“You become the thing that you abhor.”
Hegel, in a nutshell
In philosophical logic, argument theory to be precise, the Tu Quoque (“you also”) argument is traditionally considered a fallacy, a subgroup to the broader ad hominem/ad personam fallacy. Tu quoque is based on the intent “to discredit the opponent's argument by attacking the opponent's own personal behavior and actions as being inconsistent with their argument, therefore accusing hypocrisy”. But if, for example, the CEO of a big corporation says he supports labour rights, but won’t have them in his firm, can we not rightfully call him a hypocrite? If the president of a given country says she is favour of universal human rights, but would deny them to minorities, would we contain our criticism out of danger of committing a Tu quoque? We would hardly call these observations ad hominem attacks. But then how do these compare to the (clearly indefensible) ad hominem attack? It seems the ad hominem is a sound accusation if and only if the intent of the accuser is considered. If the Tu quoque is used to justify one’s bad behaviour in response to another’s, we would consider this an ad hominem attack. “Your dog peed on my lawn, so I’m going to make my dog do the same in your frontyard!” is hardly a morally defensible position. Intent is the decisive point of demarcation. If I call out the president’s behaviour to draw attention to her hypocrisy, my intent is good, i.e., morally defensible, because I aim to diminish pain and unnecessary suffering, not justify inflicting it on someone else. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives the following example for the Tu quoque as a special type of ad hominem:
“Look who’s talking. You say I shouldn’t become an alcoholic because it will hurt me and my family, yet you yourself are an alcoholic, so your argument can’t be worth listening to.”
Only if we assume that the accuser’s intent is to become an alcoholic himself we are legitimately calling this a Tu quoque/ad hominem argument (though this is not clear from the speaker’s statement at all). But the intent of the accuser is no less relevant than that of the accused if we want to differentiate “justified” and “unjustified” hypocrisy. We would not call the accused’s (alcoholic Uncle Pete) argument hypocritical because it prevents further harmful conduct. The fine line of demarcation between unacceptable and acceptable hypocrisy then is the intent of both accuser and accused. In contrast to the CEO who wants to curb labour rights in his own firm while supporting them wherever his position does not matter, the alcoholic wants to protect his friend or relative from becoming a bad person.
This is less obvious in the now classic case of Whataboutism, the “And you are lynching Negroes”-argument that refers to the Soviet immunization against critique by deferral to US racism. What motivates the argument is the premise of moral condemnation of cruelty and violence held by the opponent (here, the US in the 1930s) while turning a blind eye to its own egregious human rights violations (noted that universal human rights haven’t been officially declared yet). The vivid illustrative depiction of US racism in Soviet media in its crude symbolism almost has a meme-like character. A 1930 print from Soviet magazine Bezbozhnik u Stanka (“The Godless at the Workbench”) shows a lynched Black American dangling from the hands of the Statue of Liberty.[1] The symbolism is staggering, as if often with moral accusations of one’s opponent in a quid pro quo logic of cruelty. Needless to say, the Tu quoque is questionable. The Soviet Union’s leadership it itself guilty of murder and cruelty. But is it wrong?
Throughout history, the hypocrisy of the ruling class has been unmatched. Kings and Despots were preaching piety while they occasionally disemboweled the house maid to make a warm foot bath after a long hunting trip. The point is that the peasants usually were pious, while 120 days of Sodom-like rampages were traditionally reserved to the upper class, as Pasolini knew well. I do not only talk about Epstein, the Clintons, or the British aristocracy and their unsavoury hobbies. If we look more closely at the claims and behaviours of the ruling elites in the West – the US Democratic Party, Trudeau’s bioterrorist regime in Canada, climate austerity Greens and Soc Dems in Germany, Tories and Labour aristocrat MPs in the UK – we can detect a level of senseless cruelty against modern day peasants that need not hide behind Henry the Fourth’s casual murdering spree. The Green Party-funded Climate action movement and its many spin offs presents a call for austerity, disenfranchisement, and economic dearth. But if we take a closer look at their concerns – saving the planet – their motivations become entirely grotesque. I haven’t seen footage of Climate activists drawing attention to East Palestine, Ohio, where, after a fiery derailment of a train carrying toxic materials two weeks ago, poisonous vinyl chloride threatens to kill hundreds of thousands, people and animals alike, from the aftermath and its dispersion into the air and local water. Locals were even reported as seeing a “mushroom cloud” over the area. This is an environmental disaster of a scope the US hasn’t seen in the last decades. But none of the superglue-and media-prone kids, so worried about the planet, were particularly interested. This is because in this milieu, “capitalism” has been discerned as the passepartout for all evil, and the more dramatic, grand, and hollow the gesture, the better for the cause in which real individual human lives, the concrete environment consisting of air, water, and soil, plants, and animals are considered irrelevant. In the totalitarian hollowness of the hyper-simulated reality of “climate”, which is a conceptual fiction without substance beyond models and simulations, the reality of life is denied, the individual is denounced, and concreteness abhorred.
But not only do Astroturf movements, contrary to their claims, care bizarrely little about concrete human suffering, so does the US Democratic Party establishment. If you thought the POTUS had the decency to go to Ohio and pay his respects, you are probably from the 2010s. Our post-civil society, heralded by Covid, is that of open elite shamelessness. Hence, instead of visiting the place of the greatest environmental disaster in recent US history, Biden, in a strange confusion of the country he was elected president in, went to see his buddy Zelensky in a “surprise visit” to the Ukraine, as though the country was already annexed (as it probably is). As usual, the press images were more revealing than the words spoken. One showed Biden performing a fatherly hug on Zelensky, and one wonders if Biden has already filed for adoption of his Ukrainian sock puppet. But global elites are unsurprisingly homogenous in their mindset, especially in the test phase to the “global biosecurity state” (Simon Elmer) we are currently witnessing. When German Secretary of State Annalena Baerbock said she would “serve Ukraine…no matter what my German voters think”, she was brutally honest, but no less a raving hypocrite. “Defending our Western values” in Ukraine means the defence of hypocrisy and corruption, and not least open Ukrainian Bandera- and Azov-style Nazism and fascism, when at home – in Germany – we are currently seeing a united elite operation implementing a new “Democracy Freedom Law” serving to criminalize all state opposition as “fascist”, including a law stating the Reversal of the Burden of Proof. The last judicial system which implemented such a law was Nazi Germany’s Volksgerichtshof: if you could not prove your innocence, rather than being proved guilty, you were simply that - guilty. The parody of such obvious totalitarians calling their critics Nazis while supporting Nazis in another country with weapons and financial aid cannot be overstated. Neither can their hypocrisy. And do I still need to mention our darling PM Justin Trudeau who recently said: “Everyone should be able to live a life free of discrimination, to be able to make their own choices, with their own bodies.” Of course, this does not apply to state mandated vaccinations with an experimental drug, but only to “gender non-conforming” people.
The list of obvious hypocrisies is too long for the email version of this Substack, perhaps too long for a book even – just Google, e.g., “timeline of US military interventions” and read Seymour Hersh’s Substack piece on the US sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines – but it is worth knowing the facts if you want to make an ethical point. And you should. For, in the face of such shamelessness, would a Tu quoque or whataboutism approach really be morally indefensible? The Central Committee of the USSR’s Negro-lynching accusation against the United States may have been questionable – the intent certainly was – but not per se wrong. This is because it put power into perspective. Whataboutism draws attention to the real motivations and interests of states and governments. More importantly, it can be a discursive tool to draw attention to power differentials. For the Westerner, the realization of Zelensky’s self-staging as a victim, while lying in Biden’s arms and receiving hundreds of billions of US $ in tax money from several Western governments, and some additional several billions from Blackrock/Vanguard in “rebuilding Ukraine”, while the real victims must endure the scenario of “total victory” is the result of a logical Whataboutism operation. The Tu quoque puts interests into perspective and provides a more complete, and likewise objective, picture. In other words, refusing the “but what about the other side”-question is doing the bidding for the interests of the powerful: we must remember that the current war, like all wars in history, is never in the interests of ordinary citizens.
But the real danger of unhinged elite hypocrisy is this: in a world where the claim to power is exhausted in moral accusations of the opponent, all questions of (economic, political) interest is stifled, and yet every single claim to morality, to “values”, to “democracy”, to “saving lives/saving the planet” is contradicted by reality, there is no moral reason in the world why the subjects should “do better”. Even more dangerously for the Western world right now, there is no reason why Putin should “do better”. The standards have been dissolved, the cards are on the table, Rousseau’s noble savage, free from moral restraint, has returned as Mr Hyde. Hypocrites, and hypocrites they all are with their sanctimonious ideology of “care” and “kindness”, while letting people die alone in hospitals and children traumatized for their lives, have lost the moral high ground forever. They have lost the defining power over “right” and “wrong”. And this is precisely why they hold on to it so hard: because they have no standards left. It is their only justification for rule. But there is no reason why Putin or whoever else is taking up the unflattering role of Satan incarnate for the world right now should not have every right to behave as cruelly as he could. By which standards could he be held accountable? The Tu quoque does not enforce this logical conclusion, it just reveals the logical impasse an unhinged Western global elite following its own interests is trapped in. In this sense, the Tu quoque accusation is not only morally defensible, but should be used as the go-to tool of ideology critique today.
Of course, Kantians of the world would beg to differ: regardless of the evils of others, there is no justification for one’s own evil deeds. One must always behave morally, i.e., according to the categorial imperative, because as you can see. My heart, my mind, my soul tells me that this is the only way forward. But my intellect tells me that if there was a time putting Kant to the test, it is the current era.
Cover boy: Robert Palmer performing “Looking for Clues” (1980)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
You're wickedly dumb.