The Honesty of Hypocrisy

Utilizing video's as a learning medium, I am glad I encountered the Malcolm X video of his speech at the Oxford Debate.  It was perhaps one of the most instructive finds other than when Guy Kawasaki a few days tweeted about "grit" and the importance of struggle or the quality of how we perservere.

Malcolm X was vivid in saying that he had more respect for an extremely ugly regime that was basically not being hypocritical as to its philosophy, than those whose words and meanings are disconnected with the realities of the actual consequences to the people it states it stands in the betterment of. 

The so the aparthied regime at the time in South Africa held more respect for Malcolm X then reading about the freedoms that he recognized he was very much excluded from.  So I take it from this Oxford Debate that he was challenging the honesty of hypocrisy and in in turn making his own struggle deeply honest. 

This then is the problem when we deal the cards of life as the practice of hypocrisy.  We then make it about ideals of perfectionism, when the missing element is what I see that Malcolm X saw, that it is intelligent to determine the honesty of the hypocrisy all of us practice because we cannot do as we think rather than merely what we say.   To state that hypocrisy is the difference between our words and our actions is to bring rules to life that can make life unlivable.

Yet I see that the greatest hypocrisy is between that which we think and that which we say.  It is OK if our words don't match our actions, especially when our actions found our words wanting, i.e. we learned through our actions the falsehood of the words we were using, moreover the words we use are incomplete and are never rich enough to describe the actuality of our actions.

So I say, that my thinking must change and then my words can change but equally that my actions (my relationship with the world) must close the loop with my thinking (my habits, my beliefs, the noise I carry in my head, the incessant and mindless chatter of identity).  What I learned most from matching Malcolm X's video of him speaking at the Oxford Debate, is to look for the honesty in our hypocrisy - because that honesty is the bridge between our actions and our thoughts.

[Em]

[Em]