Hot Seat

Chapter 27. Hypocrisy Is a Symptom of Values

“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Equity Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw explains in Neal Stephenson’s seminal science fiction novel, The Diamond Age.

“In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception—he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time, it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct.”

During Ontela’s early days, we had a problem.

One of my cofounders overspent on some hardware. We had a budget, and he exceeded it. There wasn’t a great reason for it, and he didn’t check ahead of time.

I pointed it out to him. I don’t remember the tone I used, which means I was probably snarky about it.

“Well, OK, Dan. How about if we save some money by not going over budget on travel, like you did last week? That should make up for it.”

He was right. I shut up.

This happened a few times—“You did this.” “Well you did that.” After a while, we were blowing our budget in multiple categories, and nobody felt like they could say anything ...