Bad Faith: America’s Existential Crisis

And how radical good faith can collectively heal us.

“The most tremendous thing which has been granted to man is: the choice.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843)

America is having an existential crisis—a struggle for how to derive meaning from life—demonstrated daily by people like Speaker Mike Johnson, who delivered this outright lie Tuesday morning about Joe Biden that accurately describes the Trump regime:

“The Biden administration was unprecedented… and the president was checked out of his job for quite some time and everybody knows it. And there was a cover up that people around him who were using, they would give him scripts to follow… You can’t allow a president to check out and have unelected, unaccountable, faceless people making massive decisions for the country…”

A casual observer might note that Mike Johnson is acting in “bad faith,” and they would be right; but what does that really mean? The existentialists had an answer.

What is Faith?

Faith is a term that has come to mean a belief in something uncontrollable, usually but not always religious. By contrast, good faith is a secular concept, meaning the intention to be fair and honest. Its opposite, bad faith, has come to be synonymous with lying and fraud.

Faith comes from the Latin fides (fidelity): a foundational Roman virtue meaning reliability, integrity, and keeping one’s promises. Good faith (bona fides) was part of Roman law and meant trustworthiness in legal transactions. For the Romans, fides was not belief but fidelity—the sacred duty to honor one’s word. To live without good faith was to live without honor.

However, the rise of Christianity and the subsequent conflict among Abrahamic religions led to a reorientation of faith from a covenant with others to an allegiance with a specific deity. This shifted the burden of moral decision-making from the individual to the supernatural.

But when fidelity to honor—one’s good faith—is replaced by faith in another human or divine being, a permission structure is given for bad faith. This is key to a range of societal dysfunction because civilization requires good faith interactions to retain its structure. Legal contracts enforce “good faith” by law. Political and social contracts only work on the basis of honest dealing.

Unquestioned faith in a singular person or being turns will from an active to a passive role in the human conscience. External allegiance becomes the only rationale for action—transforming the will to be a better person into the will to be a better servant.

In many ways, the project of the Enlightenment philosophers—many of whom were religious themselves—was to return faith to the individual. They saw honor, truth, and reason as crucial building blocks of moral governance and civil society. It was the singular achievement of the Enlightenment that they reengineered the world to operate on the basis of good faith instead of religious faith.

But even science, reason and the social contract couldn’t insulate humanity from the deeper question: what happens when meaning itself fractures?

Essentialism vs. Existentialism

From the ancient Greek philosophers until the 19th century, the dominant concept of human life was essentialist: humans are born with a purpose, an essence, that they spend their lives trying to live up to.

Beginning with Soren Kierkegaard, known as the founder of existentialism, this idea was deeply challenged. The key insight of the existentialists was crystallized by Jean-Paul Sartre’s axiom:

Existence precedes essence.

This means our being, and our choices, are ours alone. Our existence comes before the meaning that derives from it; therefore that meaning comes from our choices.

“Freedom has become a burden from which many seek escape.”
— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)

But freedom to choose can also be a tremendous burden. The anxiety of knowing that you alone are responsible for what you choose to do and what you strive to be—in every single moment—can be debilitating. For people like Sartre, this anxiety of freedom, and how people try to get relief from it, is key to understanding the human condition.

Bad Faith—Anxiety of Freedom

Sartre (1905-1980), like many of his contemporaries, was deeply affected by World War II. For Sartre, the existence of the Nazis proved that virtue and essence were not innate qualities of humankind, but choices made—or avoided—under pressure.

Bad faith (mauvais foi) was Sartre’s term for people who lie to themselves in order to relieve themselves of the anxiety of choice—people exactly like Mike Johnson.

“I attempt to evade the anguish of my own freedom by making myself a fixed role, by being something rather than someone—and that is bad faith.”

—Existentialism Is a Humanism, Jean‐Paul Sartre (1946)

In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre crystallized the key psychological self-deception: “Bad faith is a lie to oneself. It consists in concealing from oneself one’s own freedom.”

Sartre used the example of a waiter who plays the part too much, as if they existed as a waiter, instead of a person playing the role of waiter. Like the waiter in Sartre’s example, Mike Johnson no longer sees himself as a man free to choose. He believes that he exists as a Christian soldier sent by God, to protect the “imperfect instrument of divine will”—Donald Trump.

Bad Faith Revolution

The communications revolution has been exponentially accelerating. Civilization-wide advances in our ability to influence one another have gotten closer and closer together: Books → Radio → TV → PCs → Internet → Mobile → AI. Each invention expanded our collective ability to choose—and with it, the ability to deceive ourselves.

In existentialist terms, this progression fractured reality into an increasingly more complex and frightening set of choices. The existential anxiety felt by so many is born from an expanding, and unnatural, set of influences to choose from. You can see the revanchist, retro fantasy world that the Trump regime projects as a psychological solution to this anxiety: a white, Christian, sanitized version of the 1950s that never existed.

This vision both relieves the anxiety of choice and provides permission for authoritarianism: “If the government takes away all the people and things that I don’t understand or agree with, I won’t have to worry so much.”

In short, the Trump regime is using technology and the media to amplify America’s existential crisis—and to provide a bad faith solution to it: Put on the “Armor of God” or a “TRUMP 2028” hat and let others make your choices for you.

There is a much better way—a good faith solution.

Radical Good Faith

“Man is free; but he finds his law in his very freedom. It is because man is radically free that he bears the burden of the whole world.”
— The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir (1947)

Jean-Paul Sartre; Simone de Beauvoir

The existential crisis facing America and the world is real. It cannot be wished away, or defeated with politics. It requires a reorientation back to choice, and its corollary, responsibility. It requires embracing radical freedom.

Bad faith removes responsibility from the equation: These are not your choices, or even your thoughts, but this is much easier than choosing yourself.

Radical good faith is an approach to creating meaning in life that demands self-discipline, fearlessness, and risk. It requires both vulnerability and aggressive action when needed. Radical good faith restores freedom to its rightful place as both a privilege and a moral discipline. It has one rule:

Always act in good faith toward others but demand the same in return. Never collaborate with bad faith, even if it serves you.

The key is the last part. Too many of us, modeled by our politicians and institutions, have taken on bad faith as a model for success. By telling themselves that their role defines them instead of their inner humanity, they have adopted an easy excuse not to make decisions—or take responsibility for their own behavior. Bad faith gives people like Mike Johnson a microphone.

Importantly, radical good faith is independent of and compatible with other beliefs: it is not anti-religion; it is anti-abdication. The founder of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard, was a deeply Christian man, but felt that the relationship with Jesus Christ was personal; and that what Nietzsche called a “slave morality” had taken hold of religion. Kierkegaard’s argument was that God was not teleological—He did not assign meaning to the universe or human life—that meaning still comes from our own choices.

Regardless of belief, you cannot escape your own decisions. As much as it may seem that handing over agency to authority will bring relief, it is the death of freedom. To be radically free is to face yourself, take responsibility for your own choices, act with integrity, and refuse to allow anyone to choose for you.

“A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

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