The author Domenico Losurdo uses the term mutual demystification a lot, especially in Liberalism - a counter history. When two parties accuse each other of being hypocrites, it often ends up showing that they both are.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'd like to point out that I'm european, not american - this is the opposite of calling each other hypocrites.

[–] Funkytom467@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

When people are not brain dead by media, both in the US and EU we know all of our problems comes from our own government and fat CEOs.

Foreigners are just one of the many scapegoats they put the blame on.

What it reminds me of is Greeks and then Romans calling them barbarian, from barbar meaning foreigners. This isn't new...

The problem always was power and the unfit nature of human beings to possess it.

[–] dawnglider@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

I wouldn't expect anyone to deny the existence of corruption or abuse of power, but I think the corrupting influence of power is often used to justify in retrospect the acts of people put into power to do exactly that. It might sound pedantic to say that CEOs or state officials aren't really "corrupt", because they rarely ever intend to represent the interests of the workforce or population, but really it's a total inversion of causality. They don't "betray" because they got in power, they got in power to "betray".

On an interesting sidenote, it also goes against the common misconception that any form of authority ultimately leads to corruption, since those same CEOs and officials seem to stay pretty loyal.