… and we get, as with Watergate, a new generation of conservatives with a healthy distrust for “the government solution”.

Well, Sartre or no Sartre, I like the way you put it better, and it’s closer to what I was getting at. I am no great Sartre scholar (I’ve just been re-reading Being and Nothingness recently for other reasons – fun not being one of them), so I was just extrapolating anyway.

But to the basic point:

1) “they know they are not really altruists” – yes

2) “…are deliberately…using social opportunities to realize their real choices…” – yes

3) “…while pretending to conform to a higher ‘standard…’ – bingo

4) “…or, perhaps, feigning a kind of naiveté.” I’d say that’s pretty much bullseye.

All I was trying to get at, I suppose, in my application of bad faith here was the basic idea of a consciousness somehow rendering itself quasi-oblivious of its own CONSCIOUS activity – a self-knowing unknowing, a purposeful choice to alienate purposeful choice in order to “excuse oneself,” as Sartre so often puts it.

I’ve always admired Sartre’s ballsy effort to try and understand that.

On a personal level, my thoughts have drifted this way because I’ve started to encounter it way too frequently, to the point where it’s starting to look like everything is that kind of “nail.” It seems everyday I meet someone who obviously thinks ONLY when thought is required, on the fly, to justify (excuse) the very personal failings they are so obviously ashamed of.

I’ve nearly come to the conclusion that all of modern thought has turned out to be one prolonged effort to rationalize bad character. It seems that the worst thing – the thing that really sets people off – is any sort of suggested rebuke or criticism, and that includes self-rebuke and self-criticism.

One of my favorite moments in all of classical literature is in Xenophon’s rendition of the Apology of Socrates. He’s just been judged guilty and will get the death penalty, and his acolytes have gathered around him. Among them is that histrionic follower, Apollodorus, weeping profusely. He wails to Socrates,

“How can you be so calm? I cannot bear to see you die unjustly.”

Socrates smiles,

“My dear Apollodorus, would you prefer that my death were just?”

We don’t understand that attitude anymore; try to be decent and virtuous and let the rest take care of itself. Instead, we’d prefer to be the weeping, wailing one, the public displayer of right sentiment. We are, one might say, all Apollodorus now.

A remark, and admission as to what I have done with the concept of bad faith you broached.

Strictly speaking, I have inverted the concept to some extent. Rather than asserting or agreeing that X has made a false choice which he attributes to the necessity of social pressure, some Das Man habit which is not authentically his own but which he enacts, I am suggesting that the bad faith is in the form of a self-deception as to reasons and the interpersonal, and even more radically, self-justifications, deployed.

These persons are in my description then, not engaging in an X which proves to be an inauthentic or harmful modality because they are mistakenly or in cowardice trying to conform to a pattern (altrusim for example) they don’t really embrace, but rather I am asserting that they know that they are not really altruists, and are deliberately if somewhat less directly than the outright manipulative cynic, using social opportunities to realize their real choices while pretending to conform to a higher “standard”, or, perhaps, feigning a kind of naivete.

The overlap is there, but I should acknowledge, as it occurred to me later, that if you are following Sartre very closely and narrowly, then my remarks will be somewhat off kilter. I will appear to be addressing only a kind of slightly more buried kind of hypocrisy which people try to believe themselves innocent of. Which is what I guess I am in fact doing.

To the forces of evil, man’s intellect was nothing more than a useful tool to make man convince himself that evil was good. The heart and soul were far more difficult propositions and had to be won over, conquered, or destroyed, for there will be found humanity’s true resistance.

Back atcha 🙂

And DNW –

Thanks for your thoughtful reply as well.

Ironically, the Christian doctrine of not judging applies. The prohibition does not anihilate the Law; it does annihilate one man knowing the full intent/cause of another man.

I wonder if the Spartans “knew” their whole way of life was “immoral” in that it was completely dedicated to war and supported by slavery.

There is an underlying topic which is too much to go into here, but it is the valid use of stereotypes or other’s people’s conclusions merely because we don’t have the time and resources to investigate and validate every damn bit of information or claim or doctrine.

I follow Neo precisely because I think she is one of the least intellectually lazy persons on earth and I can trust her more so than most anyone else.

Is that intellectually lazy?

Oh, thanks for the thoughtful reply, Kolnai.

DNW –

“…evolved…”

I’m going to riff on this and take it in the direction I played around with yesterday….

… was toying around with Sartre’s notion of bad faith, and while you are certainly right that the left has evolved (love that you chose that word) beyond belief in principle, they have not, I think, evolved to the point where they’re comfortable acknowledging the fact.

The self-aware leftists who spin the wheels of culture won’t acknowledge it publicly for obvious reasons — it’s bad politics, bad “messaging,” bad for business.

Agree.

The majority of objective allies, fellow travelers, and unthinking partisans, however, don’t acknowledge it to themselves. The value of Facebook (which I never use, just occasionally peruse) for me has been its confirmation that what we treasure today is not virtue or principle, but the display of sentiments thought to be what virtuous or principled people would display.

I sometimes call it the Gyges Syndrome, or, altering Veblen a bit, “conspicuous presumption.” The Culture of Stupid, the Gyges Culture, the Culture of Conspicuous Presumption is one in which the atmosphere is overlain with liberal nostrums and their attendant philosophical nihilism, while at the same time holding on to those traditional bugbears Nietzsche was so insistent nihilism implied we had to abandon.

I obviously agree with the analysis of the logical implications, and agree that there is something radically incoherent seeming in comparing their announced worldviews with their rhetorical behaviors.

The big question for all of us is how much of the population evincing this trait is a, brazenly engaged in self-consciously cynical manipulation of language for political effect; and what part of the offending population is b, “genuinely” deluding itself; and if so “b”, then just how.

I think that your notion that it is an issue of radical bad faith in the case of the latter, the less guilty residuum, has some merit.

And I think that in positing the issue in that way, we can still find room to rotate the phenomenon around and inspect the various facets of the process.

My guess is that the act of bad faith will reduce, finally, to a kind of moral choice too (and by that I mean an undeniable existential choice as to what kind of being the choice-maker decides to make himself into).

Let’s pretend here. Let’s pretend that we believe in a God. Let’s pretend that we don’t have this God in our dock, but we find ourselves in his. And, that we find ourselves literally incapable of lying to a being to whom everything is transparent.

What then does bad faith as an interior psychological process amount to as a phenomenon, as it is compared and contrasted with a more ostensibly overt and “conscious” form of socially manipulative cynicism?

“One who abandons Christianity has no right to Christian morality” (something like that, it’s in Twilight of the Idols).

It never occurred to Nietzsche that Judeo-Christian morality was not, in the final analysis, an arbitrary convention. If it isn’t, if it’s instead an expression of our teleological center of gravity, then to abandon the Judeo-Christian metaphysics and morality in theory puts us in something like a state of bad faith. That is, the Last Men are all there will be, the end of the evolutionary line — no Ubermenschen, no New Morality of Free Men, no Zarathustra. Just the Camusian fallen ones who fornicate and read the funnies (or, today, watch gonzo porn).

We’ll do precisely what Nietzsche thought we would one day “evolve” beyond — abandon the Christian God while disingenuously clinging to the notions of what He sanctions — conscience, principle, virtue, etc.

Even placing aside any issue of an intrinsic teleology or teleonomy which one is constructively ignoring in order to advance an agenda or quell a feeling of disquiet, there is the issue of radical honesty, and the psychological motivation for choosing to not be honest or to “think too much” about the contradictions one is purportedly unconscious of. I am suggesting that the “go alongs” the “I never thought of it that way” types, have in fact, at some subliminal level, thought about it, and made their own choice and alignment, confirmed through repeated acts of recommittment.

I don’t like coming to this conclusion. It implies something almost spiritual as afoot, even though I am merely using a (very roughly) phenomenological lens to examine it.

Acts of the will may be a bit more mysterious and portentous, even for presumptively two dimensional, completely material, mortals like ourselves, than we are accustomed to think.

Consequently, it’s very important to the leftist canaille to appear to themselves to be going through the expressive motions of the principled — and indeed they really think they are in possession of principles as firm as the stone tablets handed down on Sinai. The twilight of the idols has turned out to be their apotheosis. Everyone a golden calf, and to each his (or her!) own.

What I’m having trouble wrapping my head around — and this is why I’m appealing to mauvaise foi — is the cognitive predicate of this Gyges Syndrome. It really is as if the left and its cohorts believe concurrently in absolutely nothing and in their own exemplification of Moral Truth. You see it all the time I’m sure — I certainly do, not only on Facebook, but in the academy. A certain fellow you barely know but somehow is on your friends list posts some drivel about some political thing or another, and in the span of a two or three paragraph rant will go from absolute nihilism (“do what you will” = Moral Truth) to absolute proclamations on principle and “it’s simply a matter of right and wrong.”

Say what now?

None of this is incompatible with what you (DNW) said. I just think it’s curious, to say the least. There’s a scene in Blade Runner when Tyrell tells Deckerd that Rachel doesn’t know she’s a replicant. Deckerd replies incredulously, “How can it not know what it is?”

That’s my problem here. How can (so many) leftists not know what they are? Do they really not know? As of now, I have severe doubts about that.”

I will agree with the conclusion that you will probably find yourself willy-nilly forced to: “They can’t, not know.” Not really.

I shudder to think of what the implications of this conclusion would be if there really were a God.

I think I agree with you.

What I’ve been trying to pin down is the level of intentionality at work in doublethink. In other words, I’m beginning to cash out of the account of the dupes and followers of the left that paints them as merely manipulated sheep. I think they are willingly manipulated sheep, and the ones who manipulate them ultimately don’t see themselves as manipulative (ends justify the means).

You make an interesting point when you say that it perhaps stands to reason that the less intellectually sophisticated we are, the more we will tend to affirm the common truths we’re inherently directed towards. That way, there is less fog generated by the old cogito.

I think Caplan’s assumption is the assumption of a rational choice economist – all else equal, when incentives don’t punish irrational behavior, people will act/think irrationally. Why? Amour propre, basically. Putting this view starkly, we like to feel good more than we like to know and act on truth.

So, again on what I think is Caplan’s view, intellectual laziness takes us away from basic truths because of its predicate, which is self-indulgence, or, in economic jargon, the dominant urge to maximize one’s own utility (understood as “feeling good”).

In his book, Caplan’s argument is that our bad voting decisions don’t produce individual costs sufficient to outweigh the felt benefits of lazy indulgence in feel-good nostrums. So we vote what makes us feel good.

Interesting, that. It dovetails, possibly, with a point I made in another comment a few days ago, concerning praxis. One way of construing Caplan’s argument is that democratic politics in pretty much any society aside from a tiny one (and maybe even there) has built-in landmines that virtually guarantee the thing is going to blow eventually.

The government gets too distant but at the same too tethered to its interest groups; the people do not feel immediate or palpable enough costs to their ignorant decisions, so they keep electing people whose decisions drive everything down, down, down; and the whole thing is large and unwieldy that responsibility can always be shoved off to whatever “enemies” one wants to “punish,” to borrow a phrase some guy once said.

That, to me, sounds like a situation where political praxis is well-nigh impossible. It conspires to make everyone into play-actors, identifying with feel-good “roles” (like Sartre’s waiter) that fill up the void of meaning which praxis vacated.

And then it’s all downhill. When praxis is first replaced and then identified with correct feeling and role-playing, we are equating intentions or will with reality, and whether we know it or not, are conceiving of ourselves as gods.

This does help account for some of the deeper roots of the explosion of narcissism we’ve seen in the past two or three decades.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/06/04/Daily-Beast-Nominates-Ted-Cruz-for-Craziest-Member-of-Congress

I’m pretty sure intellectual laziness can only be laid upon those who engage in proper intellectual activity, which naturally eliminates the whole progressive academy.

When I was in the military, getting the GI bill, I trained with the infantry: straight leg, dog face soldiers. Troops.

One troop, I’ll call him King, was just barely there. So, for diversion, in the field when we were training, I started, “ask King.” There are often long periods of nothing in the military and that nothing is quite spectacularly boring. Hence a need for diversion.

And so sprung up the daily “ask King.”

And these were two of his answers to the question of “why are we here.”

I don’t know.

Someone told me to.

I figure that’s about as good as it can get.