From Ray G. Gregory:

Re: Power promotes hypocrisy: study (Dec. 29): We have been dominated since the Renaissance by the concept of the proscenium stage - where actors work from a raised lit space out into a darkened auditorium. That is, the front-line of authority faces and controls the representatives of the people. Two collectives - one trained and polished to get the authority message across effectively, and the other untrained and there for the fun of it, are locked in a confrontation that spells out the nature of the relationship that defines the society they are both (often unadwaredly) a part of. The deceptive power of the raised lit space runs throughout our heavy institutionalised world.

The space is a kind of megaphone through which is blasted the laws, mores and acceptable conventions decreed by the topdown authority echelons we are all willingly or unwillingly controlled by.

Those who occupy the raised lit space are “professionals” - those who enjoy a celebrity of one kind or another, having their faces lit up (and painted). They profess, at each appearance, to be what they are not. They cannot simply “be”.

That is, they are paid to be “hypocrites” and their form of address alters appropriately. However they are not their own masters/mistresses - though the system insists that they profess that they are so.

They are totally controlled by the form they work in. In the dark, to the sides of the lit space, lurk various degrees of slaves on whom they are desperately dependent; and beyond them, in the intenser darkness, are their real controllers, very much aware of their own decreed places in the overall hierarchy, but, with each rank of power, more heavily compromised and more deeply tainted by the hypocrisy the overall structure insists upon.

There are playwrights though (in theatre), directors, producers, managers etc. (and their equivalents in all professions) who want to cry out against such a choking convention.

They work at it though through the overwhelming form of the time, which devours them and takes their blunted protests as its own praise. These are the Hypercrites. Effectively they learn to fart out of their mouths.

I hope the authors of this article are aware what they are at the start of, if they dare to follow through what they are implying into the wide rather screwed-up world!