What Obedience Costs When Nobody Is Looking
Compliance under observation is close to meaningless. I say this having watched a great deal of it, performed extremely well, by men who were telling me nothing at all.
When he knows I am attending, everything he does is partly a message. The obedience is real in the sense that the action occurs, and it is unreadable in the sense that I cannot separate the part that is deference from the part that is presentation. He is not being dishonest. He is simply doing what anyone does when watched, which is to do the thing and simultaneously communicate that he is doing it. Those two activities have become fused and he could not pull them apart if I asked.
So the instructions that interest me are the ones with no witness. Something small, on an ordinary afternoon, which I have no way of verifying and which he knows I have no way of verifying. That is where it stops being a performance, because there is no audience for a performance, and what is left is whatever he actually does when the only person keeping the arrangement is him.
The men who find this hardest are frequently the most impressive under observation. They have built something genuinely admirable out of being seen to be good, and it is not fraudulent, it is just load bearing in only one direction. Take the observation away and the structure has nothing to hold it up, and they discover on a Tuesday that the thing they thought was devotion required an audience to exist. That is an unpleasant discovery and I do not make light of it.
What they usually say afterwards, when they admit it, is that it felt pointless. That is the exact word, more often than any other. It felt pointless to do it with nobody knowing. And I understand the feeling and I want to be precise about why it is mistaken. The point was never the action. A small instruction is small on purpose. The point was to find out whether the arrangement exists when it is not being maintained by my presence, and the answer arrived, and the answer was no, and now we both know something true.
It also tends to reveal what he thought this was. A man who only does it when watched has understood the whole thing as a series of interactions with me. A man who does it on the Tuesday has understood it as a condition he is in, which continues whether or not either of us is currently attending to it. Those are enormously different, and no amount of eloquence about devotion distinguishes them. Only the Tuesday does.
I do not check. That is the part men find most difficult to sit with, and I will not soften it. There is usually no verification, no follow up, no moment where it is produced and examined. He simply does it, or he does not, and the doing has no external consequence whatsoever. Which means the only thing it can possibly be is true.
That is why the small instruction is the serious one. Anyone can kneel while I am in the room.