A Sartrean Response to “Being Human”: Chapter II.

I promised to abstain from talking about pickup artistry, however I must nonetheless address the implications of this Sartrean philosophy on *interpersonal relationships*, which are the part of his philosophy which seems most painfully self-evident:

 

Because there is no human nature, no authentic self, and nothing which is hidden “just beneath the surface”, there are just three words regarding all your hopes and dreams of finding love which best describe your situation: **“No one cares.”** It only takes a couple years of personal experience to learn this fact, though people may deny for decades. No one cares about your Soul, its beauty, your ideals and principles, your bleeding heart, your passion, your good will, your virtue, nor your goals and interests… *except for you*.

 

Yet this is why the existentialists are optimists. If you alone must champion the things that “truly matter” in your life, then no one but yourself can stop you. When you walk into a bar and see somebody beautiful, it’s you that has the choice to say, “I don’t wish to impose; they bought their table and they saved their money; they are talking to their friends; they don’t wish to be interrupted; I’m just ugly.” Yet you *also* have the opportunity to say: “They do not own the place; this is a social setting; there is nowhere which is truly safe; this building might explode at any moment; if my parents hadn’t met, then I would not exist; I know that I exist, and they cannot deny this; I am free.”

 

For Sartre, it’s the latter statement — “I am free” — that is the only honest answer to the situation, even if it’s not the only “logical” conclusion. All of the excuses to restrict one’s freedom out of social expectation are mere lies one tells oneself because it has been told. They may be “logical”, but they’re not *necessary*. Only that I’m free can I substantiate.

 

Persisting in “bad faith”, insisting that the World revolves about such social expectations, is the root of misery, and any psychoanalytic “therapy” which reinforces such a dogma kills the patient. Therapists behave as though there were some “inner psyche” buried in the tangled wires of the personal subconscious (or, far worse, the “brain”, as it’s objectified by neuroscience) which can be “adjusted” to be “normal” and to “function” in society. Yet this is merely an aggressive, predatory tactic which enslaves the populace to this “bad faith”.

 

Politically, this bad faith is echoed in those ideologies (which I will not call out explicitly) which would demand that we conform to “kindness” out of some abstract conception of “equality”, regardless of the situation we encounter in the Real World. Such a kindness is of course impractical, and it’s this very fact that it’s impractical which people fetishize as “purity of Soul”, since only by so doing can they justify it. Merit vanishes completely from the table; nor can kindness be employed as merit. People still persist in the delusion that, if you are “truly” kind, then love “will find you”, with no need for “tricks” or for manipulation. 

 

Yet this rosy view of human nature is utopian in vision and dystopian in practice. If you cling to the conception that the “truly” kind will always find “true” love, then you assume that anyone who *doesn’t* find true love has not been “truly” kind. The falseness you perceive about this “phony” angers you because it is your own. (That’s not, of course, to say that *everybody* does this *at all times*; they may be perfectly authentic pointing out your own hypocrisy.)

 

This is the only reason people hate on pickup artists and seducers: it’s because they are reminded, in the underlying mechanism of a tactic which succeeds, that their delusions about love, derived from their own pious self-conceptions, are just that: delusions. They don’t *want* to face the bitter truth that pickup artists *can* and *do* succeed, although the evidence is utterly ubiquitous and, if there were a universal human nature, it would favour even such a bitter pill.

 

Just look at any photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre. One quick glance would make you wonder why a man so unattractive would have dated DeBeauvoir, with girlfriends on the side, for decades. Yet just saying “he is French” is just like saying “he is ugly”, and to claim that he manipulated her suggests that she had not manipulated him. At least, if they were both aware that it was happening, (that is: that they manipulated *one another*, as we often do) then we may truly call them “equals”, and perhaps it’s this consent to do so, without pretense or illusion, which is truly “love”.

 

**[({R.G.)}]**

 

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