Two kinds of pretense:
What you pretend to be to yourself alone in your soul
What you pretend to be to others, AKA virtue signaling
I put down ‘virtue signalling” and I am unsure why. I guess I equate it with hypocrisy both large and small. I am reading a very powerful and short book by Catherine Liu: Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class that fits. I heartily recommend this if you too have worked in academia and can’t make ‘hide nor hair’ of intersectionality or …well, any woke vocabulary.
Here is a sample of Liu’s analysis:
Although the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) is profoundly secular in nature, its rhetorical tone is pseudo-religious. While the PMC infuriates conservative Christians with its media monopoly on liberal righteousness, it finds salvation, like most Protestant sects, in material and earthly success. In liberal circles, talking about class or class consciousness before other forms of difference is not just controversial; it is heretical.9 They call you a “class reductionist” if you argue that race, gender, and class are not interchangeable categories. They pile on with the legalistic and deadly term intersectional to accommodate the materialist critique of their politics. The PMC simply does not want its class identity or interests unmasked. Young people wanting to enter what the Ehrenreichs called the “liberal professions” and gain positions in academia and the culture and media industries have had to adapt themselves to the Procrustean bed of PMC-dominated networks of influence. Anyone who wants to privilege class critique should be prepared to be thoroughly red-baited and asked questions like “Why do you wear presentable clothes when you’re a socialist? Shouldn’t you wear burlap sacks?” and “Why do you enjoy sports? Isn’t that part of the military–industrial complex?” and “Why do you encourage conflict? Aren’t you irresponsibly fomenting violence?” PMC elites believe that asceticism is the fate of the leftist and that any kind of social conflict arising from corrosive inequality is her fault. In promoting these casual assumptions about leftism, the PMC defends capitalism as the purveyor of both luxury and harmony. Gabriel Winant’s characterization of the Left’s warlike language is just one example of liberalism’s attempts to discipline its antagonist, the socialist who takes issue with the PMC. What leftists must accept is that for us, there is no class without class antagonism and class contradiction. I do not opine on the PMC because I hope to have a civil discussion about our differences: I am writing this critique to isolate the PMC’s historically grounded, virtue-hoarding politics of liberal refusal to adopt and support the social and political changes we desperately need.
Back to my pretense and your pretense:
Answer One: sorry, that is private biz between me, myself and I
Answer Two: I pretend to know more than I do. I pretend to be a good ancestor to my children and to yours. I pretend to want to have uncomfortable conversations about issues like COVID, Ukraine, Palestine, electoral politics or learning. Yes, that is what we used to call hypocrisy. Perhaps I have said the quiet stuff out loud. Hmmmmm. Any consideration of our futures has to include at least a personal discussion with yourself about what you pretend to value and hoard. Sometimes that private self-talk (answer one) will slosh over the “top of our boots”.