(Our ‘polite egalitarianism’ is perhaps the best example – an elaborate charade of courteous modesty and fairness, a severe case of what a psychotherapist would call ‘denial’ of our acute class-consciousness.) Hypocrisy comes easily to us not because we are by nature vile and perfidious (or no more so than any other culture) but because our social dis-ease makes us naturally cautious, oblique, indirect, passive-aggressive – disinclined to say what we mean or mean what we say, prone to polite pretence rather than honest assertiveness. (When we drop the hypocritical pretence, we tend to become
...more
