Back in the early-2010s, when I was an adjunct at what was then still called LDS Business College, our Tuesday afternoon devotional speaker was Henry J. Eyering–not Henry B. Eyering, of the Twelve, mind you, but Henry J., his dead-ringer of a son who was at the time an academic VP at BYU-Idaho. That was how much respect we got at LDSBC: the BYUs got actual apostles, we got their non-Union equivalent.

But now I’m being facetious; it was actually a memorable talk for me, which is something that can only rarely be said about any Church address. Specifically, the line that stood out to me was when he described counseling with his father as a young man about whether or not he should pursue grad school, to which Henry B. said, “Son, motivation is everything.”

And that line stood out to me, because it wasn’t immediately obvious to me at the time that that was true. I mean, I didn’t necessarily disbelieve it; but I also had it in my mind that sometimes someone does the right thing for the wrong reason–but at least they still did the right thing, and such should still be encouraged. For example, around that same era, David Fincher’s The Social Network had made Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg look like a lonely, narcissistic putz; the real-life Zuckerburg responded, then, by going on Oprah to announce he was donating thousands of dollars to underfunded New Jersey public schools. Now, that donation was in effect pocket change for a multi-billionaire, and was a blatant and craven stab at PR damage control. Nevertheless, those same New Jersey public schools could have just as easily responded with, hey, we really do need the money, and it’s not like anyone else was donating, so who cares why he did it, just so long as he did it! Who are we to judge motivations?

Nevertheless, the Savior was unequivocal when he declared in the Sermon on the Mount: “when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” Such strong language would seem to indicate Henry B. Eyering was being perfectly orthodox when he declared, “Motivation is everything.” Why we do something matters as much as what we do.

But then, I was still young in the early-2010s, and confess that the question of motivation was still largely just an intellectual exercise for me. The past decade, however, has repeatedly and explicitly proven to me that yes, motivation really is everything, because if you only ever do the right thing for the wrong reasons, then you will just as easily do the wrong thing for even worse reasons. Roseanne Barre for evening, who had positioned herself in the 1990s as a feminist working-class hero due to her sassy willingness to challenge patriarchal standards of femininity by embracing both her big body and big personality, became in 2016 the outspoken supporter of a man who gleefully spent his life mocking fat women as ugly and gross; Sylvester Stallone, who had similarly positioned himself as a Black Lives Matter ally during the filming of Creed, willingly embraced the man whom the overwhelming-majority of Black Americans voted against, and who spent his first days back in office undermining anti-racist initiatives at every level of government. And of course Zuckerberg has shown his true colors a thousand times over since The Social Network, down to the present moment, when he cravenly declined to keep fact-checking the news. As one Black commentator put it, Trump has been a truth serum for America, revealing who each one of us really are—and there has indeed been something revealed about each of these celebrities’ core motivations.

The Punk version of this phenomenon has been John Lydon, AKA Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols: the short-lived yet seminal ’70s band whose sole studio album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols is often cited as the genre-defining, ground-zero epicenter of all Punk Rock to follow (that is, if you ignore the fact that the Ramones released their genre-defining first album a full year earlier). The Pistols not only defined the entire Punk aesthetic of spiked hair, torn clothes, and sneering faces, but also the genre’s political provocations: their very first single after all was the snarling “Anarchy in the U.K.,” their one album opens with a track about the Berlin Wall, and they famously rented a boat on the Thames to perform “God Save The Queen” on Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, which resulted in their immediate arrest when they docked–which of course only boosted their popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. If any band had unimpeachable Punk cred, it was the Sex Pistols.

Even after the Pistols swiftly imploded, John Lydon continued to be rakishly outspoken on a wide-variety of commendable issues: he was a constant critic of the English class system; called out Johnny Saville as a child-molester on the BBC decades before Saville’s crimes became public knowledge; celebrated Oscar Wilde for being obviously gay in an era when such was literally a felony; vigorously defended the U.K.’s National Health System and free public schools as two genuinely good things about Great Britain; and got dual U.S. citizenship in 2013 to support Obama’s own attempts at healthcare reform. Even when he rankled his own fans (e.g. when he loudly refused to join Elvis Costello in his 2010 boycott of Israel’s oppression of Palestine–and mind you, Costello had written his early hit “Radio Radio” specifically to protest the BBC’s censorship of the Sex Pistols), there was still this widespread assumption that Lydon’s politics were at least internally consistent, and his persona was that of an equal-opportunity offender.

But then bafflingly, Lydon became a Trump supporter in 2017; he was even photographed wearing a MAGA shirt in 2018–and that a solid year after Trump tried to repeal Obamacare and cancel the health insurance of over 30 million sick & poor Americans (only John McCain’s heroic thumbs-down saved it, you’ll recall). This was self-evidently not a logical position to take for someone who repeatedly credited universal healthcare with saving his life when he was 7. He also dismissed both Biden and Hillary as “champagne socialists,” while saying nothing about the champagne conservative who inherited all his money from his slum-lord father and named his youngest son “Barron.” The Punk rocker who had once bravely called out Johnny Saville as a sex-pest in 1978 suddenly had nothing bad to say about the most photographed man at Jefferey Epstein’s island. (Perhaps not coincidentally, he has also warmed up to the British monarchy as he’s aged–also a haven for the sex-pest Prince Andrew.) Lydon’s politics in the end had absolutely no internal consistency whatsoever, and he had suddenly lost all appetite for offending those in power. What cowardice! What hypocrisy! What craven surrender! What ever happened to Johnny Rotten, the original Punk rocker?

Not that there hadn’t been signs all along: he had finger-wagged everyone who celebrated Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013 (which was overwhelmingly everyone most hurt by her austerity policies); and despite his earlier admiration for Oscar Wilde, he came out against gay marriage in 2005. Likewise, in Michael Azzerad’s 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Ian MacKaye recounts how Minor Threat once opened for Lydon’s second band Public Image, Ltd. in the early-’80s, so they played their absolute hearts out to try and impress one of their heroes–only to then see Lydon step out of his limousine outside: he had purposefully skipped out on the opening act. MacKaye related this story to explain why he chose to never skip the opening act once he became a headliner; but the other takeaway here is that Lydon was already a “champagne socialist” himself, even in the ’80s.

Indeed, Lydon comes off as an unrepentant asshole every other time he pops up in Our Band Could Be Your Life, too, such that at least half the other bands in the book had no truck with calling him a “sell-out” to his face even when he did deign to stand in the audience. The term “sell-out” has long fallen out of favor in the 21st-century, but that’s a shame, because it remains an important descriptor of someone who does things solely for the money, not principles. When Lydon once testily told an interviewer of Public Image, Ltd., “We ain’t no band, we’re a company,” it appears he was being completely serious; and when he named the Sex Pistols’ 1996 reunion tour “The Filthy Lucre Tour,” he apparently wasn’t being ironic there, either. And when he angrily called the late Sid Vicious “an empty coat hanger” during that same tour, that wasn’t just Punk Rock provocation, but indicative of how he really treats people (no wonder the Pistols broke up). His selfish assholery was never an act. As Maya Angelou once said, when people tell you who they are, believe them.

Which perhaps gets at the heart of why Lydon betrayed all of his purported ideals about healthcare reform to become a MAGA supporter: he was simply attracted to Trump as a fellow asshole. Because that is the only thing that has ever really appealed to John Lydon, hasn’t it: the ability to be an unrepentant asshole. It’s why he joined Britain’s first Punk band, it’s why he blasted “God Save The Queen” on Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, it’s why he called out Johnny Saville in 1978, it’s why he so loudly defended universal healthcare: Lydon merely wanted to get away with being a total asshole.

The fact that these were all good–or at least defensible–things that he did with his assholery was only a happy coincidence. His motivation wasn’t to use his assholery for good causes, but use good causes to justify his assholery. Hence, the moment conservatives embraced being open assholes themselves, he had no problem switching sides, no matter how many tens of millions of people their policies hurt. Unlike so many of his Punk Rock peers, John Lydon had been doing the right things for the wrong reasons, which only enabled him to then do the wrong things for even worse reasons. His rebellions had no moral center; when he sang “Don’t know what I want/But I know how to get it” on the Sex Pistol’s first single, he spoke the truth, because he has never actually known what he wants at all, other than his own self-aggrandizement, which really is the lowest form of anarchy.

But now I grow bored of ragging on some washed-up old sell-out, and turn my gaze instead towards my own Church. For I am of course far from alone in being exasperated that oh-so-many of my fellow Latter-day Saints–people who all their lives long have refused to ever utter a profanity or swear-word, watch an R-rated movie, listen to sexualized song-lyrics, wear “immodest” clothing; who righteously despised Bill Clinton as an adulterer and a liar; and who most certainly would never have let me listen to the Sex Pistols growing up–all very matter-of-factly turn around and vote for the “pussy-grabber,” the serial adulterer, liar, and rapist, the mass-deporter, family-separator, and vulgarian who crashed the economy and got literally a million people killed by COVID and staged a violent coup on 1/6/21. This they did not reluctantly, not with reservations, not as a “lesser-of-two-evils” choice, but enthusiastically, happily, proudly, for three straight election-cycles. Not all conservative LDS did this, mind you; but a definite majority did, and that without the slightest whiff of cognitive-dissonance or self-awareness. They all positioned themselves as the polar opposite of Johnny Rotten, but ended up in the exact same place as him anyways.

For it has been painfully obvious for nine years now that the majority of those essaying to be Latter-day Saints avoided profanity not out of a humble desire to become good, but only an image-conscious desire to appear good. Like John Lydon, they had been doing the right things for the wrong reasons, which made it all the easier for them to then do the wrong things for even worse reasons. Henry B. Eyering was right, and more importantly, so was Christ: Motivation really is everything. Without a solid motivation, you really do become as children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive. Now, more than ever, we need to examine our motivations.