Here we would say that the major factor in play with the general distaste for experiencing or even witnessing this in action is that it is a breach in fair treatment to favor the self over others, to have a dual standard where one is allowed to do what one wants but others are expected to stay within a set of rules and play fair, and will therefore be at a disadvantage in competing with someone who acts as though they are above the law, especially if they can get away with it. This is a very common consequence of people who are corrupted becoming out of alignment so that they cannot have compassion for the suffering of others in a normal way and when that is insufficient, find it all too easy to take advantage of other people to serve the self because they will be little concerned with the consequences they might be causing for the disadvantaged individuals they exploit in this fashion. It takes someone who is insensitive to live that way with the possibility of their conduct being detected and then becoming common knowledge when people start to spread stories about them, and at some point they will be called to account and it could be quite embarrassing indeed.
This embarrassment will be much less so on the part of someone who is beyond the pale, suffering from severe narcissism, or who has a sociopathic personality disorder making them devoid of a conscience. People are individually somewhere on a spectrum between divine alignment and non-alignment. It is the sociopaths at the extreme end of things in non-alignment. Those who are capable of even committing serious crimes, including homicide, without compunction because they cannot feel any remorse or guilt for anything they do because they care nothing about other people, and will not see and feel the harm to them as being important in any way, and will not allow that to hinder them in making things easy for themselves and harming others to gain an advantage.
So, in effect, hypocrisy is an extreme state of false representation, it is living a lie, and that is what makes it so upsetting because it is not a single lie in most cases but a lie that is perpetuated to become a kind of mode of operating, even a lifestyle as in having a career gained by self-promotion using false credentials and posing as something one is not, or enforcing rules of conduct that one is breaking personally again and again and again, and thus will appear to be two-faced when this disparity is eventually exposed and the person confronted. So this automatically will make it a more serious level of falsehood and many times hypocrisy involves criminal level conduct through its consequences, so it becomes a rather serious matter in the course of human affairs, and rightly so—it is very telling about the individual’s character who engages in hypocritical behavior.
Please login or Register to submit your answer