People being fake

People being fake

I think there are a few layers to this.

Analyzing motivations

For most people, it is a bonding mechanism. They fake to increase their common ground, as a basis for socialising, since being liked and with others is their prime motivation. We are usually more independent and not interested in shallow relationships anyways, so there is little reason for us to act like this and it feels unauthentic to us since we do not share the same intrinsic motivation.

In a lot of cases, it is also a defence mechanism to overcome their insecurities, consciously and subconsciously. Few people are really ready to accept the truth, even with themselves and rather avoid than confront it. It takes a lot of self-esteem to openly admit your faults in a constructive way without regrets. Just look at how many people would not openly tell you their weight, even though it is more or less visible for anyone to see anyways.

Mediocrity

This behaviour is not constructive at all and it really drags me down to see it in people close to me, externalising responsibility so they can feel better in their misery. You often see this even combined with the bonding part when people form groups and circle-jerk about their mediocrity as if it was a thing to be proud of. I often clash with these people as it usually bothers me too much to not say anything when they are factually wrong and I care about the topic.

Manipulation

And then there are those that actually want to play and manipulate others, for example dark triad personality traits, and because they treat it all as a game, without showing their true intentions, they do not trust others either and always suspect them to play games as well. So within every purely factual statement, they always assume a hidden narrative. It is just impossible to be honest with these people, as you will inevitably get entangled in a net of suspicion and bad faith.

Conclusion

Few people are able to deal with real honesty and I am not even talking about brutal honesty here, just plain out simple words from the heart without double binds, even if you try to sugarcoat it.

I think the biggest problem from an INTJ perspective is that we usually try to lay out our entire factual base to honestly present a case and this will often include statements that are easily misunderstood or seen without sufficient context and ultimately hurt others even if it is just honest observations to us and we are not judging at all. Usually it is better to just describe how you feel about something without explaining the reasoning and rationalisation behind it and let the other figure this out themselves, but it goes very much against our analytical nature and motivation to go through this thought process together to arrive at the same, correct conclusion.