Bad faith links fear of freedom to anti-Semitic demonization of others

Evidence

Most bad faith is harmless, but it can have darker consequences. In the short story ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, written in 1938, Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly in order to be something. He is pleased when he hears someone else say of him, ‘Lucien can’t stand Jews.’ It gives him the illusion that he simply is the way he is. Bad faith here makes an entity out of a nonentity. Sartre developed this thought further in Reflexions sur la question juive (translated as Anti-Semite and Jew), begun in 1944 and published in 1946. He does not argue that all anti-Semitism comes down to bad faith (that would be a hard thesis to defend), but he uses the notion of bad faith to make a connection between two things that no one had put together quite so neatly: the fear of freedom, and the tendency to blame and demonise others. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in moral panics over immodesty and scapegoating dynamics — fear of freedom driving blame of others. — connects to: Psychological guilt stems from evading one’s absolute freedom through bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 71; Fear of freedom masks itself as defense of the status quo — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 78; Persecuted victims reproduce the power they fear against others (+1 more)
• SEED: Strong essay seed: anti-Semitism as existential self-construction — identity adopted to feel like a solid thing rather than a free contingency.

Broader Connections

• Fear of freedom masks itself as defense of the status quo #expands (0.85) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 78
• Persecuted victims reproduce the power they fear against others #corroborates (0.80)
• Fear of freedom leads people to prefer security over liberty #expands (0.80) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 77