Hypocrisy in its pejorative sense can be a depressing subject. No-one likes to hear the hypocritical refrain constantly repeated over and over, that everyone including himself is a hypocrite proudly putting up a false pretense of universal goodness to hide the original evil, the particular selfishness within. After all, calling someone a hypocrite is tantamount to calling him a selfish bastard who pretends to be otherwise. The Alexandrine Jews translated hanef, denoting a godless person, into 'hypokrite'; until then, 'hypocrisy' simply meant to play a part, hence a hypocrite was merely an actor. Since God is the universal father who provides the patriarchal community with its unity, a godless person is a bastard; and a selfish bastard at that, because he thinks of himself and does not have the good of the community at heart.

Moreover, the hypocrite would rather not do his moral duty, which is a social duty or duty to the universal - the community. He would rather be true to his individual will, which is essentially anarchic because it would persist forever if only it could, without resistance, without any leadership but its own freedom unbounded. But alas for the individual; he is not the omnipotent, universal god. He is a particular, part-time, demigod who must occasionally spell his name backwards and tag along with the others if he would survive as a human being. Wherefore we don our masks and play our parts for our own good. Thus is the social interest a selfish interest. To call a married woman a hypocrite for playing a wifely role because she wants the benefits of marriage is hypocritical. The term would be more fairly applied if she took her vows and gave a command performance of the duties of her role with evil intent, say to get herself in her husband's will, then arrange for a seeming accident. Madonna played that role quite well in Body of Evidence; the protagonist married wealthy men with weak hearts and literally screwed them to death; lawyers debated whether or not a woman's body could be legally defined as a 'deadly weapon.'

So we think 'hypocrisy' is an abusive term, and we take pause to apologise for calling people selfish bastards. Augustine, whom many Christian scholars claim is the founder of modern Western intellectual history, received the impression from his misinterpretation of Paul that man is a selfish bastard or godless man because he fell from grace into sin and must be redeemed or burn in hell. Even innocent babies are tainted by Augustine's original sin: if they are not baptized, they will burn in hellfire. Augustine wrote the first Catholic justification of state persecution of religious error, setting the stage for the Inquisition. To object to forced conversion is to disbelieve God's power to convert. God the father must whip his sons, for "true education begins with physical abuse" - "per molestias eruditio". Original sin is sin of the flesh. Augustine was a profligate before his conversion; thereafter he deems a woman's embraces "sordid, filthy, and horrible." In his old age this brilliant man, who had in fact contributed many bright lights to humankind, became the apotheosis of christian hypocrisy - that is, if christianity be a religion of love. He became an evil cleric, merciful to those who feared him, hateful to those who disagreed, and would have had all those opposed to his views subjected to state cruelty in order to impose his version of the divine order on the city of his god. Such is the trap of divine anarchy that god-men who adore omnipotent gods often fall into.

Yes, hypocrisy is a depressing subject, and the term is unfairly applied to a few of us after everyone is implicated. We are sick and tired of hearing about our our original evil and our selfishness and our hypocrisy. It is high time that we accentuate the positive, keep the good things in mind and feel very blessed. After all, we have heard the gospel that good is a positive thing, while evil is its absence or merely nothing, therefore let us ignore evil and focus on good. In fact there is nothing to ignore for evil has no positive existence. Why, Augustine himself said that evil has no existence. And we do not have to prove that evil is nothing, for it is impossible to prove the negative, that nothing exists.

Life must go on and it will go on one way or another whether we like it or not, so let us proceed with a smile on our face and a song on our lips. Laugh, sang the wildly popular American newspaper poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and the whole world will laugh with you. Human life will be a continuous improvement to perfection if we put on a happy face and keep our goal in mind; every swerve from our wanted destination will be corrected by our cybernetic pilot. We may have been wrong in the past, but so what? We can certainly become better in the future, so let us not dwell so much on our past mistakes that we lose faith in our progress to perfection and lose confidence in our ability to achieve it.

If we are all hypocrites then let us reinvent ourselves and give the word a flattering spin - we invented the negative stereotype and we can rid ourselves of it. After all, we do not find the stereotypical hypocrite running around classical literature, no more than we find hypocrites in the rest of our animal kingdom. Yes, the monarch butterfly is poison to predators; the pseudo-monarch butterfly is a good dinner but looks like poison so the predators shy away; but we do not charge the camouflaged butterfly with hypocrisy! When a woman changes her dress or puts on pants to suit the occasion, we do not call her a hypocrite. And her cosmetic is good medicine all around when the cosmos looks sick and disordered.

No, we are not butterflies; we don't think butterflies self-consciously intend to deceive predators. We are something more than animals, or at least we think we are the kings of our kingdom - 'think' is the key word. We do not have to automatically deceive each other in order to evolve. We can put our best foot forward, put on a jolly good shew, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps - if that is hypocrisy, this is our apologia for hypocrisy. Our camouflage is for our mutual benefit, not for cheating some hungry competitor out of dinner - we would rather feed him for $6.95. Again, we have something more going for us than do butterflies. Darwin's 'bulldog' or propagandist, T.H. Huxley, knew that - Huxley was no social Darwinist. Man is more than an animal: biological evolution per se is his worst enemy if he does not use it to his advantage; otherwise he will destroy his race with weapons of mass destruction. By golly, man does well to deliberately put on a smile that the whole world may smile with him. His smile will come true ; he will get ahead in the world and do the world some good to boot, so let us not be so hasty with the bitter, judeo-christian condemnation - "Thou hypocrite!"

It is said that he who lies long enough comes to believe his lies, and that he who believes moves the world. Well, then, why not tell good lies? If the miserable man gets up every morning, smiles into his mirror and says, "I am a happy man today! Good Morning, and the top of the world to you! " the days will go better for him, until one day his positive mental attitude will be a matter of habit and he will be on the top of the world. Let us not blame actors for acting, for not actually being the person they pretend to be. Every pretender is not a happy hooker or a confidence man who would win our heart to pick our pocket.

There is a underlying crisis in every man that makes him a natural-born hypocrite or actor, something that moves him to be other than he is, to make something of himself, to progress from evil to good, and to that end he plays his part. He knows that he differs from his role, that his role is a lie so to speak, yet he plays his part and does his best to be true to his character. 'Hypocrisy' can be a good thing. So he is divided and that division identifying him is determined by his decisions or crises which turn on a point, the decisive turning point where past and future continuously meet, where we are baptized in freedom if we seize the moment before we fall into oblivion.

Let's end our apology for hypocrisy here, for it is Monday morning, and what a wonderful morning it is! Let's put on our best faces today and see what transpires.