Things like this, and in fairness it's not just him
Improve the world we live in, the departing Rupert Murdoch urged staff today.
Is he not aware of who he is? That he is the owner of numerous news organizations that - forget left or right - have together been more responsible than anyone or anything else for dragging public debate into the gutter and for destroying trust in journalism and public figures - particularly politicians.
Is he so ignorant that he doesn't know? Surely not. Is he so completely dishonest that he can knowingly deny what he is? Again I'd guess not, I think it's some sort of weird selectively dishonest double-think that allows him to be precisely what he professes to despise without suffering from any kind of guilt.
I'm struggling to define it properly and I think to really nail down what is going on would be very hard. But at the same time I don't think that I have to work too hard because despite being a stance that ought to be impossible, I reckon you all know what I'm on about and you've seen it often enough.
I guess it's an extreme case of the same thing that allows us to go about our lives being hopefully decent caring people but somehow blanking out starving children on the other side of the world and the homeless guy right in front of us and so on. Basically to function we have to not care about almost everything and convince ourselves that we are good people and resolve that contradiction. And I guess that when companies poison a village of mps vote to starve children or whatever they don't go "aha I got my evil way" cos almost nobody thinks that they themselves are evil, even those who are.