I saw this tweet¹ recently:

A tweet by Bhavye Khetan in which he brags about tricking VCs into having mettings with him after he lied to them about his credentials

The guy lied to get meetings with VCs. As far as I can tell, this is the system operating exactly how it should, and I have really nothing to say about that. What I want to talk about is this popular response:

A response to Bhavye Khetan’s tweet by Rob Bailey, calling Bhavye Khetan a hypocrite.

Specifically, point #1. “People complain VCs don’t take cold inbound. So don’t complain if they try to.”

Do you see the problem? Rob Bailey is calling Bhavye Khetan a hypocrite because Bhavye Khetan said something that contradicts something that “people” say. But “people” and Bhavye Khetan are not the same thing?

I’m not trying to pick on this Rob Bailey guy — it’s a common pattern I’ve noticed online. People will argue with an individual as if that individual is the spokesperson for a larger group. People will call someone a hypocrite not for contradicting themselves, but for contradicting other people.

“Oh, you think sex work should be decriminalized? I was under the impression you feminists thought sex work was exploitative?”

Why should an individual feminist be beholden to what every other feminist has said? Maybe some feminists think sex work is exploitative and some don’t. Yet too often people accuse others of hypocrisy by association. I bet now that I’ve pointed it out, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.² If you say something that contradicts what a group you’re loosely associated with has said (even if that group is just “people in general”), then you must be a hypocrite.

But why does this happen? Have we grown so tribalistic that our default mode of interaction is now team vs. team rather than person vs. person? Can we no longer recognize that individuals may have their own opinions that differ from those of their tribe? If so, that sounds pretty toxic. But maybe it’s comforting to believe you’re combatting an ideology, rather than a mess of millions of individuals who all have different lives and believe different things.

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