f0rrest | john lennon & hypocrisy (Reply)

Over the last month, I’ve developed a sort of fascination with John Lennon. I've always been drawn to dark, contradictory figures. It all started when I took the time to really digest his first true solo album, Plastic Ono Band, and found myself stunned by how raw, introspective, and sincere it all was. The ending of the first song, “Mother,” had me immediately captivated. John repeatedly screams, “MAMA DON’T GO DADDY COME HOME,” until it gets so intense that there are no words left, only crackling, guttural screams, like an animal yowling in pain. When I first heard it, I thought to myself, “Damn, this is the same guy who wrote ‘Please Please Me,' what the fuck?”

But then I remembered that he also wrote “Help!” and that’s when it all started to make sense, that's when it all started to come together, as they say, right now, over me.

From that moment, I started digging into every song that John Lennon ever wrote for The Beatles, and I found that, out of all the band’s music, John’s stuff was by far the darkest and most introspective on the records. While Paul McCartney was writing stuff like, “Ain't got nothin' but love, babe, eight days a week!” and “Baby, you can drive my car, and maybe I'll love you!” and “Good day sunshine!”, John was singing, “Well, you know that I'm a wicked guy, and I was born with a jealous mind” and “I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved” and “I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be,” all of which just intensified my fascination with him, especially since, in the public’s collective eye, John Lennon is seen as this sort of guru of peace, love, and understanding. I mean, he wrote “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance,” after all. This contradiction between Lennon’s private and public persona, this disharmony between ego and ideals, soul and intellectualism, is what really captured my attention. How could such a seemingly enlightened dude be so cruel? Was it all some sort of artistic act?

I quickly found out that, no, it was not some artistic act for John Lennon. He was just a very sincere, self-aware, deeply conflicted person, full of insane contradictions. He was a very complex person, as we all are, but he also did a lot of bad shit. He’s on record, in many interviews, admitting to beating his first wife, sometimes brutally and sometimes in public, with eyewitnesses. He also virtually ignored his first son, Julian, and, according to the biography I’m reading, John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman, he was emotionally abusive to practically everyone around him. What makes Lennon especially unsettling is that he seemed fully aware of his own shortcomings and hangups, yet rarely did much to correct them. From an early age, he was cruel to people he deemed beneath him intellectually or artistically, often getting into fights at school and developing a reputation as a heinous bully. He was stubbornly contrary toward almost everything and had no respect for anyone, frequently shoplifting, even from mom-and-pop stores, including ones where he knew the owners personally. He rejected authority at every turn, nearly flunked out of school, and only made it into art college because a sympathetic headmaster recognized something exceptional in him. And exceptional he was: artistically gifted, witty, intellectually curious, and as sharp as a legendary samurai sword. Despite his disdain for school, he spent much of his adolescence reading, drawing, and writing poems and short stories. He was far more well-read and artistically accomplished than any of his peers. Yet all reports indicate that he was still a major asshole. He was the type of person who, depending on his mood, was capable of either beating your ass or having a deep, intelligent conversation with you, meaning hanging out with John was like nursing a ticking timebomb with a very well-hidden fuse. Yet people seemed to like him. He was very good at impressing people. His sharp wit, intellect, and adaptability got him far. When rock music exploded in the 1950s through Elvis Presley, Lennon very quickly taught himself how to play guitar and formed The Quarrymen, the band that would eventually become the Beatles. He quickly got shows lined up at various local establishments, and his early band was generally well-liked by those who listened. One would think this might satisfy John, make him a little more pleasant to be around, but this was not so. He would frequently drink and get into fights with people in the audience, and sometimes even with his own bandmates. And during his time in the Beatles, things didn’t really improve. He once nearly killed a DJ for suggesting that he and Paul McCartney were gay together, for example. And out of all the Beatles members, he only seemed to respect Paul, often dismissing Ringo Starr and George Harrison as mere musical instruments to be used and abused. Yet even with Paul, in the 12 years they worked together, John only complimented him one time. One gets the impression that John was an envious person who resented anyone he perceived as his equal or as more accomplished than himself. There seemed to be a venomous rage always bubbling beneath his surface, and this rage seemed to drive all his behavior. This is readily apparent in any recorded interview he ever did. In almost all of them, he’s intense and comes off as kind of dangerous, like he could get up and punch you in the face at any moment. This is especially apparent if he’s being interviewed with other members of the Beatles, who are all generally pleasant people. The contrast is stark. John often just stared at the interviewer as if to intimidate them, and sometimes he would switch from big smiles to death glares seemingly at random, and he would tell off-color jokes with a straight face so it was impossible to know if he was actually joking, and he often answered questions with short, evasive language, then treated the interviewer like they were stupid when asked to elaborate. Yet herein lies another contradiction, because despite his frequent hostility, he seemed desperate to be loved and admired. He aspired to be a pop star, after all. “I want to be the toppermost of the poppermost.” He cultivated this persona of someone who didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought of him while, in reality, he craved approval and validation from almost everyone. Yet he went about attaining this approval in weird, counterproductive ways, because his motivation to impress people was inspired more by wanting to prove he was better than everyone else, and he didn't really hide this fact.

Some will argue that John Lennon had undiagnosed autism or ADHD, and that that somehow absolves him of all his bullshit. First, it’s well documented that John suffered from dyslexia, but beyond that, nothing is confirmed. We have a tendency to reach retroactively, to try to fit our observations to our already existing biases. Meaning, yes, I think some people desperately want John Lennon to have ADHD or some form of autism, because that would more easily explain his behavior and, in some cases, make him “just like me!” And secondly, even if he did have autism or ADHD, this wouldn’t absolve him. As someone who was medically diagnosed with ADHD at a very young age and shares many characteristics with John Lennon, such as his latent contrarianism and bubbling rage, I refuse to believe that I have no control over my behavior. Yes, controlling myself might be a little harder for me than for someone without these traits, but I’m not sitting here beating my wife and ignoring my kids and being a major asshole to everyone I meet. People can adapt in spite of their neurological conditions. People can find ways to work within the unfortunate framework handed down to them by God or genetics or whatever you happen to believe. We can change our shapes. This is what I choose to believe. And again, we don’t actually know what John suffered from, besides the plague of existence. The truth is, we will never really know the contents of John’s soul. After all, how could anyone truly know what’s going on inside another person? All we have to go on is John’s artistic output and his behavior, which reveal maybe about 1% of what we might be able to know about him. Unfortunately, that 1% isn’t very pretty.

This is what gets me about John. His music suggests a level of self-awareness that one might assume would lead to self-improvement, but all reports seem to agree that, despite writing songs like “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine,” he was still the same ol’ angry, jealous guy at the time of writing those songs.

But perhaps, later in life, he was trying to change, who knows? In a 1980 Playboy interview, right before his death, he said, “I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace.”

When I read that, I thought to myself, wow, what a great quote. It seems intuitively true, especially for someone as self-aware as John Lennon, to gravitate toward concepts that contradict their own negative traits. This is the entire basis of the self-help industry, after all. I mean, if I’m being honest, the primary reason I study Buddhism is because I believe it to be the solution to my own feelings of envy, anger, and despair. Buddhism’s focus on peace and empathy has helped me cope with my own bullshit. But did it truly help John cope with his? If he did not practice what he preached, so to speak, does that not mean he was just a huge hypocrite?

And that’s what I really wanted to dissect here today, hypocrisy.

First, what is hypocrisy? Merriam-Webster defines it as:

hypocrisy noun

hy·poc·ri·sy \ hi-ˈpä-krə-sē \

1: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not : behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel

It follows that if John Lennon were singing about peace, love, and understanding while violently attacking people and/or just being a total asshole, then he was, indeed, a hypocrite.

But is that such a bad thing? I mean, obviously John Lennon’s behavior was bad, I’m not really disputing that, although I use “bad” here only to get my point across, as the good/bad duality is complicated and possibly entirely constructed, but, more specifically, is John Lennon’s hypocrisy “bad” in the sense that it undermines his message of peace, love, and understanding?

I would argue that, no, no it does not.

Take, for example, me. I smoke cigarettes, yet I tell people all the time that smoking is terrible and that you should never do it. This would make me, definitionally, a hypocrite. But does the fact that I smoke undermine my guidance? Does the fact that I smoke somehow make smoking good for you? No, no it does not. That would be ridiculous. Even though I smoke, it remains true that, regardless of what I say, smoking is pretty fucking terrible for you, as agreed upon by countless medical doctors. Smoking fucks with your lungs, makes you feel like shit in the morning, messes with your immune system, and causes cancer with remarkable efficiency and potency. Me smoking does not contradict these seemingly immutable facts.

This is what interests me most about John Lennon. He embodies this hypocritical dichotomy. On the one hand, he’s like the poster boy for peace, love, and understanding, but on the other hand, he was a narcissist who abused everyone around him. Later in life, he seemed to gravitate toward concepts of universal peace and love as a means to escape his own violent hardwiring, which he openly admitted to. The question I ask myself is, does this make John Lennon a quote-unquote “bad” person?

The answer is, I don’t know. I think John Lennon is perhaps just another person, like you or me.

Are we not all guilty of some level of hypocrisy?

I think that John’s attempts to better himself, whether successful or not, were admirable and encouraging. And, most importantly, to dismiss his philosophy of peace and love simply because he was not the arbiter of peace and love himself does us a major disservice. To carry that logic forward, we would have to declare that because Forrest here smokes cigarettes yet says you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, cigarettes are somehow now suddenly good for you. This, I think, is what many people get wrong about hypocrisy, i.e. declaring someone a hypocrite does not undermine their position, it’s just a personal attack.

Now, if you’re intending to just personally attack someone, fine, but don’t think that’s going to win you any arguments with those who know better.

To complicate this further, it is true that perhaps, as a famous celebrity who was “bigger than Jesus” (his words), John Lennon had an extra responsibility to display the virtues he extolled. He had a huge platform, after all. Many people looked up to, and still look up to, him. When those people see that their role model was actually not so great, they might then be inclined to either A) become not so great themselves or B) dismiss John Lennon and all his peace-love-understanding talk altogether, as if to think, “If John can’t do it, then it’s obviously all just hokey, idealistic bullshit.”

But this, too, misses the point and just reinforces the fact that you should be careful who you choose as a role model, or better yet, not have one at all.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to do better, or that all our behavior should be excused. I’m not giving John Lennon a free pass here. But it is important to remember that, regardless of who we are, we’re all human.

Fucked up, weird, hypocritical, but human.