These are the reasons why dramatists can so easily make unconventional badness seem superior to conventional goodness. The recipe is simple: Place upon one side of the stage a typical conformist whose respectability is as easily read as a wayside billboard; a man who is orthodox in business, in politics, and in religion, and in excellent standing among his associates; whose virtues are stereotyped and stamped with the appreciation of his set, and whose faults are ignored, or camouflaged, or possibly praised in the restricted circle in which he moves. Over against him place a person without social standing, a creature of strong and unconcealed natural impulses who is free from scruples, over-caution, and self-deception; one who is just his natural, uncalculating self. This turns the trick, and the audience applauds. Why does it applaud? Few of its members could tell you, and the psychoanalyst has only a fraction of the truth when he explains that our repressed instincts have release and go on a picnic through subtle self-identification with the character upon the stage. There is also gladness in having the way cleared for re-thinking, the acceptance of an invitation to judge basically, a feeling of liberation, not into unbridled instinct, but into a fresh effort at rational objectivity. A woman who had been reared in a “protected” and conventional way, never guessing that she might think for herself, experienced in mature life an intellectual awakening that took the direction of extreme revolt against all orthodoxies, moral axioms included. She declared that she did not feel a need for God; was happier without any belief in him; and that she had rejected the whole notion of moral laws. “But,” she added, “I believe in being decent!” She had not reverted to irrational impulse; she was endeavoring to let reason retrieve errors that arose through reason. That membership in a circle of the respectable sometimes assists in hiding evil so gross that respectability itself would be shocked by it need not be urged, for it is merely incidental. The more important faults are the commonplace ones--the ones that are common because they spring directly from the process that founds respectable society. Here they are: 1--Respectability is the standardization of compromises by using them as precedents. Compromising is, of course, not the same as discovering either truth or righteousness; it is at best a detour over a temporary and perishable bridge. Its service lies in keeping us peaceable or cooperative in spite of disagreements; its goal is not to repeat itself endlessly, but to fade into a no-compromise because we have come out into clear light. When we make compromise the standard procedure, then we sanctify our defects and bestow upon them capacity for unlimited progeny.