Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Hypocrisy and Jesus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Faking it is a Domain not completely congruent with the vice of hypocrisy, though there is so much overlap that we must face hypocrisy at the outset. Not all hypocrites experience the anxieties at the core of the faking it syndrome. And not all types of faking it raise a serious issue of hypocrisy. I am not a hypocrite, unless most teachers are, for pretending to find interesting what is dull, or for engaging in the various falsenesses that constitute cajolery. Nor am I a hypocrite for putting on a somber face at the news of the untimely death of a person I didn't especially care for. Says Trollope: “Will anyone dare to call this hypocrisy? If it be so called, who in the world is not a hypocrite? Where is the man or woman who has not a special face for sorrow before company? The man or woman who has no such face would at once be accused of heartless impropriety.” Were we to blame the mere donning of a role that our hearts weren't totally into as hypocrisy, we would be hypocrites all the time, except perhaps when asleep.
Even in sleep there is a trace of role-playing, of self-monitoring so as to maintain certain proprieties and a sense of responsibility, though not enough to give rise to hypocrisies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Faking It , pp. 9 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003