[ANON BOOK REVIEW OF A BOOK REVIEW: The left demonstrates they have no moral problem using hypocrisy as a tool. I was curious as to what defense the left offers. This book actually defends hypocrisy, although the opening paragraphs of this book review appears to condemn it. The defense of hypocrisy presented is hollow and empty of reason or morality. Epic fail.]

MIT Press

Our Obsession with Hypocrisy Is Making Things Worse

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.

(Full throated defense of hypocrisy follows this intro….)

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/our-obsession-with-hypocrisy-is-making-things-worse/