Moralistic bourgeois rhetoric can be backed by hidden violence and therefore never trusted

Evidence

To keep her teaching job at the school, she had to sign a document stating that she was neither a Jew nor a Freemason. It was ‘repugnant’, but she did it. … She and Sartre later made this belief central to their politics: fine-sounding bourgeois values, for them, were never to be trusted or taken at face value. They may have learned this attitude during the regime of humbug that was Occupied France. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 459

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading purpose on existentialism’s political turn — this is the lived origin of the movement’s suspicion of fine-sounding values, relevant to later chapters on existentialism and politics. — connects to: Communitarian moral rhetoric masks a project of disciplining individuals; The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285; Moral authorities justify effective violence despite logical contradictions (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how moral panics and fine-sounding ‘family value’ rhetoric function as instruments of control under collaborationist regimes.

Broader Connections

• Communitarian moral rhetoric masks a project of disciplining individuals #exemplifies (0.90)
• Moral authorities justify effective violence despite logical contradictions #corroborates (0.85)
• Violence with impunity is practiced in the name of civility #exemplifies (0.85)
• Mob attitudes are bourgeois convictions stripped of their hypocrisy #expands (0.80) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 793
• Moral unmasking that fails to shock bolsters the very values it attacks #complicates (0.75)
• The civilizing process makes violence invisible rather than eliminating it #complicates (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 285