[natecavanaugh]

Yes and shouldn't our first goal to be to examine ourselves for it and understand that sometimes that our culture and times and the systems involved make living in a purely idealistic state either untenable or at least make it incredibly hard for us to have any cultural impact towards the better?

For some, living any part of the system is hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance. For others, it's trying their best to live towards their ideals while also understanding that progress is a constant journey. And for some, it's a mix of both.

Being human and flawed isn't unique to any one person or group. It's the default, and I tend to think that those who throw hypocrisy towards others should eliminate it from their lives first. I have yet to meet a single person who has done that, and even the extreme ascetics or saints engage in some form or other. Armchair quarterbacking someone else's hypocrisy a few centuries after the fact seems even harder to pull off without at least some level of humility towards our own institutional blindness.

[ForHackernews]

Sure, we're all guilty of it to one degree or another. You call it "armchair quarterbacking", I call it dealing honestly with flawed people in history. I don't understand the reflexive impulse (in this thread and elsewhere) to try and absolve revered historical figures of their very real crimes and yes, hypocrisies.

[natecavanaugh]

Oh, I wasn't implying that I think he or any figure should be "absolved" of anything.

If we're all guilty of hypocrisy in some form or another, and we all struggle with it, and the person your describing is dead and can do nothing to change that fact, what is actually the point?

I mean, there are times hypocrisy is overt and blatant, and times when it's subtle and we don't see it in ourselves. In those times, I think it should be called out on, and even historically, it can be useful to make the distinction between outright deceit and phoniness to cognitive dissonance to just being unaware.

With Thomas Jefferson, or most people from the past, I can't know which part of the spectrum of hypocrisy they fell on.

I think it's fair for you to be honest and point it out, but it's so often used as a pejorative statement without any nuance into the relative ways in which we could easily be talking about ourselves.

But again, I don't say any of this to try to defend or deny the sins of those in the past, those should be discussed frankly and out in the open.