It's a dangerous psychological pattern to hold yourself to a moral standard that you cannot live up to. It brings you in constant debt with yourself, leads to self hatred and zealotry, and to abusive behavior towards others who of course also don't live up to your standards.
Inducing existential debt via guilting the subject through a kind of indelible original sin into an impossible standard is a design pattern of many religious and ideological cults. It creates a distorted, self flagellating self and a hierarchy of contempt.
This pattern is universal in abusive relationships: Once a subjects accepts that their essence is tainted by an original sin (like doubt, horniness, ugliness, maleness, blackness, whiteness), it establishes a persistent right to reparations and enables exploitation.
Of course you should still hold yourself to higher moral standards than you hold most others. Otherwise you either won’t enter in friendships with high standards people, or you will be disappointed by most of the others.
You can follow @Plinz.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: