The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Arendt treats hypocrisy not as a mere social failing but as a profound moral corruption. The hypocrite’s distinctive wrong is self-betrayal: presenting a fabricated moral persona while knowing it to be false, thereby “bearing false witness” against one’s own inner truth. For Arendt, many vices can coexist with a kind of integrity—someone may be flawed yet still honest about what they are. Hypocrisy uniquely dissolves that possibility because it requires systematic self-deception and the manipulation of moral language for appearance’s sake. This is why she calls it the “vice of vices”: it hollows out the very capacity for truthful self-relation on which responsibility and judgment depend.