Douchebagginess seems to be driven by 2 unconscious factors. The 1st is believing your weaknesses are immutable and deciding to brazenly own them. The 2nd is being threatened by others trying to work on those weaknesses and attacking their fragile growth state imposter syndrome
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I never thought about this before, but the presence of imposter syndrome is what distinguishes hypocrisy from reality/aspiration gap. Hypocrisy is about having your cake and eating it too. Aspiration is about closing a gap.
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Hypocrisy: fake it so you don’t have to make it
Imposter syndrome: fake it till you make it
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Hypocrisy justifies itself by believing “everybody is faking it.”
Imposter syndrome cures itself by suspecting some do not.
Believing in the existence of sincerity is what seems to produce sincerity. Stone soup of the soul or something.
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This is why I’m highly suspicious of people who loudly decry virtue signaling. Besides the irony factor, are they really so dumb they think it’s 100% hypocrisy, 0% aspirational striving towards... well... actual virtue?
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This is the moral equivalent of behaviorism versus cognitivism.
Moral behaviorist think it’s all signaling.
Moral cognitivism, so to speak, assumes there is something it is like to ‘exist in virtue’ and that it’s a nice feeling. Or can be. Like feeling physically clean.
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I think people who don’t think it’s possible to “feel clean” at least for a while, and in some narrow sense, are like people who haven’t taken a bath for so long they’ve forgotten what it feels like to not be in an endemic state of grimy, smelly, itchiness.
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They seem to think it’s all about wanting to feel superior to others and hold others in contempt/look down on them. That’s like thinking the primary benefit of a bath is being able to turn your nose up at smelly people. Err, no. It’s actually a nice feeling all by itself.
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