To be a hypocrite really isn’t about morality, or whether a particular belief is right or wrong, but rather has everything to do with the consistency of judging people by the same standards that you would accept as being consistent with your preferences and professed belief, to, in turn, be thus judged by. In other words, if you believe that someone who is a liar and a cheat should be exposed as being a liar and a cheat, then it would be consistent if others thereby exposed you as a liar and a cheat, as well, should you be those very things.
So too, if you believe that gossip is harmful and not becoming of a good citizen, but yet, you indulge in gossip from time to time, then quite frankly, you are being hypocritical by your action. Indeed, to judge another, under whatever conditions that have been set forth in a person’s mind, signifies that in fairness, other people should thereby be able to judge you along the same sort of lines and that you should have nary a complaint about such. Indeed, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Therefore, those who are not hypocrites are those who accept the same standards that they apply against other people, as being absolutely valid when applied against their own self, and thereby don’t complain about it.
In truth, to be a hypocrite is basically to be inconsistent in one’s outlook and philosophy to the other, because it isn’t consistent to apply a standard to one person, but to claim somehow that turnabout is not fair play when it most certainly is. So then, one way for people to reduce their hypocrisy is to be far less inclined to judge people and far more accommodating that as a people, we are subject to viewing the other erroneously, and often suffer from the inability to know everything of pertinence in regards to a particular situation, thereby not providing us with all the information that we need to formulate a fair judgment or opinion, if we were even so inclined.
For the hypocrite, there is a certain delight in taking the superior judgment position, so that from their perspective, though they may err, they believe fundamentally that most of the time they are in the right; whereas, those others that may have a complaint or two about them, are fundamentally wrong or else out of line. It is a truism that the hypocrite wants to believe that when they look deeply into the mirror, that they represent a paradigm of consistency when it comes to how they apply their judgments and their standards to the other, while also claiming to accept the same basis to evaluate them, in return; whereas the reality of the matter is that they are being overly generous to their self, while being far less than generous to the other, along with also being prone to adjusting their judgments “on the fly” so that they always end up smelling like roses, even though the smell that they are emanating is rather something actually quite foul