Sartre's "Bad Faith": A Practical Guide to Recognising Self-Deception

What is “bad faith” if not a carefully rehearsed refusal to look at ourselves as we are and, at the same time, as we might be? The phrase has the blunt ring of moralism, as if it named a defect of character, an ethical deficiency to be corrected with training and willpower. Sartre did not mean it that way. He took the term from ordinary language “mauvaise foi” and pulled it into the core of existential psychology: not a vice but a mechanism. A pressure valve. The human way of not collapsing in the face of a freedom so total it terrifies us. We are, in his stark phrase, condemned to be free. Condemned, because there is no exit from the theatre of choosing; free, because no script binds us except the one we continually copy into being. Bad faith is how we pretend we have no pen.

This is not a confession of guilt. It is a diagnostic map. The ordinary theatre of living, working, loving, affiliating, making claims on identity, disclaiming responsibility, runs on a series of micro-escapes from the vertigo that follows the recognition that nothing but us stands behind our choices. The seduction is understandable. The world is charged with demands. Social codes extract behaviours without asking after the self that must perform them. Economic systems, bureaucratic wash, inherited norms, the quiet coercion of belonging, these are not gentle things. They act like gravity. The body feels their pull before the mind formulates the excuse. It is not simply that we are afraid of freedom; it is that freedom is not abstract. It comes with costs that are paid in relationships, status, livelihood, security, fantasies of coherence. And yet there is a particular sting when we loan out our agency to the fictions that shield us from that cost, then discover the debt accumulating in resentment and numbness.

If the essay has a thesis, it is this: bad faith is not a moral error but an almost universal response to existential anguish, a psychological and social technology that allows us to survive the feeling of weightlessness in a gravity-less universe. Seen this way, it is not primarily about judgement or shame; it is about recognition. It is about learning to catch the evasions in the act, not to punish them, but to understand what they are protecting, and what they cost.

Start, as Sartre did, with the claim that existence precedes essence. It sounds like a formula, but it is an unmasking. There is no blueprint. A paper knife is invented with a purpose; only then is it brought into existence. A person comes into existence before any purpose, template, or inner nature fixes what they are. We become our essence retroactively, through the sediment of choices. This is the first tear in the fabric. If nothing predefines me, then what I am becomes a project. Not a project I can outsource to nature, God, genealogy, job title, or psychological type. The cost of this is anguish, a lucid discomfort that arises from knowing that the centre does not hold on its own, and that no appeal to an external tribunal absolves me of authorship. Anguish is the vertigo of responsibility.

From that vertigo it is a short walk to bad faith. Not a lie told to others, but the more refined art of lying to oneself without quite being caught. The lie takes a familiar form: I am not free here. I could not have done otherwise. The circumstances, the past, the category, the role, the system, these foreclosed the choice. Under a microscope, the lie shimmers with half-truths. There are constraints, often thick and real. There are limits to what one can materially do, say, survive. But the lie is not in naming the constraint; it is in erasing the space that remains within it. And the lie has a sister: the fantasy that we are pure transcendence, untouched by the drag of history, body, context, obligation; we invent ourselves anew at each turn, unburdened by consequences, as if no one else has to live with what we have done. One lie reduces us to fact; the other reduces us to pure freedom. Bad faith lives in both reductions, and in the oscillation between them.

Sartre’s vocabulary is useful precisely because it captures this oscillation without romanticising either pole. Facticity: the weight of givens, the body, history, social codes, decisions already made and difficult to unmake, institutions and their narrow corridors. Transcendence: the open possibility not to be exhausted by what is given, the capacity to interpret, project, redefine, refuse, re-choose. The fracture in us is not a defect; it is the field of play. To be a person is to inhabit the tension. Bad faith is the refusal of the tension. Sometimes it appears as a flattening: I am my job, I am my past, I am my role, I am my diagnosis. Sometimes as a dissociation: I am nothing that binds me; what I did then was not I; what I promised is a version of me that died when I woke up this morning. Either way, the economy of bad faith is the same: reduce the stress by amputating half of reality.

This is why the famous examples, the overattentive waiter, the calculated delay of decision, still carry charge when removed from their mid-century setting. The waiter is not interesting because he is a waiter; he is interesting because he animates the role with a precision that betrays desperation. He is not serving; he is performing a theory of himself. He collapses his humanity into a script, hoping the script will save him from the scene beyond it. The gesture is familiar. The role becomes armour; eventually the armour grows spikes on the inside.

The delay is familiar too. The postponement of decision by disowning one’s own gesture, my hand is just a hand, my presence is just presence. Consciousness trying to be both itself and an object among objects, such that the responsibility to decide never lands. There is a tenderness in this evasion; it reveals how loaded choice can feel when every yes and no reverberates through the fabric of identity. Delay becomes a temporary sanctuary. And yet even sanctuaries can become traps if they are misread as homes.

The contemporary variations do not need invented scenes. They are woven into the forms of life that structure our days. The fatalism of the workplace where performance metrics replace judgement and identity plugs into a title like a life-support machine, declaring that the market determines not only value but meaning. The quiet scripts of romance where one keeps desire and fear in unsteady balance by naming it friendship, reducing one’s voice to what is least rejecting. The efficiency of labels, mother, leader, creative, survivor, acting first as beacons, then as enclosures. The past pressed into service as justification: historic wounds transformed from context into destiny; inherited patterns given the authority to foreclose present agency. None of these are simply illusions; they hold some truth. But the fit is never exact. The seams pinch. Bad faith is the decision to pretend the seams do not exist because to admit them would mean renegotiating the pact we make with ourselves and with others about what can be asked, refused, remade.

There is another dimension, more structural and less often acknowledged in existential talk: systems. Bad faith is not merely a personal quirk; it’s a strategy that social orders tacitly reward because it stabilises predictability. Institutions need reliable selves. Economies prefer workers who identify with their function and internalise expectations. Communities congeal around roles that distribute dependence and recognition. To keep these machines running smoothly, it helps if people believe their slot is also their essence, or at least believe that while inside the slot, they are absolved of authorship. If you have ever noticed how many cultural narratives end with “it had to be this way,” you have felt the alignment between psychological comfort and systemic inertia. To recognise bad faith, then, is also to trace how external arrangements tilt the floor beneath our feet, making certain evasions easier to enact and to rationalise.

This is why treating bad faith as moral failure misses the point. Shame polices the symptom and leaves the mechanism intact. It also plays into the hands of repressive arrangements by narrowing the field of examination to individual weakness. A gentler and more responsible frame sees bad faith as a signal. Anxiety peaks; the self numbs; the body tightens into its role; speech begins to substitute concept for contact; the past is pressed into alibi; the future becomes a fog one calls fate. The signal is not there to indict. It is there to bring into view the precise place where freedom has been traded, not away, but into a script. The trade might still be worth it. Sometimes choosing to play the role, for care, survival, solidarity, makes sense. The difference is whether we choose it lucidly, acknowledging the residue on the self, or whether we insist nothing else is possible and therefore nothing is being chosen at all.

One can sense an objection here. What of all the lives in which options are brutally narrow? What of those on whom roles are violently imposed, for whom the cost of stepping sideways from a script is social death, legal sanction, literal harm? The existential insistence on freedom can begin to sound like privilege disguised as philosophy. But this misses the intent. The claim of freedom is not a denial of constraint; it is a refusal to de-personalise the last margins of agency that persist even within constraint. The geometry of those margins varies. For some it is a wide field; for others it is a sliver. The ethics of existentialism lies in not abandoning that sliver to fatalism or to fantasy. Facticity is real; transcendence is real; their interaction is the site of responsibility. A politics grows here too: if freedom is the project of the person, then the task of a just society is to widen the usable margins of transcendence without pretending that a widened corridor solves the conflict at its core.

A strange thing happens when you begin to examine your evasions without punishment. The tone of inner discourse changes. The high drama of self-accusation gives way to a cooler attention. You begin to catch the moment you exchange the unsteady agency of your own desire for the security of a predefined identity. The moment some story of yourself becomes too efficient at explaining away the dissonance. You feel the bodily signature, shoulders rounding into a type, voice slipping into its prepared cadence, silence doing the work you didn’t name. This practice is not a conversion; it is an apprenticeship to awareness. Many of the same decisions will be made. Many roles will still be played. But played knowingly, they no longer claim the whole of you. They cease to be ontologies; they become tactics.

There is a difference between a tactic and a home. Bad faith is what happens when a tactic, adopting the language and habits of a function, answering to a description, using a stereotype to survive a conversation, is mistaken for a house in which you must live, unwalled out of curiosity, walled in by fear. The nervous system prefers security. It will persuade you to stay where the edges do not threaten. It will encourage you to collapse your possibilities to protect against disappointment, to elevate a pattern into a principle. It is difficult to resist; resistance requires a tolerance for ambiguous states. To say “I am this, and I am not only this” is to live in an unresolved chord. The ear gets tired. So it is not surprising that bad faith offers itself as rest.

The trouble is the cost. When the narrative of necessity is maintained too long, numbness deepens. A kind of quiet cynicism sets in, towards oneself first, then towards others, then towards the very idea of change. Cynicism here is the mood of bad faith, the fog that makes the fiction easier to sustain. Its opposite is not naïve optimism. Its opposite is seriousness, in the sense Sartre gives it: the refusal to assign intrinsic value to values, the effort to live without idols that excuse the human work of choosing. Seriousness is an expensive stance. It replaces ready-made reasons with reasons you must own, and once owned, you must keep renegotiating. Many will prefer idolatry because it lightens the burden. But idols exact their own price. They take a tax in attention, in creativity, in the capacity to tolerate the truth that most of what we do is done for reasons we can always revisit.

This raises a question: if bad faith is a defence against anguish, what sustains us when we decline the defence? Compassion is not a decorative answer. It is not sentimental. It is a technology. Compassion allows a person to register the heat of agency without falling into self-attack. It de-escalates the panic that demands a clear identity at every moment. It lets you say: this is frightening, this is complicated, I am tempted to reduce myself to spare myself, and yet I can remain in contact with the discomfort long enough to see what is actually true. Compassion is the mood that protects authenticity from becoming a new idol, a new narrowness masquerading as liberation. Without it, the attempt to live lucidly becomes an austere performance, another role, this time with the mask of the enlightened.

There is a pragmatic turn concealed here. Once you see bad faith as a diagnostic, you stop asking for solutions and start looking for signatures. Not advice, not prescriptions, just the fine-grained texture of where you hand off your authority to a role, a label, a tale about the past or the future. You notice the language of “I can’t,” “I must,” “That’s just who I am,” “This is the only way,” and hear in it the soft click of an escape hatch. Again, the escape might be reasonable. But the click tells you where to look if you wish to measure your life not only by comfort but by contact with your own authorship. In some contexts the click will be a mercy. In others it will be a warning. Only you can hear the difference, and there is no algorithm for it.

A subtle complication often goes missing in discussions like this: the unconscious. Existentialism can sound like a philosophy of conscious acts and explicit choices, a denial of the subterranean forces formed in early attachment, trauma, repetition compulsion, identification, the body’s encoded memory. Depth psychology interrupts the tidy voluntarism of the heroic chooser. It tells us that much of what we call choice is compulsion disguised as intention. And yet there is a point of contact between these traditions that is more fruitful than their polemics. For the existentialist, good faith is not a struggle for control; it is a struggle for lucidity. The unconsciously driven pattern does not disqualify freedom; it complicates it. To own one’s freedom while acknowledging the layers that shape the field of decision is not contradiction; it is maturity. Transcendence is not omnipotence; it is the capacity to become aware enough to intervene, however slightly, in the rhymes you are otherwise condemned to repeat. The unconscious does not get the last word, but neither does “I”.

Bad faith, reframed within this composite view, becomes a double cover: it hides us from the anguish of freedom and it hides us from the pain involved in discovering the grammar of our own repetitions. To lift the cover incrementally is to feel two kinds of vulnerability, and it is understandable to dislike both. Few resist the temptation to put the cover back down. We negotiate with ourselves: after this deadline, after this season, after I have proven this identity well enough that it no longer needs proof. Sometimes those negotiations are wise; they buy time and keep life liveable. Sometimes they are indefinite extensions granted by a parliament of fears. The difference is subtle, and it reveals itself not in slogans but in the texture of your days.

None of this requires the pose of ascetic authenticity that refuses all compromise. That too is bad faith, the denial of facticity in the name of purity, a refusal to acknowledge the legitimate claims of dependency, solidarity, and care. We are entangled creatures. Our choices affect others who did not ask to be remade by our reinventions. To hold both agency and entanglement without collapsing one into the other is a serious art. You will fail at it often. The failures are part of the apprenticeship. They are not evidence that freedom is a sham; they are evidence that freedom is not a project completed once and for all. The aphorism that we become what we do is true enough; the more sobering truth is that even after doing, we remain open. We can always become what we do next. The openness is not always a gift. Sometimes it is a pressure. Sometimes a wound. Sometimes a door.

Consider how often the rhetoric of “authenticity” becomes an idol of its own. A consumable aesthetic. A performative transparency that hardens into an identity no less constraining than the roles it rejects. Sartre helps here by refusing the essentialist hunt for a “true self” to be excavated and expressed without distortion. There is no pre-social kernel waiting to be displayed. There is only the ongoing work of negotiating facticity and transcendence without ceding the field to either. Authenticity is a mood of lucidity, not a wardrobe of traits. It is quieter than the market will allow. It does not sell well because it declines to become a brand.

Resisting bad faith is therefore not a heroic narrative arc. It is a series of minor moves, a willingness to tell the truth to yourself when a part of you would prefer a cleaner alibi; to admit where you are using the past to evade the present; to name the ways the system has colonised your imagination, not to exonerate yourself, but to see the whole picture; to accept that the body has its own votes in the parliament of decision; to let discomfort register long enough that the old role loses its automatic claim. These moves do not add up to a radical transformation by headline standards. They produce something else: an atmosphere of seriousness, a reduction in the ambient self-contempt that accumulates when we insist we had no choice, and a discreet widening of the space in which something genuinely new might occur.

The paradox, and perhaps the most human note in Sartre, is that the threat of bad faith is permanent. There is no graduation. The more you see it, the more cunningly it disguises itself in higher forms: the role of the lucid one who sees through roles; the identity of the free one who denies the pull of belonging; the pose of the morally serious for whom impurity is always elsewhere. Each of these can be another escape hatch. Knowing this is not supposed to paralyse you with suspicion. It is meant to soften your certainty and keep you honest about how quickly the mind weaponises insight for the purposes of protection. Wary tenderness is the phrase that comes to mind: wary, because one must watch the mind as it does its work; tender, because a mind at work is a vulnerable thing.

If there is a practice at the end of this long thought, it is not a set of steps but a posture. A posture that refuses to reduce the world to what hurts less. A posture that resists the fascination of essence and also the fantasy of weightless choice. A posture that allows for regret without turning it into fate, and for resolve without mistaking it for salvation. A posture that looks at systems with a clear eye and at the self with a compassionate one, aware that the lines between inner and outer are not thick iron gates but thin membranes through which influence passes in both directions.

Freed from moralism, bad faith becomes a mirror and a map. The mirror shows the face we wear when we say we are not choosing. The map traces the roads by which we could return to choosing, even in modest ways, even in damaged terrains. The point is not to castigate ourselves for the hours spent living under a fixed title, playing out roles we did not fully consent to, borrowing the authority of the past to absolve us of the terror of the present. The point is to be able to notice with clarity when, precisely, we are engaged in the exchange. To see it as an exchange. To see that we pay. And then, perhaps, to renegotiate the terms. Not to arrive anywhere definitive, not to become a monument to authenticity, but to remain alive to the fact that we are, even now, even here, more than a function and less than a god, torn between gravity and flight, uneasy in the roles we must both play and refuse, walking the narrow isthmus between a history that has happened and a future that is not yet obligated to resemble it.

If there is comfort, it is only in this: that the discomfort is not unique to you, and that it is not evidence of failure but of contact with what is most human in us. Bad faith is not an enemy to be destroyed once and for all. It is an ever-present invitation to inspect the ways we decline the weight of our lives and to ask, without drama and without haste, whether in this moment we might bear a little more of it. There is no triumph in the asking. Only a slight turn of the head, a slight stirring of agency, the faint sensation of a door somewhere down the corridor, not open, but not locked either.