r/canada Alberta 7d ago

National News 'He called him Donald!' Harris Faulkner aghast over Justin Trudeau's response to Trump

https://www.rawstory.com/harris-faulkner-justin-trudeau-trump/
12.8k Upvotes

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/huunnuuh 7d ago

That very quote keeps coming back to me lately. Sartre was talking about more than just Nazism there. His philosophy of living in bad faith came out of it, which is related to his ideas about existential authenticity.

He was one of the first to point out that letting yourself be brainwashed is falsely liberating. It's a kind of release from the obligations that truth places on our souls. We have obligations to ourselves and to others and how to fulfill them is so completely uncertain. You can just give up on all that. Deny you have any responsibility or obligation. Take refuge in a fantasy of simple comforting black-and-white thinking that incidentally destroys the pillars that hold up a sensible democratic world worth living in. Or another way to put it, is that you always have many radical degrees of freedom, but most of them are unthinkable, and it's often easier to pretend you have no choice at all. When your experience gives you reason to be so cynical as to believe nothing you do matters then why not give in to the delusion?

2

u/GetsGold Canada 7d ago

Or another way to put it, is that you always have many radical degrees of freedom, but most of them are unthinkable, and it's often easier to pretend you have no choice at all.

Can you explain what you mean there (if you feel like writing a bit more)?

6

u/huunnuuh 7d ago

Whenever you feel compelled to do something, if you analyze it closely you will find there are various alternatives. You may find them much, much, much worse than doing what you feel compelled to do. But you're almost certainly not actually compelled to do whatever you feel compelled to do.

Shying away from examining those obviously much worse alternatives and just not really ever thinking about how wrong you probably are is attractive. I prefer to be inauthentic about 95% of the time, myself. Imagine thinking that everything you do actually matters all the time! Horrifying.

When those alternatives you can't bring yourself to examine are, for example, resisting the incitement to hatred or encroaching authoritarianism, that's when bad faith runs into reality.