I should start by being honest, that is to say not hypocritical. I believe that hypocrites are the lowest form of life.

The moral philosophers have always despised hypocrisy the most among the many troubling traits human beings can possess. They call it the “vice of vices?”

Hannah Arendt, the famed moral philosopher wrote 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.”

The terrorist or criminal might do great evil, but often believe that what they are doing is right. They are not hypocrites.

A hypocrite is someone who pretends to be something he or she is not. I see hypocrites almost every time I turn on the news, they seem to flourish in Washington and on cable news channels. A hypocrite is also someone in my mind who sees themselves as being morally superior to people who think differently.

“We are all hypocrites, “wrote Jose Emilio Pacheco,’ we cannot see ourselves or judge ourselves the way we see and judge others.

I think there’s a lot of truth in that, just look a the so-called Left and Right.

“Indeed, it is bad enough to be a victim of injustice,” wrote A.G. Holder in the Prindle Post, “but when the crime is performed by one who claims a position of moral authority, the injustice is multiplied. One can do wrong without being hypocritical, but one cannot be a hypocrite without doing wrong; in fact, hypocrisy typically compounds the painful consequences of evil.”

I think one reason I get so angry with some of the people who message me is that they sometimes seem like hypocrites to me, and I admit to hating hypocrites. The woman who claims to be a passionate environmentalist ridicules me for buying aluminum water bottles and giving up plastic ones.

Is she helping the environment? She’d rather be superior to me. She is a hypocrite.

The people tell me I am ignoring Bud in favor of Zinnia are hypocrites to me, because they could not possibly know how I am treating Bud and because they don’t know that they are speaking about themselves and their own lives, not me and my dogs.

That is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is always false, it is always a lie.

The man who e-mailed me that the graduates of Bishop Maginn High School would have trouble getting into Harvard is a hypocrite. He has no idea what the refugee students want and knows little of their love for the school, and its support for them and their families.

I realized – it took long enough – that when I get angry, it’s because I believe I am dealing with hypocrisy. And when I get angry, I accomplish nothing in return.

In chapter two of her book On Revolution. Arendt dubs hypocrisy “the vice of vices” on the grounds that it is inescapably indefensible. Any other vice, she argues, could feasibly be justified from the right perspective, but hypocrisy alone is bereft of any possible integrity.

Why do I dislike hypocrites so much? Perhaps because I am one in some ways.

“People dislike hypocrites because they unfairly use condemnation to gain reputational benefits and appear virtuous at the expense of those who they are condemning — when these reputational benefits are in fact undeserved,” explains psychological scientist Jillian Jordan of Yale University, first author on the research in Psychological Science.

Naom Chomsky wrote that “for the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”

Since I dislike hypocrisy so much and see it so often, I’ve been thinking about what I can do to not be a hypocrite, since it is so easy to be one, and in our society, rewarded so richly.

Our President has compared undocumented immigrants to rapists and murderers, yet he has hired them in almost all of his properties for all of his working life.

To me, this is the purest and most brazen kind of hypocrisy, someone uses the vilification of others for his or her own benefit. Why do so many people not only tolerate it but find it virtuous and admirable?

I think it has to do with the truth. Truth without love is brutality, even demagoguery. Love without truth is hypocrisy.

I think Pacheco is correct to say we are hypocrites to some degree because in our rigid and unyielding ideologies we are cannot see ourselves honestly or judge ourselves in the way we judge others.

It is only later in life that I was able to face the truth about myself, and begin the arduous work of healing, of being authentic.

I have a good friend who is a rabid hater of Donald Trump, she has become nearly obsessed with worrying about him and disliking what he says and does. She has become addicted to the news, and lives, like so many people in our twin ideologies, in an almost perpetual state of outrage.

She is especially outraged at what she sees as the most brazen kind of hypocrisy  – his claim that he loves and supports women while so many women have come forth to accuse him of sexual harassment, even rape.

The President makes a point of hating everything she believes in, she often says and is incapable of supporting any idea that is not held passionately by his base of supporters.

Okay, I said, admittedly getting weary of her ceaseless and almost daily tirades against Donald Trump, name one good thing he has done, and one thing about him that you like.

She didn’t hesitate to say this was impossible. He has done nothing that is true or good,  she said, and nothing about him that it is possible to like. She said if he continues to stay in power, America will become a fascist country or worse.

I challenged her a bit about this.  In a sense, I said, wasn’t she doing precisely what bothered her so much about the President? Was it possible that in four years he had done nothing that was wise or overdue or effective?  Was it possible that none of the people in his life or family found a single thing that was positive or likable or true about him?

That there was no good or virtue in him?

Was it no longer possible for my friend to see herself clearly or to judge herself in the way she judges her and her supporters? I noted with some sadness that my friend, one of the brightest people I know,  had lost perspective and the ability to listen or reason.

I am not a supporter of our President, but I do want to understand why half of the country is. And I can name several things he has done that seem smart and effective to me. It is hypocritical for me to fail to acknowledge that this is important, it’s about seeking truth, not righteousness.

I think there is, in fact, hypocrisy in me and in the whole construct of a “left” and a “right,” into whose funnel every idea of position has to be stuffed and accepted or rejected.

This is the narrow vessel into which tens of millions of people have been led and manipulated to the point that dialogue has died, along with compromise and empathy.

Isn’t that the true meaning of hypocrisy? Everything we do is good, everything they do is bad?

This is the triumph of hypocrisy, I think because it makes truth impossible and reason a heresy. Perhaps this is why Hannah Arendt hated hypocrites so much, maybe she foresaw the damage they would ultimately do.