Hypocrisy
(Presented at the 2025 ANZURA Conference in Brisbane)
Introduction
The initial idea for this topic comes from the saying of Jesus well-known from the New Testament.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. (Matthew 27 KJV)
And in The Urantia Book, referring to Jesus there is the following:
His few denunciations were directed against pride, cruelty, oppression, and hypocrisy. 140:8.21 (1582.2)
and:
My Father disdains pride, loathes hypocrisy and abhors iniquity. 149:6.11 (1676.5)
These and similar sayings have an urgency that many a modern reader will not comprehend straight away, from being too familiar with hypocrisies near and far, large and small and not easy to shock. But even a dim awareness of these Pharisees, hypocrisies, sepulchres and even the crucifixion should be enough to invite deeper inquiry. What is the “big deal” here? What makes an undesirable but otherwise ordinary weakness so dangerous? What ingredient makes it explode into trouble?
By definition hypocrisy is about appearance. And, as the experienced hypocrite will tend to distort reality in every way possible, a proper effort to understand it is actually quite difficult. It’s mischievous and not completely rational. Neither looking too hard at particular hypocrisies nor trying to classify them scientifically seems to help much, so what follows are just a few observations about hypocrisy which seem to contribute towards a modern re-discovery of the problems and dangers. Because that which brought woe to the scribes and to the Pharisees surely finds conditions favourable, given present-day ease of communication and technical efficiency.
As I hope to show, despite the inherently slippery nature of this topic, perseverance did eventually connect it to the conference theme with some unexpected observations on the nature of faith.
Hypocrisy Everywhere
In individuals’ occasional pretentious behaviour is easy enough to notice. Here the difficulty is that as one individual cannot know for certain the motives of another it is not possible to simply assume hypocrisy from appearances. Perhaps a person who is struggling with problems is putting on a brave face just to keep going. Or perhaps it is for reasons of self-improvement that a person attempts a “fake it ’til you make it” strategy. In these cases it would be most unfair to point a finger and declare “thou hypocrite”.
Yet finger-pointing of precisely that kind is quite characteristic of the hypocrite because pointing out someone else’s failings is such a convenient way to divert attention from one’s own. Moreover, the hypocrite can pretend to very acute discernment by high magnification of whatever tiny failings in others present themselves. So we have the admonition,
Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye. (Luke 6:42)
Inconsistency in all its forms is another marker for hypocrisy and yet again an individual must be allowed an honest change of mind or be denied the opportunity to improve.
Apart from immediate consequences in emotional hurt and disrespect for fellow creatures, these behaviours are usually not much more than games that people play. So, rather than recite further examples of this kind, let’s move on to consider consequences that are recognizably dangerous.
The element of self-deception that happens in hypocrisy is nothing less than a departure from reality, and that is quite serious business, for we know that meeting every reality we discover with our most sincere effort is of considerable importance in this universe or universes (130:4). Carelessness with reality means missing out on spiritual progress of one kind or another. Here I am of course using the word “reality” in The Urantia Book sense denoting a fullness of promise in addition to the many challenges involving what are so tidily described as cosmic realities, mind meanings and spirit values (0:1.1).
An unfortunate consequence of self-deceptive hypocrisy is what it so readily leads to; more hypocrisy and ever greater departures from reality, potentially forming a positive feedback loop, a tumbling snowball, a runaway train, a critical atomic reactor of the mind.
Individuals working together can carry out several hypocritical activities at once thereby achieving collectively a degree of hypocrisy well beyond the reach of any one individual, at least one with a coherent personality. For example, a government office might be tweaking the departmental website for outward appearances exactly while a neighbouring office might be engineering terms of reference to neutralize an inquiry into last year’s mistakes; bureaucratic white-wash for the sepulchral remains of last year’s corruption.
In government, artfully chosen terms of reference ensure a report can be technically independent and still constrained to find only what is politically convenient. Most famously the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are of this kind. Regardless of the respectable science contained therein, the terms of reference ensure that the public sees only the outer layer of allowable findings, apparently proving again and again that humans are the cause. Despite the novelty of presenting findings as worse rather than better, it is an exercise in hypocrisy nonetheless. Perhaps it might be called a “carbon-blackened temple” in contrast to the more usual “whited sepulchre”.
Disturbingly, in the sphere of government the hypocrite is also an easy target for the political opportunist promising prestige to anyone willing to make a show of being a good party member and ready to point out anyone else who isn’t. In the political extreme of fascism the sentiment of “I am better than you” soon becomes “You aren’t as good as me”, and that soon becomes “You need to be controlled” or even “We need to attack your country and make you behave”. For the purpose of taking control of a population fake emotion is evidently just as effective as the real thing and just as dangerous.
Modern Hypocrisy
It might be said that not much has changed if we allow that the ancient scribe has become the modern bureaucrat and that the ancient Pharisee has become the modern technocrat, still with a political agenda and still dangerous because politics requires its sepulchre of secrets to look spotless even to the use of deadly force.
But change there has been, most evidently in the speed of interaction. Whereas in the past it would take time for consequences to build, time for lies to be uttered, time for ink to dry on the page, now new hypocrisy appears out of thin air as fast as information in the electromagnetic spectrum can carry it, so readily available that the battle is now about quality rather than quantity. Accordingly, in the information age the perpetual art of misrepresentation has shifted in emphasis towards various fabrications about information quality, including “misinformation”, said to be incorrect in substance, and “dis-information”, known to be false but presented as true for the purpose of deception. Now there is even “mal information” said to be harmful to know, although that usually just means inconveniently likely to expose a hypocrite. Of course, all of these are just new labels for old departures from reality and the truth-seeker knows that the only remedy for defective information is more information however its quality might be described by someone else.
In the past materialism, too, has been about the proximity of heart and treasure (Luke 12.34) or about science considering only material phenomena. Now, with the human mind so often separated from reality by an electronic display of some kind, we have the paradox of materialism embedded strangely in a virtual world that is objectively less material; more and more obsession over less and less matter. Along with the appearance of virtual, almost spiritual-seeming worlds, some extremists have escaped the pages of science fiction comics to seek to build conscious machines and merge them with human minds. It is so hard to know what might arise from such an experiment that it must be left to explain itself someday. Even so, I can suggest that the combination of human intelligence and machine intelligence both pretending to attributes of each other would be a spectacular concentration of high-speed, machine-assisted hypocrisy.
Famously in film and literature, the fictional, self-aware computer called HAL9000 took the course of the hypocrite to cover its cyber-embarrassment over a small cyber-mistake by eliminating everyone who knew about it. This kind of dangerous thinking machine, that was purely imaginary when the story was written, has since become at least partly practical with the rise of mass-produced computer componentry implementing machine learning in the form of a network of virtual neurons organized, layered and intimately interdependent such that the ensemble produces something resembling intelligence. Machines of this kind already have a procedural competence sufficient to put in charge of a spacecraft. Luckily for us the HAL9000 already went berserk around the year 2001! Meanwhile let’s be quietly aware of the internal feedback of information happening even inside a language model artificial intelligence and the possibility of something very strange happening very quickly.
There are indeed plenty of hypocrisies and departures from reality of which to be aware but instead of being overwhelmed by these additions to our great mountain of concerns, let’s now consider how they relate to faith, which is the time-proven resource for facing everything from woolly mammoths and mega-reptiles to big data and machine intelligence, even big spiders.
Faith in Flux
One of the most admirable qualities of faith is constancy in the face of challenges, as displayed by many biblical and historic figures and fictional ones like John Bunyan’s pilgrim or Frank Baum’s Dorothy yet now I raise the question of how faith can deal with rapid change and even rapid change in perception of reality itself.
My first idea is that faith gets established over a period of time, which gives it stability described accurately as building on rock instead of sand.
But when perception of reality changes it is more like the rock is shifting, too. So a second idea is that faith is also reality-seeking in some sense. This compares to what is sometimes called the “moral compass” in connection with conscience. I sense some truth in this from the experience of having my faith distracted on occasion and then re-orienting itself according to what seems to be its own true north.
Consideration of what happens to faith during change that is both rapid and disruptive of reality gives rise to an unexpected idea. Rapid change suggests that there must be times when faith is caught by surprise, perhaps while taking on something new or adapting to something apparently different. Then I think there is no option but to drop an existing understanding and take up another, caught by surprise, perhaps, but never caught out.
Now while that doesn’t look like traditional faith, it is completely traditional to allow that faith routinely starts from a position of not knowing and the faithful approach always implies at least some child-like willingness to attach to something before it is quite understood. Perhaps this naive-looking approach works because the mind has access to quick, accurate perceptions of that splendid reality-resonant combination of truth, beauty, and goodness which makes it fair to suppose the mind can decide astutely when to attach its faith to some aspect of reality.
To this I add my recently discovered appreciation that the mind can also decide when to detach its faith; whenever truth, beauty or goodness fails to measure up. Faith might be child-like but it does not compromise.