My usual response in dealing with people who are stupidly argumentative and intensely hypocritical and highly critical is to ignore and avoid them as much as possible. Such people are usually not self-aware enough of their own flaws to be reflective, or else they would turn their critical energies inward rather than outward, and the intensity of their criticism usually indicates that they are the sort of abusive people who can dish out hostility but who cannot really take it because they do not feel that it is deserved. Unfortunately, at times the lack of reflection on the part of such people means that they find it mystifying that I would wish to avoid interacting with them as much as is humanly possible, as they see no reason apart from wrongness in the part of others that people would wish not to interact with such founts of wisdom and instruction and knowledge as these fools consider themselves. And not wishing to cast my pearls before swine, I consider it better not to open an argument with such people who would try to drag me down to their own level and beat me with experience.

Nevertheless, for my own benefit and for the benefit of others who struggle with like problems, it is nevertheless of interest to think about the problem because such an issue is a universal aspect of human experience. A great many people in general have to deal with abusive and disagreeable people whose own lives are a shambles and who lack genuine love and concern for others but who somehow they think they know enough to tell everyone else what is wrong with them rather than spending their limited supplies of energy in minding with and dealing with their own business. Unfortunately, one of the most common ways in which people seek to imitate God is in being Lord and Master and Lawgiver and Judge, without having done the necessary work of making sure that their character and lovingkindness are modeling after God first. And if we are to criticize such tendencies in others, we must not be remiss in seeing how such things could easily be true of ourselves as well. It does us no good if we can see the hypocrisy or flaws in others because everyone can see flaws in others. What does us good is to see the flaws in others and also manage to see ourselves, and then to do the work necessary to improve ourselves, whether or not that work is seen or recognized by those self-appointed critics who condemn us so that they may be justified, but who face a great surprise when they in turn find themselves judged as they judged others and not as they excused themselves.

There is a longstanding joke that sharks will not go after lawyers out of professional courtesy. More poignantly, sharks do not tend to go after people in general except accidentally, and have acquired an unjust reputation for deliberately hunting people that has led them to be slaughtered en masse. The idea of professional courtesy is one that is insufficiently practiced in our world, though, and it is in large part because of a lack of self-awareness. We all spend a great deal of time and effort in our lives and in our relationships with others in explaining ourselves and justifying ourselves, and yet despite this effort we do not spend nearly as much time seeking to understand and relate to the justifications that other people can make for themselves. And even where there is much that we have to be ashamed about, we likewise spend a great deal of time seeking to condemn others and do not consider that others may have reasons just as good as our own for not doing as we would wish them to do. This lack of professional courtesy on the part of one hypocrite to another is a sign of a lack of true awareness of the need for reciprocity in our dealings, and our beliefs that some factors we may possess exempt us from the need to give to others what we demand for themselves, despite the fact that this is the rule by which we should organize our existence.

It is often thought that we are particularly empathetic to those who have suffered or struggled like ourselves, but this is not always the case. In fact, it is only the case when we acknowledge the suffering and struggles that we have had. When we do not acknowledge or even admit such things, we often show an intense antipathy towards those who are like us, our feelings of shame for our own experience and our own behavior intensifying the loathing that we have for others like us. Indeed, we find in our sharpest denunciations against others the real measure of dissatisfaction we have with ourselves, and can use what really gets our goat in others as a sign of what vulnerabilities we have for wrongdoing with ourselves. Most of us are simply not wise enough or focused enough on internal development and personal growth to take this information and use it for improvement. Rather, we try to find weapons to target others with energy and time that should be spent repenting and making the difficult efforts to change. For it is not until we change that we have some hope of actually doing well by others, for it takes the beam out of our eyes so that we may be discerning about the specks in the eyes of those around us. Unfortunately for us all, the painful and unpleasant experience of dealing with hypercritical hypocrites does not usually put us in the mood for self-examination, but usually for some form of self-defense, and so the hostility continues.