Conor Cruise O'Brien on Weil and hypocrisy

From On the Eve of the Millenium, pp 101–102:

Hypocrisy indeed is inseparable from all forms of social life. No one can live with a really determined and consistent enemy of all hypocrisy. Molière made that point in Le Misanthrope, and Ibsen in The Wild Duck. In the twentieth century Simone Weil rejected the teachings of Molière and Ibsen as corrupting. She insisted on nothing but the truth, in her writings and in her personal life. Her most famous statement was a declaration of total disseverance, a rejection of all bonding. Said Weil: "Any sentence that begins with the word 'We' is a lie." It was a lie that she refused to tell.

Nobody can live like that, and Weil willed her own death. She was tubercular while serving with the Free French forces in Britain during the Second World War, and she killed herself by refusing the special rations to which she was entitled as a tubercular person. Her action was posthumously seen as one of solidarity with the people of occupied France, then undergoing a more severe regime of rationing. But solidarity is hardly her thing. I see her action as essentially a rejection of the people among whom she had chosen to live, and among whom she could not bear to live. Rejection, because of the hypocrisy of those people, their compromises, their childish and bonding nationalisms, their constant use of sentences beginning with "we," and their general human mediocrity and awfulness.

We cannot, then, live without at least a modicum of hypocrisy. There are times, however, when the hypocrisy of a given society reaches such a level that it brims over, arousing general disgust, followed by the collapse or mutation of the society in question. That happened in pre-Reformation Europe. It happened again in the France of the ancien régime in the decades before the French Revolution. And it happened in our own time, in the former Soviet Union, on the eve of the collapse of Communism. And something like that may now be happening in contemporary Britain as well as in other parts of the West.

(O'Brien describes himself as a devotee of Edmund Burke, who would presumably also have rejected Simone Weil's brand of saintliness.)