke one of the most used phrases of the IT era called 'slacking off’. But in academia, the situation tends be slightly different. People in this pool know they can’t be in it for the money. That in itself is huge entry barrier. Unlike the corporate world, academia is not your glamour stable. Logically then, you can’t be in it for very many reasons, not counting circumstances that forced you into it. And again, as it’s not hard to observe if you talk to ten professors and twenty PhD students, that they love their subject, and are hence passionate about it. This means that more often than not, a poor work ethic is not tolerated in the top academic and university research environments. Slacking off is for the administrative staff.

Despite the differences shown here and otherwise, there’s a common syndrome that appears in both these places (and in several other places as well) that I like to refer to as the root of hypocrisy.

The root of hypocrisy, unlike what it sounds, is not an incompetence related Peter Principle. It’s best to understand this with examples. Let’s take the corporate world first: an employee is pulled up by his boss for slacking off, and his results at work or the lack of it are questioned. This is usually the employee that gives two hoots at what is being said at team meetings, and will, on several occasions ridicule the boss’ motivational talk as being just hot air. In the event that this person is promoted and given a team to manage, all of a sudden, he now expects his subordinates to cooperate, produce results and stay motivated. He doesn’t tolerate coming in late to work and expects his people to take shorter coffee breaks. He can be seen as being completely oblivious to the fact that he himself was, until recently, an exhibition of all the above stated gray areas. In the academic environment, you can draw parallels. A professor shows little tolerance and patience to the students’ lack of understanding of a subject, notwithstanding the fact that they might have shaky basics in it, just like he/she might have had in earlier years.

We all experience such things, and some of us might be guilty of it ourselves. If you dissect the problem, you can see two entities emerging out of it. A) is what can be called as the individual’s character, and B) is what can be called the role’s character. Every individual in effect wears a hat to play a role. This could be the role of a son, a batsman, an employee, a philanthropist, a mentor, a student and the list is endless. Each role comes with a *set of characteristics* that have to be rightly followed irrespective of who’s stepping in to it. At the same time, the person who steps into the shoes of a particular job also carries with him/her a set of values or a pattern of programming that is unique to that person. When the ball (the individual) sits into the socket (the role), the dimensional constraints of the socket dictates the degree of freedom for the movement of the ball.

A straightforward example, though its mention here might seem partly out of context, is that of an actor. Jim Carey could be the funniest guy on screen in the characters he portrays, but could be a stern and stiff faced bloke in his real life. When you take this analogy and superimpose it on the cases mentioned above, you can understand the case of the employee being promoted to managing staff. The care free employee now finds himself in a role that requires him to act in a manner that is not in accordance with his real self. But for the greater good of his livelihood and that of his family's, he then subdues his inherent nature and plays to the tune of the new piper. Similar is it with the professor and the student. During my torrential teenage years, I remember reading something that I bought then as Gospel truth. It said “Parents of teenagers often behave like they had nothing to do with teenage life themselves” or something similar.

This conflict between the character of the individual and the character of the role can look very confusing from the outside, especially when a person moves through multiple roles in quick successions and takes time to grow into each role. We outsiders, not understanding the inside story, coined a word for this state: hypocrisy.