Herein we are describing what we consider to be ideals. Do we all live up to these ideals? Not necessarily. Is that hypocrisy? Not necessarily.

 

Many people in this world have conceptions of perfection that are actually based merely on how they already are. Thus they have what could be called religions (in a sense), and in those religions, they are saints. But a conception of sainthood that revolves around oneself will never be recognized by anyone else, which will make it more difficult to interact with others, and which is bad. The test for self-centric sainthood is to wonder whether or not the same attributes, if displayed by other people in different circumstances, would still be saintly. If not, that isn't actually a religion — it's just a way of preserving one's sense of self worth in a world that offers little in the way of clear validation. That doesn't mean that it is hypocrisy per se, unless one attempts to pass off such rationalizations as legitimate reasons.

 

Some other people talk about ideals, not because they instantiate them, but because they want to create the illusion that they do. This is easier from a distance than up close, but people who succeed at it can garner a bit of favoritism that they would not have been afforded otherwise, and/or leniency when it comes to their trangressions. Sometimes they get away with wrong-doing just because nobody believes that somebody who seemed to be so good could have done something so sinister. This kind of behavior is definitely hypocricy.

 

Yet there is a third scenario, in which people talk about ideals that are higher than they have achieved, that is not hypocrisy at all. Setting standards of excellence that are higher than one's actual level of achievement, toward which one is striving, isn't wrong, and it isn't hypocrisy unless one tries to misrepresent one's own capabilities.

 

The utility of discussing ideals goes way beyond just the ability to define personal goals. We are all imperfect. Yet if we put out heads together, we can develop ideas that are more perfect than anything that we, as individuals, could have conceived.

 

As an analogy, if we were to build a house, we'd buy some land, and we'd commission an architect to design the house. The basic design might be the handiwork of just one person, but typically, several or many people will inspect the blueprints before they're finalized, including other architects, engineers, building inspectors, and of course, the homeowners. All of these people can make mistakes, and thus overlook errors in the prints. But the chance of two people making the same mistake is slight, and the chance of an error making it past three people is even more remote. If enough people carefully inspect the prints, the chance of there being an undetected error asymptotically approaches zero. Thus a team of people can do work that approaches perfection, even when each person on the team is far from perfect.

 

In the same way, we, as members of a society in search of the right thing to do, can work together to develop standards for moral behavior, and the standards can (and should) be far better than ourselves. In fact, they should be visions of perfection, by which we can all measure ourselves, and toward which we can all strive. But this doesn't make everybody hypocrits. Rather, people willing to discuss ideals that reveal their own limitations are actually more honest than people who rationalize their behaviors by setting self-centric standards.

 

Most importantly, these visions of perfection can serve as the bedrock of our communities, immune to fads and trends, and the prerogatives of personalities. Thus the visions become tough to corrupt, because they are the product of many people seeking perfection.