(from the Greenwich Village Quill)

PEOPLE.—An aggregation of ventriloquists. (A ventriloquist is one who speaks from the belly.) 2. A Jacob’s ladder used by politicians, priests and newspaper proprietors for ascent into the Golden City. 3. A movable barrier, a hinge. 4. The slats in the beds of the mighty. 5. The pivot of stupidity. 6. The second childhood of the race of simians. 7. An invertebrate cow. (In some countries the word people is used to denote a voting machine; in others—especially the Oriental countries—it is a sect numbering many millions that lives entirely on caviar and ortolans and that is in consequence much hated by its impoverished rulers.)

Word Meanings
By Benjamin DeCasseres
(From The Washington Herald, reprinted in Dansville, NY Genesee County Express, 01-20-1938)

Many of the words we use nowadays have ceased to have any meaning.
The word democracy, for instance, is now used by the Communists. Democracy means the rule of the people. Communism means the rule of the proletariat — that is, rulership by only one class of people, the very lowest. And they purpose to exterminate the middle and upper classes. That is not democracy (which means all the people) but oligarchy.
The “radicals” call fundamentalist and constitutional Americans “reactionaries,” whereas a reactionary means one who seeks to return to ancient and outworn forms of social and political organization — such for instance, as those that make the state all powerful and abolish the common rights of individuals
Reactionaries are actually thus Fascists, Communists and Socialists.
A liberal used to mean one who was opposed to centralization and regimentation in those matters that concern the individual alone. Today men call themselves “liberals” who support every crackpot scheme to make the individual a parasitic growth on the general public. They now call these schemes “social legislation.”
The dictionary is, however, still a good guide in defining one word, and that is individualist. There is no mistaking what that word means. It means an independent man, two words hated by all Communists, Fascists and reactionary liberals and Socialists.

The Pan-Baiters
By BENJAMIN DE CASSERES

(from The Judge, 04-03-1920)

THERE is one god that will never pass away. Gods may go and gods may come, but Pan lives on forever!
Pan is nature, life, instinct, the seasons. beauty, good wine, pleasure. the heady laughter-beads in the cup of the eye and the whispers in the reeds and trees where clandestine lovers meet.
Pan’s eternal slogan has been, “Live and let live.” Eat, drink and laugh, is another of his pipings on his immortal pipe carved from the Tree of Good and Evil, and still another is, Get thee behind me. Long-Face and pogrom-laden bigots!
We have had in the last two thousand years Christian-baiters, Jew-baiters, free-speech baiters, free-thought baiters, and now in this country we are afflicted with the Pan-baiters.
They chase the great god from the eating places, from literature, from the “movies,” from the stage, from the painted canvas, from the great poem, from the hearts of the human.
Squat on their wooden thrones in sanctified sublimity, they crack their whip at the head of the happy god wherever he shows himself. Pan-baiting is the veritable business of our lawmakers and sectarian pundits. If they ever discover that sunlight intoxicates they will attempt to gouge the eyes out of the God of Day himself.
But Pan hides, and is never dead, and can never die while the blood is rich and red.
The Pan-baiters are wasting their bad breath.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HYPOCRISY
By Benjamin De Casseres.
(Originally published in The International, July 1915)

THE epithet “hypocrite!” is generally applied by a hypocrite. The clairvoyant mind smiles and passes on. Make-believe is the eternal Fact. Appearance, semblance, illusion, seduction, lying, con­stitute the elements of life. Emerson said God’s method is illusion and he spoke of life as a procession of “hypocritic days.” That is, God himself is the primal make-believe, the protagonist of all hypocrites. Are we not created in His image? The “things are seldom what they seem” of the Gilbertian ballad should have read, “things are never what they seem.” Duplicity is inherent in all movement, in all thought, in all human action. A study of history reveals a stupendous charla­tanism. The study of religions reveals the inherent quackery of human belief. The history of human ideals is a history of pretence, fraud, self-hypnosis.
Life is a passion for masks. The Kiss of Judas on the forehead of the Lord came out of the heart of man. Each of us desires to seem the thing he is not. It is a life-instinct. Hypocrisy, whether conceived as Maya, the god of illusion, whose work goes on forever and whose lies are sublime and transfigurating, or whether conceived as Pecksniff, who cov­ers his feelers and snatchers with the par­son’s white gloves, is the one unpunish­able sin. Hypocrisy spells success. Whether sublime or mean, it is the primal element in the will-to-live. Therefore I praise hypocrisy and glorify the hypocrite. Hypocrisy comes from the Greek words hypo (under) and krinomai (contend). It is a life-word. Its roots reach down into the heart of existence, which is com­bat, struggle, vengeance. The batteries that lie masked behind a smile and a salu­tation, the humility that charms and puts to sleep, the impassive look that swarms with eyes—these are the higher forms of the arts of the primordial bushwhacking being, the prehistoric man who lived by decoy and snare. Tartuffe is a descend­ant of Nimrod. Man nor animal, nor army, nor atom ever “fought in the open.” It is and always will be a “contending un­der.” Every act, every thought, every aspiration secretes itself in a Trojan horse before the obstacle to be scaled or the enemy to be conqured.
A great French thinker, Jules de Gaultier, has said that the one thing needful to life was a lie. It is the vital require­ment of the human being. Whenever an epoch comes to an end a great dreamer, religious, philosophical, or humanitarian, rises up and invents the lie-ethical. This profound truth (the universal necessity for the lie) gives us the metaphysics of hypocrisy. The external world is other than it seems. It is a series of represen­tations or images in the brain. The imag­ination colors the raw material of impres­sions and sensations, and builds up in that monstrous house of a billion scin­tillating wonders—the brain—a world that does not exist. We project it outside of us and go eternally toward it, but it recedes forever and forever, that New Jerusaleum an arm’s length away, that hypocritical and smiling mirage of the perfidious Life-spirit. A malign and an­cient seduction! A sublime, ironic Falsehood! The Spirit of Life the first Hypo­crite!
In the struggle for existence as formu­lated by Darwin, hypocrisy is a condition of survival. The law of adaptation to en­vironment, whether in the higher or lower forms of animal life, is a law dependent on flexibility. How quickly can we change? How quickly can we put away our previous selves and engender newer attitudes? Turn-coat, Volte-f ace, and Trimmer always survive in the struggle for existence. “When in Rome do as the Romans do” is not a proverb from Bae­deker, but a physiological, sociological and psychological law. To the degree that the individual urges his personality against the claims of the personality of the mass, in that degree are his life and welfare threatened. In that monstrous process from the amoeba to man forms and intelligences have survived through cunning, which is the heart of hypocrisy, as the instinct to survive at any price is its soul.
The theory of sex selection in Darwin, which has played such a tremendous role in the evolution of life, is an exposition, unconsciously, of sex-hypocrisy. The courtships of animals, birds and men do not differ in any manner. The whistle from the tree-tops, the strut of the pea­cock, the clean collar and newly mani­cured finger nails of the lover, the piano lessons that the young girl receives, all constitute part of that feigning and dis­sembling that cloak a brutal fact. Joseph Surface came nearer the secret of suc­cessful courtship than his brother. Before possession and before yielding the man and woman are always Janus-faced. Nature lards and fards to secure her end. After mating all masks are thrown off. The two sentimental hypocrites revert to a kind of intolerable sincerity and bald­ness of speech. The Sunday finery is laid away in the chest. The animal world and human world put on jumpers and cheap calico after attaining the end for which they were spawned. Hypocrisy in this field is a solemn sport.
If the race is to persist (and there has never been a single reason advanced why it should, but from Solomon to Schopen­hauer one could quote a thousand thou­sand reasons why it should not) hypocrisy is as necessary as food, and whatever is necessary is moral. Hence hypocrisy is moral because it furthers the perpetuation of the species. To bring about chaos, dis­organization and universal death it is only necessary for each individual, each nation to proclaim “the truth” from the house­tops. Truth is the one thing to be feared, truth is the one thing to be shunned. Truth is Medusa. It is the basilisk in the human heart; he who encounters its gaze dies. Let men drop their masks and look at one another in the face, let us pluck our thoughts naked and bleeding out of the voluptuous body of our deceits: So­ciety or the race could not last a minute. Men play the hypocrite before themselves. They do not seek truth, but comfort, hap­piness.
Read “Don Quixote.” Is the Idealist the supreme comedian of Time? Read “Don Quixote.” Is truth in the head or in the bowels ? Read “Don Quixote.” O thou Idealist : Fragrant and immortal liar ! Divine and aromatic hypocrite, from the zenith of thy filigree heaven scattering sweets from thy magical scent-bag!
All the ills of civilization as it is con­stituted to-day and as it was constituted anciently flow from the hypocritical Ideal. The physical and mental organization of man is always trying to escape natural laws and straining to cross natural bar­riers and limits. “National ideals” breed the patriotic hypocrite, the political hypo­crite, the diplomatic hypocrite, the im­perialist hypocrite. All the nations of the world have disparate ideals—that is, masks to cover the preying, prowling jackal of racial pride. Buccaneers, loot­ers, assassins at heart, they hide their mo­tives behind their gold-embossed ensigns and ornamental insignias. Wearing the full regalia of the Ideal, they strut before one another bowing and scraping—these pliant tools of a satanic god.
Hypocrisy is an aesthetic. In the hands of attitudes. Before complacency he is an art that conceals a crushing irony. “I am all things to all men, and to myself no thing” is the formula of the chameleon of attitudes. Before complacency he as­sumes the self-satisfied air. Before shrewd­ness he plays the fox. Before luxury he plays the Sybarite. Before poverty he assumes a threadbare air. Before intellect he parades his prowess. But in assum­ing these masks, to make the art exquisite and to more completely subtilize the sub­lime buffoonery of existence, the aesthete of this cult must exaggerate. He must play the hypocrite to the nth power. His protean attitudes must be the subli­mation of life itself. He must reincarnate himself from minute to minute in the di­verse attitudes and nuances of voice and expression of the person he is satirizing. He makes believe he is flattering and imi­tating—and thus pours acid on acid. He never antagonizes. He blends and mixes and yields at every point, slipping on the characteristics of the other one like a skin-tight garment. And from the zenith of his consciousness there will flash across his brain that “unarithmetical smile” of Aeschylus, that silent laughter that rolls its thunder over the summits of the great world-intellects. This hypo­crite, of which Montaigne and Sainte-Beuve are the eternal types, is a surgeon of souls who works masked and gloved.
In the hands of the weak there is no weapon like hypocrisy. It is the sum and substance of the Nietzschean psychology. It is the first rung and the last rung in the Jacob’s ladder of the weak—that in­visible ladder that littleness and incapacity construct while the strong and capable sleep, and which reaches from the niggard reality of earth into the fat heavens of the gluttonous imagination. The will-to-power masks itself as “justice,” “equal­ ity,” “brotherhood,” “internationalism.” And a stench of scruples comes from their mouths—scruples, which are the fears of Hypocrisy. And from the midst of the hypocritical lowly come forth from time to time “redeemers,” victims of auto-hypnosis, who, regal in themselves, are in time covered with the pollution of infinite adoration. Their cloaked dream : to draw the quivering heart from the breast of Power and strip it of its secret. The rich are thieves, no doubt ; but the poor aspire. From the hovel to the palace the pilgrims are on the way, cloaked and cowled with the stuffs of their reveries—and the keen poignard of envy protruding from their under belts. Hyperions of an ancient heaven, to-day they mask themselves as socialists and “redeemers of society.”
The strong no less than the weak wear the mask of pretence. To gain their ends they must feign and fawn and practice a sly humility and break bread with the respectable. They draw the thunderbolts of destiny from her invisible heavens, but they must always pretend that the thun­derbolt sought them out. It is fatal for Strength to play the egotist. Strength for itself must never be glorified. The Titans must come before the lowly with some­thing sacrosanct about them. Their vital purpose must walk the earth tip-toe. It is also politic for strength to snivel and whine occasionally and sham meekness and confusion. And its kit of burglars’ tools should always have some homely motto engraved on it, such as “God Bless Our Home,” or “God Be With You.” The captains of life should look like mis­sionaries in their dress. The Will-to-Power in the strong must scale back fences before it can enter its mansion in the skies.