The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

There are, however, more profound reasons for protecting the
‘nakedness’ of others and for concealing our own. […] For a man to try
to cover and inhibit those elements within himself which he would like
to overcome and to bring forward those which he would like to see
triumphant is not ‘hypocrisy’. If he would like to be better than he is,
then he deserves to be encouraged in this aim, and there is something
very peculiar about the contemporary tendency to regard a person’s worst
qualities as representing his ‘true’ self, although it goes hand in
hand with the common belief that ugliness is in some strange way more
‘real’ than beauty and that to discover a shameful secret is to discover the truth