Talk About Hypocrisy

One of the great things about working at a university is that you can have such interesting, illuminating conversations.  A recent one with Eliot Lloyd is an example.

We started on solid ground exploring how we can develop our teaching of strategy then ranged across Innocent Drinks, Eliot’s blog on Evernote, Antarctica, Ponseti technique, quantum cryptography and bungalows before landing lightly on the positive value of hypocrisy.  Not surprisingly after all that, we both had to get on with some work so we decided to continue the conversation through this blog. In fact we had reached the precise point where we were returning to business matters so this post will get us to that point again and then await a post from Eliot when he has some spare minutes.

The idea of hypocrisy as a positive thing is that there are some values which cannot be denied: they cannot be denied in speech but they cannot be totally denied in action either.  We are used to that idea with the divergence of public speech and private action.  The politician’s hypocrisy when they proclaim family values while having an affair is resented and condemned.