The idea of homo hypocritus: the main reason we have huge brains is to hypocritically bend rules.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/homo-hipocritus.html

Anger, bragging, giving orders, and anything remotely resembling dominance among men is punished by avoidance, exile, and death [...] The puzzle here is that consistent enforcement of such norms seems to drastically reduce the payoff to expensive coalition-politics-savvy brains

In a messy real world, social norms expressed in language typically have many iffy boundary cases and ambiguities. This wouldn’t matter if boundary cases were decided randomly, but that seems unlikely. Instead big brain gains come five ways:

Unnormed – We engage in coalition politics on acts uncovered by norms, but in ways that will fit organically into the fabric of our social norms.

Skirt – We find self-advantageous ways to behave that are near but not over edge of violating norms.

Cover – When we observe others behaving near normative boundaries, we perform political calculations to decide whether to report those actions within our group and to group outsiders.

Frame – We find lawyer-like ways to argue about whether an action violates social norms, always to our own advantage, always in the interest of "impartiality and fairness"

Conspire – We form coalitions based on how we wish to to publicly interpret normative boundary cases.

When I first understood this, it was a skeleton key to decoding all human behavior. What if hypocrisy, rather than being an aberration, is the essential character of all humanity?

Norms have meta-norms against consciously trying to evade them. Self-deception helps here; we sincerely believe we just do our jobs and “tell it like it is”, but we selectively report and frame acts, and support interpretation coalitions, and unconsciously act to our advantage.

Instead of “man the tool user”, we might be better understood as “man the sly rule bender.” Critically, the essential hypocrisy at the core of all human behavior is _unwitting_, which is to say, self-deceiving. https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1023526757473890304

What this means is that almost everyone is evil and almost everyone is innocent of their own evil tendencies. People who act in "good faith" are nevertheless acting for their own advantage. And how could they do otherwise? And how could you expect otherwise?

The realization that revealed preferences do not align with stated preferences is a sister to this. "You mean its possible to want something, and to also believe that you want something entirely opposed to your true desire?"

The truth, the hideous truth, is that you evolved to lie to yourself. Knowledge of self is a joke. You will never be able to get outside yourself, no matter how hard you try. You're just too close, and your own internal agendas will always distort your self-perception.

The intersection of Gödel and Sisyphus https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019264243244228608

You're a liar to your core, and so am I, and that means all philosophies, all moralities, all axioms, and all institutions are untrustworthy. Every action ever performed was an act of calculated self-interest. Every noble ideal ever upheld was a distraction.

And that's fine! Radical cynicism only descends into nihilism if you had too much attachment to your silly lies in the first place. "I'm a good person." Stop thinking like this. You're a self-deceiving sly rule-bender. "That's depressing." Grow up.

Honestly, once you internalize the principle of homo hypocritus, much of Nietzsche becomes simply a clever application of Robin Hanson's theory.