I suspect in a lot of these cases it looks something like the fundamental attribution error. "Your behaviour is a result of your intrinsic character and thus unacceptable, while my behaviour makes sense because of these situational reasons that excuse it even if yes technically it's not ideal"
I suspect in a lot of these cases it looks something like the fundamental attribution error. "Your behaviour is a result of your intrinsic character and thus unacceptable, while my behaviour makes sense because of these situational reasons that excuse it even if yes technically it's not ideal"
In other cases perhaps an almost deliberate unseeing - it's easy to not notice things that challenge your world view. You're probably right that on some level they know, but people are really really good at ignoring things that they know on some level that are inconvenient to them.
In yet other cases, the view professed is an aspirational one - "this is how people *should* be, which I am currently failing to live up to, but I'm trying my best". This is the view that worries me the most because it creates aspirational worldviews designed for perfectly spherical human beings in a vacuum that nobody has actually lived, and then a culture of punishing people for not living up to those proliferates.
I think that makes a lot of sense. A lot of people have also experienced this within religious communities, e.g. in Christianity there's the idea that we're all sinners but the point is making the effort to transcend that via a personal relationship with God. And one of my big theories about society is that secular post-Christian societies are often still very influenced by Christianity in ways that people perhaps don't recognise or acknowledge, so it wouldn't surprise me if that sense of "imperfect but striving [+/- unhealthy expectations about that]" had permeated our culture in a dilute form, even for people who've never even been raised in an atmosphere of faith.
I suspect in a lot of these cases it looks something like the fundamental attribution error. "Your behaviour is a result of your intrinsic character and thus unacceptable, while my behaviour makes sense because of these situational reasons that excuse it even if yes technically it's not ideal"
In other cases perhaps an almost deliberate unseeing - it's easy to not notice things that challenge your world view. You're probably right that on some level they know, but people are really really good at ignoring things that they know on some level that are inconvenient to them.
In yet other cases, the view professed is an aspirational one - "this is how people *should* be, which I am currently failing to live up to, but I'm trying my best". This is the view that worries me the most because it creates aspirational worldviews designed for perfectly spherical human beings in a vacuum that nobody has actually lived, and then a culture of punishing people for not living up to those proliferates.
I think that makes a lot of sense. A lot of people have also experienced this within religious communities, e.g. in Christianity there's the idea that we're all sinners but the point is making the effort to transcend that via a personal relationship with God. And one of my big theories about society is that secular post-Christian societies are often still very influenced by Christianity in ways that people perhaps don't recognise or acknowledge, so it wouldn't surprise me if that sense of "imperfect but striving [+/- unhealthy expectations about that]" had permeated our culture in a dilute form, even for people who've never even been raised in an atmosphere of faith.