Bad faith mistakes a made condition of inferiority for a fixed essence

Evidence

In both cases, the ruling caste bases its argument on the state of affairs it created itself. The familiar line from George Bernard Shaw sums it up: The white American relegates the black to the rank of shoe-shine boy, and then concludes that blacks are only good for shining shoes. The same vicious circle can be found in all analogous circumstances: when an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior. But the scope of the verb to be must be understood; bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic: to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. Yes, women in general are today inferior to men; that is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 59

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition of bad faith as the substantive reification of ‘to be’ against the Hegelian dynamic of becoming — central apparatus for the whole book.
• XREF: The Hegelian ‘to be is to have become’ directly ties to Sartre’s being-for-itself and the reader’s existentialism grounding. — connects to: Bad faith flees anguish by relocating freedom into a fixed essence of the self — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 257; Authenticity is the radical self-recovery that escapes the good-bad faith dichotomy; Bad faith also positively constitutes the self as what it is not — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 314 (+6 more)
• ADDENDUM: The vicious-circle argument (created situation then inferred inferiority) parallels the Grafting & Growth essay’s theme of infrastructure-as-argument — the made becoming mistaken for the natural.
• DEEPTHINKING: The vicious circle of making then inferring inferiority, plus the refusal to answer whether perpetuation is required, is the dense core the whole book builds from.

Broader Connections

• Bad faith requires the for-itself to both be and not be what it is #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 313
• Bad faith is making excuses from circumstance rather than acknowledging one’s own freedom #contradicts (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 507