Fake It Until You Make It: A Reflection on Film, Hypocrisy, and Christian Ethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I will argue that a representative group of films including Mr. Lucky (with Cary Grant), Rossellini’s Il Generale della Rovere, and Galaxy Quest affirm an assumption that is as well known as it is offensively false to many: i.e., we acquire a virtue or quality of character by pretending that we already possess it—the ethic colloquially and popularly known as “fake it until you make it.” The importance and power of this ethic, as thoroughly secular as it seems to be, is best understood in the context of its Roman Catholic and ancient philosophical provenance, which for the most part has been pushed aside by secular appropriations. The theme is not exclusive to film but is especially suited to it, invested as it is in theatricality and performance per se. These films (they are few among many), accordingly, are especially well positioned to confront the collateral anxiety associated with virtue ethics inasmuch as hypocrisy seems an unavoidable condition of moral growth—these films explore this problem by featuring protagonists who are confidence men or actors, who perform virtuously without originally intending to be virtuous. At the same time, the films and innumerable other films like them, profoundly challenge the other and dominant ethic of our time--“Be true to yourself”--which is itself a vestigial, secularized remnant of the hostile Protestant reaction to the Catholic tradition and which takes particular exception to “fake it until you make it.” In this way, old theological and philosophical battles have left their trace on modern popular culture even though their origins have been forgotten.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".