In this brief but compelling Vanity Fair interview with Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor and attorney general of New York, the reporter repeatedly presses Spitzer to explain why he was having sex with a prostitute while campaigning against prostitution. Spitzer's responses are fascinating: it sounds like he had divided his life into two pieces, the values he believed in and the things that he was compelled by.
It reminds me of the scene in Stephenson's Diamond Age in which a neo-Victorian recounts, "Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy… Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none."
"I'm not going to make excuses," he replied evenly. "Let me ask you a question: Is there a difference between politicians and anybody else? Or is it that the lives of politicians are so very public?"
"There is a difference, Mr. Spitzer. You were elected to a position of public trust."
"That's right," he conceded. "It's why I resigned without delay. Some said I could try to ride it out. But I didn't see it that way. What I did was heinous and wrong…"
"You knew the risks. Either you felt you were above the law or you had some kind of death wish."
His response was that neither was the case. "It's a story that has been repeated since our earliest days as a species. It's both obvious and not susceptible to an answer," he insisted. "Nonetheless, we are led down a certain path. It wasn't hubris or a death wish–but frailty, temptation, and common miscalculation."
(via Kottke)
