"... Gervais neatly illustrated exactly why so many people so resent the increasingly ritualized ceremonial sanctimony."

"Because it turns out that this may be exactly what makes people hate hypocrites so much: They fool us into giving them credit for holding potentially costly moral beliefs without actually paying those costs. A 2017 paper from the journal Psychological Science reported a series of experiments demonstrating that we give people moral credit for condemning bad behavior — more credit than we give them for just stating that they themselves behave morally. But by the same token, we resent people who condemn others while privately indulging the same vices even more than we resent those who falsely claim to do the right thing. In fact, the people they studied seemed willing to give people a pass on hypocrisy if they admitted they didn’t live up to their own ideals. What bothers us most, this suggests, is not the disconnect between values and behavior, something we’re all guilty of, but rather trying to gain social status by pretending to be more moral than you are."

From "Ricky Gervais teaches Hollywood what speaking truth to power really means" by Megan McArdle (in WaPo).