The important consequence of this analysis is that it shows how the bad faith of others (and/or a kind of structural bad faith in a community) can have horrifying, toxic effects on us. Other thinkers gave this a much deeper analysis than the early Sartre; in the latter chapters of Self and Others, Laing described a distinction between “false” and “untenable” situations which is illuminating.
Adopting, or being put in, a false situation is extremely similar being in bad faith: Laing contrasts a false or “counterfeit” situation from a genuine one by saying “[w]hen a man’s words, gestures, acts disclose his real intentions, one says they are genuine and not counterfeit as coin is genuine and not counterfeit”.482 In context, we can read this as meaning a false situation is one where our avowed intentions/projects/actions do not correspond to our actual intentions/projects/actions. By the same token, this makes the false situation an irrational one, which helps explain why being in it is dangerous. Much as in bad faith, nothing done within a false situation can resolve the conflicts posed by/in it: “[t]rue conflict is clarifying. False conflict is muddling. When the issue is false and confused, the real or true conflict cannot come into focus, true choices are not available”.483 However, the false position is generally local and limited, it is whether the date on the lake is going well, whether it matters that my hand has been taken, and so on. A false situation might be an episode of bad faith or a localised piece of inauthenticity.
By contrast, an untenable position describes a wide, even global situation; someone within it can expect that “no matter how he feels or how he acts, or what meaning the situation has, his feelings are denuded of validity, his acts are stripped of their motives, intentions, and consequences, the situation is robbed of its meaning.” Left unaddressed, this kind of situation leads to a radical breakdown of our agency, since neither the resources we have to draw on, nor the ends that might be up for grabs, can be relied on. Without room for an adequate motif or end, the world is
disrupted; whatever I do will be uncertain and painful, with no possible resolution to or productive issue from that pain. At the extreme, a coherent world becomes impossible and yet consciousness remains, our projects only barely coherent enough to count as such and under permanent threat. On the face of it, this situation looks like it includes the experience of full-strength anguish. It is the radical destruction of all possible futures since all possible meaning has been collapsed in advance.
482 Laing, Self and Others, p.130.
483 Ibid., p.143.
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How is a completely untenable situation possible? As Laing points out, it can be the result of bad faith, on my part or on the part of others, since “[t]hose who deceive themselves are obliged to deceive others. It is impossible for me to maintain a false picture of myself unless I falsify your picture of yourself and me”. One way of surviving objectification under bad faith is, as we have seen several times, to enter into a collective bad faith which is stable.484 However, this is only possible where the motivations of the other are relatively stable and/or predictable – if there is nothing stable to conform to, not even a straightforward bad faith is possible; we are worse off since
constant adaptation of our bad faith makes each subproject of bad faith that much flimsier – since it can and will be destroyed constantly. If we live under the conditions of the “double bind”, then that constant destruction of our projects becomes a reality for us. What makes a situation a double bind?
To begin with, it has to involve more than one person, and has to be made up of repeated episodes that follow a pattern – it is, as Laing quotes Bateson, “such repeated experience that the double bind situation comes to be an habitual expectation”.485 There must then be an overt command which threatens severe, if not existential danger if it is disobeyed. This is counterbalanced by a second command, implicit or explicit, which carries the same level of threat but contradicts the first.
Depending on which prong of the dilemma is being directly levelled at us, we can adopt a position that fails against the other; eventually, since we are confronted all the time with the inadequacies of our positions (otherwise, why would we be motivated to swap between them?), we will make the switch perpetually. Eventually, designing our projects to fail efficiently and be replaced/rebuilt quickly becomes a survival mechanism.
This condition is worse than an ordinary encounter with anguish, since the other is effectively forcing us to experience an anguish-like breakdown of our projects which is nightmarishly difficult to
counter, either in bad faith or through our authenticity. The problem here is that the intermediate, limbo state our projects (can) enter and which is responsible for the pain of project transitions becomes semi-permanent, or even permanent. Laing shows us how this can come about through
“the presence of numerous disclaimed, unavowed, contradictory and paradoxical implications”486 in a situation which make it a double bind. In a small-group situation, the ostensive statement “it’s cold” can really mean the injunction “put on the fire”; at the obviously malicious end, offers of help like “we’ll arrange a nice change for you” can really be a threat: “If you don’t stop behaving like this,
484Laing himself was familiar with Sartre’s early work and cites No Exit to explain that this can happen: “[e]ach cannot sustain his ‘bad faith’ without collusion with another, each remains tormented and haunted by anxiety and despair.” (Self and Others, p.112.)
485 Laing, Self and Others, p.144.
486 Ibid., p.160.
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we’ll send you away”. Once we spot these patterns, it should be easy to point them out, but if there really is an existential threat487 then we add an extra pole to the internal conflict which is so painful.
Moreover, if the originators close ranks, or are simply forceful enough in their denials, the process can continue: “Jack will deny that he has implied anything, and moreover imply that Jill is wrong, mad, or bad to think anything is implied. This implication in turn is made and disavowed. The next time a plain statement is made, and Jill reacts to it as a plain statement, she will be accused of being insensitive, or of wilfully refusing to ‘know perfectly well’ what is meant”. If our lives in general are governed by this kind of structure, it is impossible to stabilise the equilibrium of our projects, since that restabilisation requires a (relatively) coherent amount of evidence to come from the (objective) world and from others. At any given time, the essence of being in an impossible double bind like this is that we can neither be sure we are about to act appropriately, nor are we sure whether we have done so in the past. We constantly feel on edge, since a huge number of our projects seem under threat at all times. By comparison, being in garden variety bad faith, suffering a low level awareness that our projects are inconsistent but never having to confront them, is a release. Bad faith, in the worst case, is enforced on us because the alternative is absolutely nuclear.
If the threat forcing us into bad faith really can be this severe, the (strands of) bad faith offered (or spontaneously developed) as an alternative have to be powerful as well. It must be true that, in the words of Erich Fromm, “the culture provides patterns which enable them to live with a defect without becoming ill”,488 i.e. without being exposed to full-strength nausea or anguish, or else other-relations would be in serious danger of breaking down. In his words,
If a person fails to attain freedom, spontaneity, a genuine expression of self, he may be considered to have a severe defect, provided we assume that freedom and spontaneity are the objective goals to be attained by every human being. If such a goal is not met by the majority of members of any given society, we deal with the phenomenon of the socially patterned defect. The individual shares it with many others, and his security is not threatened.489
487 “Existential” in the sense of threatening our existence and/or a complete destruction of everything we hold dear.
488 Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. Routledge: London, 1956. p.16.
489 Ibid., p.15.
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