March 4 2008

Too Good To Be… “False”

There’s nothing in this world I hate more than hypocrisy. I just can’t stand it!
I have no idea how people manage to smile at you, look you in the eye, and even hug or kiss you while they can’t stand the sight of you!

I’ve been through many situations, where I found myself surrounded with at least one hypocrite, who, in no time, managed to convert the rest of the people surrounding me into similar lying copies.
So in my opinion, there are 2 basic kinds of hypocrites, those who are hypocrites by nature, and those who are made hypocrites by those natural hypocrites. Let me explain.
There are those who, regardless of your own nature, would welcome you and show their happiness for knowing you and then stab you in the back in the first chance they get, for nothing you did wrong, just for the heck of it. These are hypocrites by nature. The other kind is the kind of people who believe what the first kind tells them, and act accordingly without giving you the privilege of showing what you’re made of. So even if they’re the sweetest people you know, even if they don’t usually hurt anyone, and sometimes even if they know how good a person you are, for some reason they’re weak when they’re in the company of the hypocrite-by-nature people and believe them so easily, maybe because the hypocrite-by-nature people are close to them, and are ones they’ve trusted their all life. So when they see you, they’d smile at you and welcome you but implicitly they’re planning ways to piss you off and make you pay for the lies told to them by the hypocrite-by-nature people.

Who’s worse? i believe the worst ever is the kind of people who know you, and know how good your intentions and acts are, but still insist on treating you as an evil person, even if you did nothing wrong to them or anyone they know, whether they belong to the first or second kind.

In the past, I dealt with hypocrisy in a self-destructive way. I used to get really sad, and mad, I had many sleepless nights trying to figure out why I’m being back-stabbed, or why do some people show me something then do something completely different, deliberately hurting me over and over again even though I never intended or did actually hurt them. On several occasions I’d turn to someone close and ask for support but I’d end up looking bad and many times I’d be considered the hypocrite, if not then I’d be at least called a whiny nagging silly person who feels all people are her enemy.
So there was a time when I’ve actually considered becoming a hypocrite myself, you know, “if you can’t beat them…”, but as the British novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham explains: “Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job”.
I can be extremely polite -which is often misunderstood as hypocrisy by the way- but I could not be two people at the same time. If I hate a person, I can tolerate them but I can’t act as if they’re so dear to me, and if there’s someone I love, I can never hurt them, at least not intentionally. So I pulled myself together and decided to deal with hypocrisy the best way I know, strength and ignorance. And now whenever someone hugs me tight when I know they’ve been talking negatively about me, or when someone gives me a big smile while giving me “hidden” and “indirect” comments to hurt my feelings or to point out something they know would annoy the hell out of me, I do get upset, but I take a deep breath, count to 10 and act as if I never really heard a thing… unless there was an insult of course that’s a different story ;)

Hypocrisy to me is the synonym of cruelty, indecency, intolerance, and insecurity. It’s a lie, a lie perfected in a way that it’s being believed at a certain point. All I can say is that nobody’s perfect, but you should always give any person a chance of expressing themselves and never judge by what others tell you.
As for the hypocrites out there, I leave you with Benjamin Franklin’s simple yet extremely useful quote: “Clean your finger, before you point at my spots.”



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Posted March 4, 2008 by Eman Abukhadra in category "Just Personal