By Michael Hallsworth, Ph.D.

You hypocrite.

These words hit people hard. They sting. Your pulse may quicken upon seeing them.

This aversion has deep roots. For many people, disgust of hypocrisy is part of the cultural fabric that weaves together their beliefs, judgments, and decisions. Religion provides an obvious starting point. In the Bible, Jesus rails repeatedly against the hypocritical Pharisees. Dante’s Inferno shows vividly what their fate could be: Hypocrites are banished to the second-lowest circle of Hell, together with “everything that fits / The definition of sheer filth.” There, they are forced to trudge around wearing cloaks that have dazzling gold on the outside, but which are lined with crushing lead within, making them as deceptive as their wearers.

Philosophers have also given hypocrisy a hard time, from Plato onwards. His Republic defines the “perfectly unjust man” as someone who has “secured for himself the greatest reputation for justice… while committing the greatest wrongs.” The 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau hated hypocrisy with an unnerving intensity, writing:

“The vile and groveling soul of the hypocrite is like a corpse, without fire, or warmth, or vitality left. I appeal to experience. Great villains have been known to return into themselves, end their life wholesomely, and die saved. But no one has ever known a hypocrite becoming a good man.”

Surprisingly, modern philosophers are not much more restrained. Hannah Arendt admits that “only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” Judith Shklar thinks that we see hypocrisy as “the only unforgivable sin” remaining today.

Yet it is Sigmund Freud who offers perhaps the most haunting evaluation of hypocrisy — and why it’s so deeply woven into the fabric of society. In his not-so-cheery 1915 title “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” which came out in response to the horrors of World War I, he wonders how such a sea of slaughter could explode so quickly, and how these impulses were contained in peacetime.

Freud theorizes that human nature consists of “instinctual impulses” that fulfill certain needs. These may be cruel and violent ones that involve us taking what we want, when we want it. But these impulses are neither good nor bad in themselves — we just end up labeling them as so, based on the needs and demands of society. What civilization does is suppress these instincts by instilling principles. In Freud’s view, we want to kill someone who humiliates us, but religious teaching (or the fear of punishment) holds us........

© Psychology Today