It's tricky to construct general rules of human behavior

"Do as I Say..." and Projection, again

So in Matthew 23 Jesus says something to the Pharisees that’s always stuck out to me as kind of funny. It goes, in the ESV,

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice . . .

What’s funny is that “do as they say, not as they do” is very applicable in certain circumstances. There are others where it’s the opposite:

It’s also funny how intuitive the difference is. You could go through and parse principles about (1) when the Pharisees/Safety Authorities/etc. are acting from a position of genuine expert knowledge, (2) what their relevant personal values are (valuing convenience and cutting corners versus staying safe, etc.), and so on. But, like I said, it’s pretty intuitive to us when one rule makes sense, and when the other does.

This dichotomy also applies to the explanation I laid out for how exactly it is that people, especially the most bitter rivals, will “project” their vices onto other people. Think (again) about Vladimir Putin accusing W of firing a journalist who lost his job because he ran a false—a verifiably fabricated (though not by Rather)—story on his network. That tells us more about Vladimir’s relationship to his journalists than it does about what went down in America. In Putin’s Russia, that journalist may have been fired by Vladimir, but in the USA it was CBS who fired Dan Rather because they know that if Americans think they’re partisan liars they will stop watching and the network will go bankrupt.

I actually think that “projection” is an unhelpful term, on the balance, because it’s sort of opaque as used: irreducible as to what’s actually happening, just taken as axiomatic that sometimes people project, and (when it’s being used) that this is one of those times, not a time when a person is making valid critiques.

Projecting vices is a special case of people tacitly assuming, because it’s all they know, that the way they operate is how other people must be operating too. And that’s frequently the case.

And sometimes it isn’t. Think about how Matthew records Jesus’ parables. In Matthew 13 Jesus notes “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” In Matthew 15 people, namely his disciples, still aren’t getting it, and earn His rebuke: “But Peter said to him, ‘Explain the parable to us.’ And he said, ‘Are you also still without understanding?’”

There’s a lot of Jesus’ followers and acolytes not understanding His parables—sometimes, evidently, by design, and sometimes to His exasperation. But then Matthew (21) finally recounts people understanding Him, namely, after the story of the tenant farmers who beat and murder the servants and even son of the landowner.

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:

“‘The stone that the builders rejected
    has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord's doing,
    and it is marvelous in our eyes’?

Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them.

It is, of course, an incredible escalation of this pattern: Jesus’ enemies understand Him in a way that His friends don’t. But it’s also an interesting setting where the mirror/projection doesn’t apply: rather than antagonists being clouded by their assumptions that their rivals function the same way they do (but they don’t), the antagonists are accurately described by their rival in a way that they recognize instantly. Jesus, of course, understands them, not because He is like them but because, I would suggest, that’s one aspect of what it means to be cunning and crafty like a serpent. It’s hard.