While John was here, we got into a dis­cus­sion about hypocrisy. Being the com­plex per­son that he is, he admit­ted that he sees no prob­lem with act­ing in a hyp­o­crit­i­cal man­ner. In fact, he tried to con­vince me to feel the same way. “You’re let­ting your morals get in the way of advance­ment”, he would say. I don’t heed any of this advice, of course, because our mind­sets, goals, and rela­tion­ships are founded on two dif­fer­ent sets of val­ues, this being one of them. Having built the first twenty-four years of our lives on this foun­da­tion doesn’t make it dif­fi­cult for us to change them, but makes us indif­fer­ent to change instead. As much as we like to con­sider our­selves dynamic indi­vid­u­als, able to adapt to a sit­u­a­tion in the best man­ner pos­si­ble, this is lim­ited by our desire (or lack thereof) to do so.

In any case, I find it dif­fi­cult to be a hyp­o­crit­i­cal per­son, and in turn, I find hyp­o­crit­i­cal peo­ple dif­fi­cult. The most aggra­vat­ing are those who are hyp­o­crit­i­cal crit­ics. I don’t have a prob­lem with peo­ple point­ing out my flaws. I have them, and I admit it. It’s the first step towards self-improvement. It’s also great for gain­ing per­spec­tive, for learn­ing how dif­fer­ent peo­ple inter­pret things (because I know that many see prob­lems where there are none).

I do, how­ever, have a prob­lem with the peo­ple who freely give crit­i­cism, when they can’t take it them­selves. These are the hyp­o­critial crit­ics; the peo­ple who judge oth­ers past them­selves, when they are the last ones who should be pass­ing judge­ment on any­one. This hypocrisy may stem from some­thing as com­plex as inse­cu­rity, to some­thing as sim­ple as upbring­ing (espe­cially as a result of par­ents who refuse to admit fault to their chil­dren). It becomes espe­cially impor­tant in equal (non-authoratative) rela­tion­ships to rec­og­nize the bar­ri­ers that get put up by such a dou­ble standard.

Funny how an autho­r­ata­tive rela­tion­ship taught me this.