The Bad Faith Society

We ended up in this four block radius
Where they enslaved us
Sweating for cheese ravioli
With tomato sauce and anchovy
Spoiled
Ah, shit, my blood boiled
But fuck that
I’m ready for open-hand combat
It’s the tomcat
And my thoughts are unlimited
Inflicting fatal wounds
And I’m immune
To your evil society
So praise the Lord
And wage the war
Against this wicked society
-Robert Diggs, “Sickness”

One of the worst things about teaching in China–and it’s a fairly long list–is the bad faith. I came here under the guise of polishing students’ English skills for college abroad, but the reality is that fewer than ten of my 75 students have anything approaching conversation fluency. More than half are stuck for a response to, “How are you doing?” It turns out that I’m not here to polish anything; I’m here so that they can say that they completed an academic program with a native English speaker.

In China this kind of bad faith–where the private raison d’être mismatches the public’s–is de rigeur, as I have previously mentioned. The Gao Kao university examination system, for example, deforms Chinese life but survives because under the U.S. style parents would initiate intense bribery campaigns. It’s not that Chinese families are more status- or achievement-obsessed (although they may be, if you can believe it) than their U.S. counterparts, but our cultural norms preclude the kind of open bribery that is a fact of life here. It was scandalous when Carmela Soprano made a halting effort to threaten Meadow’s way into Georgetown because it was so out of line.

But in the West after Sartre authenticity, the alignment of public and private raisons d’être, is a candidate for Supreme Cultural Value. (Its only real competitors are the Almighty Dollar and Family, all three front and center for Tony Soprano, viz. his trip to Bowdoin with Meadow, where he read Hawthorne on the subject: “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true.”) For Sartre, bad faith is an individual being’s attempt “to flee what it cannot flee, to flee what it is.” In Wuhu I am a check mark on an application, not a teacher, which I flee out of a constitutional aversion to the shell game. I experience this disconnect as excruciating not because it makes my life harder because in fact it makes it easier: No one cares about my prep work or classroom management or effort because they don’t matter. Nevertheless if I have a soul this hurts it.

The Chinese, though, are merely more honest about their lack of authenticity, for bad faith runs rampant in U.S. society. Often it is trivial–a movie theater exists to sell you popcorn, not show you movies–but often it is not: You consider yourself a customer of your local newspaper, but they consider you the product for their advertisers; the police are revenue and arrest generators, not guardians of public safety, as in the case of Adrian Schoolcraft; we incentivize healthcare companies not to pay for our healthcare; and the only thing scarier than Rick Perry calling President Obama a socialist is his believing it.

One of this blog’s other writers sent me a fantastic Forbes article on “The Dumbest Idea In the World,” which is for CEOs to maximize shareholder value by managing around and in response to market forecasts. The reason is bad faith: “In today’s paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value . . . CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.” The consequences are worse than a little soul shearing.

The expectations market generates inauthenticity in executives, filling their world with encouragements to suspend moral judgment. They receive incentive compensation to which the rational response is to game the system. And since they spend most of their time trading value around rather than building it, they lose perspective on how to contribute to society through their work. Customers become marks to be exploited, employees become disposable cogs, and relationships become only a means to the end of winning a zero-sum game.

Living in the soupy fog of bad faith, I submit, damages all of us. The poet narrator of Ben Lerner’s recent excellent Leaving the Atocha Station nails the problem and proffers a solution, although it is difficult to tell whether the author does so in good faith:

[T]hat I was a fraud had never been in question–who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handfuls of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

Not all of us have access by temperament, background, and means to poetry, but we all need something. In my most optimistic moments I hope that Occupy–with its unmediated democracy, refusal to specify policy proposals, and the facticity of sleeping in public spaces–will perform a blueprint, for as RZA notes the other voices speaking to our sick society self-limit by coming from the pulpit. We need more, for until the sickness of bad faith–difficult to diagnose and perhaps impossible to treat–is cured, our more visible signs of decline will be impossible to arrest.