So I Fell Off the Wagon

I’ll turn the reigns over to Neal Stephenson for this one, from The Diamond Age:

“We take a some­what dif­fer­ent view of hypocrisy,” Fin­kle-​Mc­Graw con­tin­ued.
“In the late-​twen­ti­eth-​cen­tu­ry Weltan­schau­ng, a hyp­ocrite was some­one who espoused high moral views as part of a planned cam­paign of de­cep­tion –​ he never held these be­liefs sin­cere­ly and rou­tine­ly vi­olat­ed them in priva­cy. Of course, most hyp­ocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spir­it-​is-​will­ing, flesh-​is-​weak sort of thing.”

“That we oc­ca­sion­al­ly vi­olate our own stat­ed moral code,” Ma­jor Napi­er said, work­ing it through, “does not im­ply that we are in­sin­cere in es­pous­ing that code.”

“Of course not,” Fin­kle-​Mc­Graw said. “It’s per­fect­ly ob­vi­ous, re­al­ly. No one ev­er said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of con­duct. Re­al­ly, the dif­fi­cul­ties in­volved — the mis­steps we make along the way — are what make it in­ter­est­ing. The in­ter­nal, and eter­nal, strug­gle, be­tween our base im­puls­es and the rig­or­ous de­mands of our own moral sys­tem is quintessen­tial­ly hu­man. It is how we con­duct our­selves in that strug­gle that de­ter­mines how we may in time be judged by a high­er pow­er.”