I’m Just Tired

A Supreme Court Justice stood up last week and lectured the country about moral courage. He invoked the Founders, traditional morality, religious piety, and the courage to sacrifice for one’s principles.

When I point out that the Supreme Court Justice lecturing the nation about “traditional morality” is the same man who failed to disclose years of gifts from billionaires — gifts his own job’s ethics laws required him to disclose — people assume I’m working an angle. That I’m a liberal. Or a conservative dressed up as a moderate. Or that I’m “triggered.” Or that I have some dog in some fight somewhere.

I don’t. I’m just tired.

I’m tired because I can see the pattern, and the pattern is the same pattern, and it’s been the same pattern my entire adult life, and everyone around me is still reacting to each new iteration like it’s the first time. Like the costume change means it’s a different show.

It’s not a different show. It’s the same show: a person in a position of moral authority stands up, invokes God or the Founders or Tradition or The Children, and proceeds to describe a set of virtues that their own coalition conspicuously fails to embody. The audience cheers. The opposing tribe boos. Nobody — and I mean nobody on either side — asks the only question that actually matters: does this person live by the thing they just said?

Because the answer is almost always no. And it doesn’t matter which team is talking.

Here is the move, stripped to its bones: Invoke a transcendent value. Accuse the outgroup of violating it. Perform piety. Extract benefit — power, money, tribal loyalty, whatever’s on offer. Ignore your own violations, or better yet, frame them as persecution when someone notices. Repeat.

It works because it has always worked. It works because humans are built to recognize their tribe faster than they recognize a contradiction. Consistency detection is a slow, effortful, frontal-lobe activity. Tribal identification is automatic, fast, and feels like righteousness. When the two conflict, tribe wins. Almost every time. In almost every person. Including, I’ll freely admit, me, back in the day — which is how I learned to see the pattern in the first place. You don’t notice the water until you’ve been pulled under by it a few times.

And getting out of that current, is a bitch.

What exhausts me isn’t that the hypocrites exist. Hypocrites have always existed. What exhausts me is watching otherwise intelligent people — people we respect, people we love, people who seem like highly intelligent and independently functioning individuals — refuse to apply the same standard to “their side” that they apply to “the other.” Not because they can’t, but because they won’t. Because doing so would cost them something, and the something it would cost them is belonging.

I understand the math. I get the psychology. I just don’t want to do it anymore.

Here’s the thing: every time the move runs and works, the vocabulary gets a little more poisoned. “Morality” stops meaning anything because we’ve watched it deployed too many times as a cudgel by people who don’t practice it. “Patriotism” rots. “Faith” rots. “Justice” rots.

And “truth?” Honestly, “truth” is barely a word at this point; it’s a flag people plant on whatever they already believed. Then they build a scaffolding of contrived reasoning around it and yell at anyone who doesn’t salute.

Every sincere use of these words now has to fight its way out from under the weight of a thousand cynical ones. Which means sincere speech becomes harder, and rarer, and eventually almost nobody bothers, because what’s the point? You say something you actually mean and half the room assumes you’re running a con, because everyone else has been running a con for so long that sincerity reads as a new kind of manipulation.

That’s the real cost. Not the individual hypocrites, but the slow poisoning of the well everyone has to drink from.

So, fine. I’m over it. But “over it” doesn’t mean “checked out.” It means I’m done playing the game on the terms the game is being offered. I’m not going to pick a tribe and defend it against the other tribe while both tribes run the same move with different branding. I’m not going to pretend the emperor is wearing clothes just because some other group’s emperor is the one who’s naked this week. And I’m not going to apologize for noticing.

Here’s what I think is actually possible, and it’s smaller and weirder than the grand political visions people keep selling: a small number of people — not a movement, not a party, just people — decide to step off the carousel. Not to fight it. Not to fix it. Just to stop riding it. To start noticing, out loud, without picking a team. To say “that’s the move” when they see the move, regardless of who’s running it. To refuse the vocabulary when the vocabulary has been weaponized, and reach for plainer language instead.

It won’t fix anything at scale. I’m not naive. The carousel is going to keep turning because most people want it to, because belonging feels better than seeing and facing a destabilization of their sense of Self and Belonging. But the small act of refusing to participate — of calling the pattern a pattern, consistently, across tribal lines — does one thing that matters: it creates a tiny pocket of actual air. A place where words mean what they mean. Where a person who claims a virtue is expected to demonstrate it and surround themselves with others who demonstrate it.

Where hypocrisy is noticed whether it’s wearing your jersey or the other one.

That’s not a revolution. It’s barely a posture. But it’s the only thing I’ve found that doesn’t require me to lie — to myself, to my kid, to anyone — about what I’m actually seeing.

So when a Supreme Court Justice stands up and lectures the country about moral courage while sitting on years of undisclosed gifts, I’m not going to pretend not to see it. And when someone on the other side does the same move with different branding, I’m not going to pretend not to see that either. I’m going to name it. Quietly, without rage, without team colors, without the exhausting performance of outrage that the culture keeps demanding as proof that I care.

I do care. That’s why I’m tired. Caring and seeing clearly at the same time, in a culture that rewards neither, is one of the more exhausting things a person can do.

But I’d rather be tired and clear than rested and lying.