Sartre on Bad Faith: The Lie You Tell Yourself to Avoid Freedom

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that one of the most common forms of self-deception is not lying about the world, but lying about ourselves. We tell ourselves that we have no real choice, that our roles define us, that our personality is fixed, or that our circumstances fully excuse what we do. Sartre called this kind of self-deception bad faith, and he thought it was one of the central failures of human life.