Call me a hypocrite. I went to request a personal loan, with the burden of doing it in full escalation of interest rates, and I appeared to be very pleased at the ceremony of smiles that are lavished in bank branches. The employees hang them as a trophy on their lips, as if echoing those that saturate corporate advertising. I pretended to be interested in an alarm system for the house (“your home”, in commercial jargon), but the “personal manager” did not seem to pick up on any dissimulation in me (her “client” of hers). Yes, she had learned the lesson of Death of a Salesman well, whose protagonist, Willy Loman, gives the key to being a great salesman: "It's not what you do, but the smile on your face."
Although hypocrisy is an art (etymologically: “that of playing a role”), talents are not abundant on the stage of everyday life. Thus, after the inventory of affable grimaces, the employee's face froze in a surly rictus and, with the casual tone of when they want to foist a product on you, she suggested: "If you take out an insurance policy, I'll expedite the procedures and now I authorize it myself."
Everything went so smoothly. The next day, invoking my right of withdrawal, I requested the cancellation of the policy: ipso facto the amount was restored to my account. I am telling you this in case it serves to capture your benevolence –you remember, I suppose, a situation in which you had to show a double face– and to affirm, incidentally, that at a given moment we are all hypocrites (more or less, depending on the context) .
In the absence of a human nearby to talk to, I ask artificial intelligence (let's see if ChatGPT enlightens me) if hypocrisy is necessary to live. The very hypocrite answers me that nanay, that you can always –and should!– live authentically and sincerely. I refine the question more to put it on the ropes: is hypocrisy necessary in politics? And she returns with the refrain, in a slightly sobering tone: "In any circumstance, honesty and transparency are fundamental values that contribute to trust and the construction of healthy and solid relationships." Anyway, ChatGPT sins of idealism and political correctness is not the best way to establish a friendship.
A ghost haunts the world of international relations, and that ghost (or throwing weapon) is the adjective hypocrite. For example, critics from Europe point out the hypocrisy of the Old Continent's immigration mechanisms, with their preferential treatment of some groups, while other asylum seekers, stranded in makeshift camps, wait in unsanitary conditions. Remember when three years ago Lukashenko instrumentalized illegal immigration against Lithuania and Poland to artificially generate a crisis: through a state tourist agency, he offered Iraqis and Syrians a one-way ticket to Minsk, a transfer, a hotel night, and travel to the border with Poland. Immigrants risked their lives, something that mattered little or nothing to the Belarusian dictator.
A quintessential critic of the hypocrisy of the liberal order is Noam Chomsky, but since he always puts them in the spotlight, he ends up committing another hypocrisy that makes him an accomplice of authoritarian regimes. He was the American intellectual who most rationalized the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and went so far as to argue, as if one thing justified the other, that the death toll was lower compared to the trail of victims in the third world due to "very much most extreme” of American foreign policy. Far-left thinkers see the United States as responsible for all the world's ills: because of its persistent trade deficit, they say, it needs to support confidence in the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and at any juncture they always bring up catastrophic intervention. in Iraq.
They are the same ones who talk about the expansionist US empire, but are silent before the homologous desires of Russia, and the chronic trampling of human rights in other latitudes. I don't know if they will have the cynicism to justify Russian oligarchs and media stars who denounce the “corrupt West”, but they did acquire luxurious villas on our coasts. The same happens with the Afghan leaders: they prohibit girls from studying, but their daughters are educated abroad. The hunt for the hypocrite is a quagmire in which any solution to problems drowns.
