A Word for Our Untrustworthy Society
American Mauvaise Foi • noun • (uh-mare-ih-can mow-vayse fwahh)
Definition: The unique manifestation of bad faith ingrained in America’s ethnocidal culture
Origin: The Sustainable Culture Lab
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released last week on October 12, 2021!
The book has received glowing reviews and Publishers Weekly says that THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME is one of the top books of Fall 2021.
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
Following the election results in the Virginia gubernatorial race, a number of people reached out to me to express how the ideas expressed in my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America explained the dynamics that resulted in Republican Glenn Youngkin winning the race.
Not only did they use the language in the book, but they kept on talking about mauvaise foi, or bad faith, to describe Youngkin’s surprising victory over former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. And by mauvaise foi they meant the definition within French Existentialism, which is slightly different than conventional bad faith.
Normally, when people talk about bad faith, they are talking about someone who has the intent to lie and deceive another person. Under the conventional understanding, a bad faith individual is knowingly and intentionally engaging in a relationship where their actions make them untrustworthy, and they are trying to deceive the other person into believing that they are trustworthy. Without the premise of trust, a good, healthy relationship cannot exist. A relationship built upon trust would be a good faith relationship.
Within Existentialist philosophy, however, bad faith or mauvaise foi consists of lying to yourself, and believing that the lie is the truth. With mauvaise foi a person honestly believes that they are cultivating a trustworthy, good faith relationship, and they have no conscious intent to deceive other people, but their actions remain a deception because they have already convinced themselves that a lie is the truth. By articulating what they believe to be the “truth,” they disseminate lies.
When people contacted me in the wake of the Virginia election, they were not saying that Youngkin had intentionally lied to people, but that he appealed to Virginians because he defended the lies that many Republican voters want to believe is the truth. Whether Youngkin intentionally lied is largely irrelevant because the lies spread and become the new status quo, regardless of his intent.
Mauvaise foi has been foundational to America since the beginning of colonization, and our culture’s rootedness in mauvaise foi means that it can permeate all walks of life and especially politics. Donald Trump’s presidency with its reliance on lies and deception has magnified American mauvaise foi.
The Roots of American Mauvaise Foi
As Americans try to figure out how to stay safe amidst COVID-19, the belief that the government is untrustworthy remains a constant and worrying theme.
Many Americans do not want to listen to the recommendations of White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because they do not believe the government can be trusted. And this lack of trust plunges people down internet rabbit holes in search of individuals and advice that will feed into and support their paranoias.
These people believe that they cannot trust their own government because ethnocidal white colonizers never intended to make a trustworthy, good faith government.
America’s democracy was built upon the lie that some people—without a need for explanation—are not people or human, and therefore our democracy does not extend to them. Instead, dehumanization, oppression, exploitation, and erasure are extended to these humans who America has arbitrarily decided are not human beings.
White Americans, or those with a white essence, have long believed that they could “trust” American democracy because it would extend democracy to them at the expense of non-white Americans. However, as some white Americans begin to recognize the humanity in non-white people and aspire to extend democracy to them, they realize that they can no longer “trust” their government.
The government that they trusted only exists via being untrustworthy and deceptive, so asking America’s government to be trustworthy and honest creates a foreign, unfamiliar type of government that many Americans do not understand and therefore feel uncomfortable trusting.
Likewise, communities of color have always been forced to engage with an untrustworthy government that was created to exploit communities of color for the material and financial benefit of those with a white essence. It is logical for these communities to also not trust the government. Firstly, because the government has rarely been trustworthy, and secondly, because creating a trustworthy government is so foreign to America that we thus far may be incapable of doing so despite our supposed desire to engage in good faith.
Within America’s façade of trust, there remains the expectation that our society and government may seize upon any opportunity to dehumanize a person for the short-term benefit of another person.
America creates Kafka-esque government policies and laws and business practices that incline people to believe that they receive necessary services, only to deny people of these services due to the “fine print” or bureaucratic red tape. The normalization and expectation of this manifestation of exploitation and deception inclines most Americans to believe that they cannot trust anything in our society, including other people. American individualism is greatly influenced by the inability to trust other people.
The absence of trust in America is due to our ethnocidal foundation built upon the lie that some human beings are not human beings. This lie did not exist because colonizers intentionally lied to non-European people. The lie exists because colonizers had convinced themselves that this lie was true, and now, regardless of their intent, their actions perpetuated the lie. This is mauvaise foi at a foundational level. America is a society built upon mauvaise foi.
American Mauvaise Foi, COVID-19 & Critical Race Theory
Once you are aware of American mauvaise foi, you will see it nearly everywhere you go in America, so I was not surprised when people recognized it in the Virginia gubernatorial election this past Tuesday.
When it comes to elections, today’s Republican party and conservatives thrive when trust is low because their entire political ethos is built upon professing the necessity of being unable to trust the government. The GOP’s tax policies essentially equate to telling people that they cannot trust the government with their money, and that we should trust that businesses will do a better job with money than the government.
This narrative pertaining to the untrustworthiness of government largely derives from the era of Reconstruction following the Civil War. In order to defeat the Confederacy, the Union needed to expand the role of government, and this expansion grew into extending rights to people of color. This expansion also required taxation. During Reconstruction, federal troops occupied much of the South to ensure that Black Americans could exercise the rights articulated in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution.
The trustworthiness of the federal government created a government the former Confederate states and white supremacists could not “trust.” Instead they decided that they should trust businesses and business-owners who represented the wealth, social structure, and status quo of the pre-Civil War Antebellum South. The South did not want to give their tax dollars to the federal government so that it could empower communities of color, and instead they wanted to empower the businesses and individuals who sustained inequality and division.
Today’s Republicans work to undermine the efforts of Democrats who try to cultivate a trustworthy government because this empowers the conservative narrative of government being untrustworthy. This political sabotage makes many Americans believe that they cannot trust their government, and when this occurs Republicans give them a pro-business politician who will embolden their fears.
Governor-elect Youngkin was a businessman and much of his campaign focused on the handling of COVID-19 and the fears that many white Virginians had regarding Critical Race Theory (CRT).
Many white Americans fear CRT because it aspires to ask critical questions about America and to teach the truth about our society. These questions and truths are tough for many Americans to address because these truths will shatter their mauvaise foi understanding of America. The lies that they have long told themselves would get dismantled if CRT was taught, so they prefer to continue the lies.
The fact that CRT is not taught in Virginia public schools is irrelevant. The spectre of the potential arrival of the truth is enough to foment pandemonium amongst those with a white essence who depend on mauvaise foi.
America’s response to COVID-19 also speaks to these mauvaise foi delusions. Many people prefer to convince themselves that COVID-19 is not a threat, and mandates and school closures equate to an unjust denial of their freedoms.
Since they have convinced themselves that the threat is not real, any sort of adjustment to the status quo to address the threat will be described as “unjust,” “tyranny,” or a stripping away of their “freedoms.”
Republicans can easily appeal to this base of voters by merely expressing the lies that they want to hear. Youngkin and other Republican politicians will strategically decide to not burden the voters with the truth, and will actively work to prevent the truth from existing. This is how Youngkin won in Virginia, and how Republicans will continue to try to win.
This is a dystopian playbook that has been our status quo since before the creation of the United States of America. To solve this problem, we must finally cultivate American bonne foi, good faith.
If you are in our nation’s capital swing by STABLE Arts at 336 Randolph Place NE, Washington, DC 20002 and check out the Altars Festival!
