CONCEPT
Bad Faith in Five Registers
Sartre’s taxonomy of self-deception applied to the AI moment: five distinct ways that people in the age of AI conceal a free choice behind the appearance of necessity—each with its own logic, its own seduction, and its own specific cost.
Bad faith, in Sartre’s account, is not a single attitude but a repertoire of evasions, each adapted to a particular form of freedom that the consciousness finds unbearable to acknowledge.
Mauvaise foi is the flight from freedom into imagined necessity, and the flight can be organized around any of the dimensions of human existence—around role, around history, around circumstance, around output, around the quality of one’s tools. The AI moment has produced a taxonomy of bad faith so precise it reads like a clinical manual. The first register is the bad faith of the Luddite, who converts accumulated expertise into an essence rather than acknowledging it as a choice, and thereby experiences the devaluation of that expertise as a violation of her nature rather than a change in the conditions within which her ongoing choices must operate. The second is the bad faith of the triumphalist, who converts acceleration into inevitability, distributing the