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‘? î Etymology
‘?  Hypocrisy and vice
‘? 3 Jung on the General Hypocrisy of Man
‘? x See also
‘? ¦ Notes
‘? Ô References

For the death metal band, see Hypocrisy (band). For their self-titled album, see Hypocrisy
(album).

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 is the act of persistently professing beliefs, opinions, virtues, feelings, qualities, or
standards that are inconsistent with one's actions. Hypocrisy is thus a kind of lie.

The hypocrite thinks that what he or she usually professes does not somehow apply to him or
her. It is not simply an inconsistency between what is praised or admired and what is done.
Samuel Johnson made this point when he wrote about the misuse of the charge of "hypocrisy" in
ë
 
:

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal
for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the
advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be
confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to
undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.[î]

A finer distinction that circumvents this apparent contradiction would be that to espouse an idea,
but not live up to it, might simply mean one hasn't yet conquered some self perceived shortfall
(as in Samuel Johnson's example). However to condemn others for behavior that the condemner
engages in clearly falls outside this gray area and into hypocrisy.

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The word hyp y comes from the Greek ʌȩțȡȚıȚȢ (hyp  ), which means "play-acting",
"acting out", "coward" or "dissembling".[] The word hyp  is from the Greek word
ʌȠțȡȓIJȘȢ (hyp ), the agentive noun associated with ȣʌȠțȡȓȞȠȝĮȚ (hyp 
), i.e., "I
play a part". Both derive from the verb țȡȓȞȦ, "judge" (»țȡȓıȘ, "judgement" »țȡȚIJȚțȒ (   ),
"critics") presumably because the performance of a dramatic text by an actor was to involve a
degree of interpretation, or assessment, of that text.

Alternatively, the word is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hyp, meaning "under", and the verb
  , meaning "to sift or decide". Thus the original meaning implied a deficiency in the ability
to sift or decide. This deficiency, as it pertains to one's own beliefs and feelings, informs the
word's contemporary meaning.[3]

Whereas hyp   applied to any sort of public performance (including the art of rhetoric),
hyp  was a technical term for a stage actor and was not considered an appropriate role for a
public figure. In Athens in the xth century BC, for example, the great orator Demosthenes
ridiculed his rival Aeschines, who had been a successful actor before taking up politics, as a
hyp  whose skill at impersonating characters on stage made him an untrustworthy
politician. This negative view of the hyp  perhaps combined with the Roman disdain for
actors, later shaded into the originally neutral hyp   It is this later sense of hyp   as
"play-acting", i.e., the assumption of a counterfeit persona, that gives the modern word hyp y
its negative connotation.

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Although hypocrisy has been called "the tribute that vice pays to virtue"[x], and a bit of it
certainly greases the wheels of social exchange, it may also corrode the well-being of those
people who continually make or are forced to make use of it.[¦] As Boris Pasternak has Yurii say
in Doctor Zhivago, "Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of
what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike... Our nervous system isn't just fiction, it's
part of our physical body, and it can't be forever violated with impunity."