Hypocrisy Reveals Guilt

The Objective, November 23, 2025

We often say one thing and do another, and that gap tells us more than we admit. When we look for culprits behind our collective troubles, we tend to exempt ourselves. The most common escape is vertical: blame “those at the top”—politicians and elites—while we pose as innocent bystanders. But there is also a horizontal excuse. Even those who concede that citizens play a role usually shift the blame to whichever group they don’t belong to—whether ideological (“Enjoy what you voted for”), fiscal (“You have no idea how much tax I pay”), or based on identity, be it regional, linguistic, or gender-related.

Both excuses reveal not only complacency but a refusal to ask the harder question: What responsibility belongs to each citizen?

One way to understand democratic responsibility is to see it as the gap between the decision one actually makes—when filing taxes, voting, or seeking reliable information—and the decision that would have best served the common good, given what one knew and the room one had to act. The wider the gap, the greater the guilt. That guilt requires two conditions: that the actor knows, or can easily know, the right rule or the public good; and that he has the freedom to follow it. Without knowledge or freedom, there is no guilt. But when someone knows what ought to be done, can do it, and doesn’t, the evasion is exposed.

The distance between what people say and what they do shows they sensed the right norm and had some discretion. Pretending to abide by a rule suggests one knows it—or at least sees the need to look as if one does. And when inconsistency comes wrapped in elaborate excuses, it becomes even clearer the lapse wasn’t innocent.

Seen this way, many flaws in Spanish civic life become clearer—and harder to dodge.

Start with political elites, whose hypocrisy is now assumed. Governments promise institutional rigor, then distribute appointments along party lines. Leaders swear allegiance to equality while trading privileges with factions that place themselves beyond the law. Presidents draw bright red lines and later cross them with ease, as if they had never existed. Parliaments have turned into theater stages, more scripted than deliberative—rituals as predictable as professional wrestling.

This pattern has reached its apex with the current government. In 2023 it framed the election as a moral referendum against the far right, only to govern with the support of forces further outside the constitutional framework—groups openly hostile to that framework and intent on eroding it. After championing equality among citizens, the government conceded asymmetric powers, debt write-offs, an amnesty law, and legally dubious protections, all in exchange for a handful of parliamentary votes. It never acknowledged the size of this shift and cloaked it in appeals to “coexistence.” But whoever proclaims one rule and acts against it not only breaks a promise—he reveals the choice was driven by calculation, not necessity.

The government is not alone. The hypocrisy of its critics is also striking. Felipe González weakened the separation of powers by abolishing the prior constitutional review and altering the appointment system for the judicial council. He still defends both moves today, as if he had no alternatives. Aznar had an absolute majority to undo that damage and declined. Rajoy, with both room to act and a strong mandate in 2011, chose inaction. They all knew the rules they now claim to miss. They had the chance to preserve or restore them, and they didn’t. Their retrospective indignation—treating today’s drift as an anomaly instead of the predictable result of González’s choices and their own failure to correct them—blurs their critique of Sánchez and alienates younger generations from the 1978 constitutional pact.

More subtle—but no less revealing—is the ambiguity of those who seek to govern. In 2023, the main opposition party vowed to “repeal sanchismo,” but its proposals looked more like continuity than change. After failing to form a government, it didn’t rethink its strategy, didn’t explore a negotiated abstention, and didn’t acknowledge mistakes. Everything was the other side’s fault.

That ambiguity persists in 2025. The party insists it has much to do and knows how to do it—but offers few specifics. Such caution raises doubts about its will to act: if it won’t say today what it would do tomorrow, what assurance is there it will do it at all? Especially when it excuses its vagueness by claiming voters “wouldn’t understand”—a sign of distrust toward the very people whose trust it seeks. This breeds a downward spiral: politicians avoid clarity because they fear voters, and voters stop trusting politicians because none speaks clearly. Once again, hypocrisy surfaces: a party that promises change but avoids commitment displays calculation, not prudence. And history doesn’t help: in 2012 Rajoy’s government abandoned its reform agenda and tackled only what Brussels forced upon it—late and poorly.

So far, we’ve seen how hypocrisy exposes the unused room for action among elites. But the phenomenon reaches ordinary citizens too. At least three types stand out: hypocrisy of action (doing wrong), hypocrisy of omission (avoiding what should be done), and hypocrisy of justification (lowering the norm). All share the same pattern: there is room to act, the rule is known, and convenience wins.

The first is acting against what one knows to be right. Many voters back candidates who contradict the principles they claim to uphold: demanding integrity while tolerating corruption; praising equality while seeking privileges; extolling merit while relying on connections. This isn’t ignorance. It’s calculation: the norm is known but set aside when it gets in the way.

The second is willful inaction. Getting informed, checking facts, voting, or deliberating takes time and effort. Many prefer tribal loyalty, expressive voting, or affected cynicism. The tribal voter follows the group line regardless of evidence. The expressive voter casts a ballot to feel good, not to improve the collective decision. And the cynical abstainer complains that “they’re all the same” but won’t bother to compare. The abstention of someone who sincerely doesn’t understand is more honest. Impartiality demands more effort than tribalism; humility requires more rigor than the critical pose. Again, there is a norm, and there is freedom—the difference lies in how it’s used.

The third is the most corrosive: adapting beliefs to one’s behavior to ease dissonance. Instead of breaking the norm, it is lowered. We see this when standards in education are relaxed; when favoritism in hiring or public services is treated as normal; when misuse of public resources is rationalized as “everyone does it.” This soothes guilt but damages society: it hides the fault while weakening the norm needed to judge it. And when that norm collapses, it drags us with it.

These hypocrisies seem minor. Yet repeated across millions of individual decisions, they create many of the problems we later decry. This is not about assigning equal blame. It is about recognizing that as long as we demand more of others than of ourselves, our system will remain fragile and easy prey for opportunism.

The idea that “if the fault is ours, so is the solution” can sound grim if read as a reproach aimed at others, assuming they won’t change. But its meaning is both tougher and more hopeful: it doesn’t point to “them,” but to all of us. Everyone carries faults—of action, omission, or inconsistency. And because we can’t measure precisely who is more responsible—forcing us to be tolerant of others’ mistakes—that tolerance cannot become an excuse for doing nothing.

English version prepared with ChatGPT-5.1