Oppressive parties mask sacrifice by denying the individual’s value

Evidence

The parties of oppression beg the question; they deny the value of what they sacrifice in such a way that they find that they are sacrificing nothing. Passing dishonestly from the serious to nihilism, they set up both the unconditioned value of their end and the insignificance of the men whom they are using as instruments. High as it may be, the number of victims is always measurable; and each one taken one by one is never anything but an individual: yet, through time and space, the triumph of the cause embraces the infinite, it interests the whole collectivity. In order to deny the outrage it is enough to deny the importance of the individual, even though it be at the cost of this collectivity: it is everything, he is only a zero. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 102

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Directly useful for the reader’s typology: this is the precise mechanism by which the serious man and nihilist converge in bad faith — ‘the collective is everything, the individual is zero.’
• DEFINE: Espouses the central bad-faith move of instrumentalizing individuals; a hallmark trait of the serious man and nihilist types.