Hypocrisy and its hidden horror

Once I gave money to a costumed intellectual, whose intellect subsequently proved more conspicuous in his costume than anywhere else. He wanted to finish writing two books and I credulously gave him a sizeable amount of cash to complete his works. Several years later, he never finished those books or refunded the money, and I confronted him with a banker's instinct following up on a loan defaulter. When I told him he should repay the money, he gave me the shock of my life. "One shouldn't expect human beings to be angels," he sermonised in these exact words. I stared him in the face, wondering if he was even human.

What he said stuck in my memory like chewing gum does to teeth. Frankly speaking, it was a moment of rude awakening for me because never before had I seen such a piteous face of evil in such a scurrilous incarnation. I am broaching up this subject years later not to settle my score with a misguided man, but to confirm that he was by no means an exception to the rule. 

Dogs bark, cats meow, goats bleat, and donkeys bray, because the animal world is divided in its sights and sounds. We can recognise various species either from their looks or sounds, but human beings, given their mischievous capacities, interchangeably shuffle between vicarious identities. They cannot be necessarily defined by anything they do or say.  

It's because hypocrisy performs an optical illusion on the audience when the visually perceived images differ from the objective reality. The hypocrites are not what they seem, their actual faces hiding behind improvised smokescreens. If you look into their eyes, you see nothing but incessant churning of the twilight glow. Days end and nights begin, but the hypocrites forever control the light of truth.

Thus, hypocrites have a split personality. They love to live inside one identity but live to love another. Double standard is to them what binary number is to computing. What the hypocrites say or do is either one in zero or zero in one. Truth is either muzzled by falsehood or falsehood is masked in truth.

The lives of such people are lies, schemes and subterfuges, and encounters with them are as if moments of drug-induced delusions. In avowal, you tend to give them the benefit of doubt. In denial, you don't know whether to believe what they say. The worst is when you know they are phonies but cannot challenge them. 

These despicable people adopt this way of life because it's convenient for them. They change with the story and the story changes with them. They fixate on nothing. Nothing fixates on them.

In its basic form, hypocrisy is when words differ from actions. But different people load it up with different options. Many hypocrites hide their past by claiming to be who they aren't. Some exaggerate things, taking the credit they don't deserve. Others look for scapegoats to blame for problems of their own creation. The intellectual of my story has chosen to hide behind his deceptive disguise.

The hypocrites can be categorised as liars, fraudsters, connivers, manipulators, and evaders. But what makes them hypocritical is when the goal isn't to distort truth but to embellish lies. Tennessee Williams elaborated on this distinction when he wrote that the only thing worse than a liar is a liar who is also a hypocrite.

If you look around, hypocrisy abounds. Faces are hiding in their masks, actions are awash in contradictions, and words are going against intentions. It's hard to find anyone who is true to self to prove William Hazlitt's contention that even the repentance of a hypocrite is hypocrisy itself. Once a hypocrite, always a hypocrite. Caught in the concentric circle of pretensions, he gets sucked more into it the more he tries to get out.

Meeting strangers is an adventure like mapping out an unknown terrain or charting a new course. But meeting hypocrites is like going to an amusement park designed around a central theme. Each of them is an area planned as a leisure attraction, in which all the displays, buildings, and activities are based on or relate to the art of deception. 

American writer O. Henry claimed that the social structure would have fallen into pieces without prevaricators, hypocrites and liars. He argued that we must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. He justifies manipulation of truth for the sake of modesty and shame.

Exactly where the hypocrites go wrong. They are shameless and immodest in their presentation of themselves. And hypocrisy does a reverse spin on them: instead of covering up they stand naked. 

It was not long ago that I was stricken by its horror when a supposedly reasonable man had abruptly dropped his clothes. 

The writer is the Editor of the weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. Email: badrul151@yahoo.com