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Existentialism and Morality for the 21st Century Do we all need to Become Existentialists? By JR, June 2025
Three of my many intellectual influences: Che Guevara, Jean Paul Sartre and with Simone de Beauvoir and their famous meeting in Havana in 1960. Sartre and Beauvoir believed that all societies were best understood as sources of class struggle between powerful and powerless groups which is the case with capitalist societies and its authoritarianism. Sartre believed that morality and justice were not possible as long as capitalism prevailed and became even more decadent and oppressive over time. Both Simone and Jean Paul claimed the aim is to validate one’s sense of self by denying the other their freedom -something, in whatever context, they vehemently opposed. Despite Sartre’s philosophical sympathies for aspects of Marxism and libertarian socialism – a variant of anarchism - Marxism he claimed that he never accepted any particular power or socio-economic doctrine over him: that he was a “traveller without a ticket”. Sartre referred to Che Guevara as "the most complete human being of our age" due to Guevara's embodiment of revolutionary ideals and his commitment to social justice. Sartre admired Guevara’s dedication to the struggle against imperialism and capitalism, viewing him as a person who transcended mere political activism to represent a broader revolutionary humanistic vision. Sartre considered Che as a model of authenticity and integrity, two important moral virtues absent under capitalist societies and his willingness and sacrifices to fight for his beliefs, even at the cost of his life. The CIA murdered Che in Bolivia in 1967 since he was a serious threat to the capitalist world order controlled by the USA. Dr. Guevara's life and work symbolized a passionate commitment to the liberation of oppressed peoples and his revolutionary actions in Cuba and other regions resonated with Sartre's existentialist philosophy, which valued individual agency and the pursuit of meaningful humanistic existence. Additionally, Sartre appreciated Guevara's intellectual depth, as he was not only a guerrilla leader but also a serious thinker who articulated the democratic egalitarian philosophy behind his actions. This combination of action and thought made Guevara a compelling figure for Sartre, who was deeply engaged with questions of freedom, responsibility and human potential. Incidentally, Jean Paul and Simone stayed at the famous Hotel Nacional in Havana. In 2004, in the same hotel, Fidel Castro met Robert Redford, who produced the excellent film The Motorcycle Diaries, which was based on Che Guevara's trip across South America and subsequent radicalization in his younger life as a medical student. Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you- Jean-Paul Sartre Two quotes by economists which Sartre would be in total agreement… Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all - John Maynard Keynes The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness - John Kenneth Galbraith Introduction With covid-19 still mutating and the deeply depressing two time election of village idiot George W Bush, the world was shocked again with the election of the abominable know nothing monstrosity Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2024, existentialist philosophy has been making a comeback. We live in a world described by T S Eliot in his post World War I poem The Hollow Men. Will the 21st century be more violent, grim, power laden, corrupt, duplicitous, hypocritical and depraved as the 20th? So far it seems a lot worse and I’m sure one of my inspirations Jean Paul Sartre would concur. Below are a few lines lifted from The Hollow Men that I encountered in one of my high school English course from a rare inspirational teacher who also had us read Eliot’s The Wasteland.
This is the way the world ends Although it was not referred to as such before the 20th Century, the roots of existentialism were formed during the late 19th century by the emergence of a massive philosophical body of work by two philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. But following the upheavals and mass slaughter of World War I and the Russian Revolution including during the first half of the twentieth century in conflict-ridden Germany and France, where uncertainty permeated every dimension of society and then the fascism in Italy and Nazis in Germany there emerged its major advocates and sole explicit supporters such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, who gained immense popularity in the ruins of postwar World War II France. They followed German existentialist thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Karl Barth who had already risen to prominence during the interwar Weimar Republic with their studies of both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Though their work varied in the details, they all shared a type of anarchist thinking that rejected religious, philosophical and political authoritarianism while expressing contempt for academic obfuscation. Not unlike some Buddhist teachings, with the exception of the few Christian existentialists, the focus of almost all existentialist philosophy has inevitably been on the rejection of deities and other supernatural phenomena, free will [1a] and human freedom combined with the moral requirement of complete accountability and responsibility combined with the brevity, finitude, contingency, constant struggle, anguish, absurdity of human existence over which almost all have no control. [1] Jean Paul Sartre stresses in his early philosophy that we always compelled to choose how to act, whatever the circumstances might be. The exhausted athlete chooses the moment at which she is too tired to continue; the terrified victim chooses to faint in order to blot out the insufferable situation. He even goes so far as to say that the tortured man chooses when to cry out in pain – and so on. Despite the extreme quality of some of his examples, it seems to me that Sartre is right to be concerned by the fact that invariably we tend to deny or to disguise our freedom in order to evade responsibility for our actions. This tendency he calls “in-authenticity” or “bad faith”, what many of us would call self deception, cognitive dissonance, lying to ourselves of just plain “bullshit”. A typical strategy is role playing which is behaving in a manner we feel is dictated or required by the functions we fulfill. He exemplifies this kind of conduct in Being and Nothingness with his caricature of the obsequious waiter who is “too much a waiter”, a man who escapes the anguish of his freedom by enacting the exaggerated gestures of a cultural stereotype.
Sartre (1905-1980) generally spent 10 hours per day writing, a passion that dominated him for as long as he could remember and even after he went blind in the 1970s. Sartre was surely a socialist and anti-capitalist [1b], his anti-capitalism justified by its erasure of morality and systemic deceit in almost all capitalist interchanges, the primary features of which are selfishness, greed and exploitation – surely value words not conducive to ethical behaviour. From my own experiences I have discovered even as a teen far too many people do not want to know, preferring blissful ignorance, especially about the sordid business practises that pervade and pollute every day commercial transactions and trades. Lack of moral principle, adherence to the truth and accountability are the norms. Moreover, capitalism uses people as means to their nefarious ends, continually violating Kantian notions of the categorical imperative and universal application of moral rules – that is, applying moral principles to other that you refuse to apply to yourself, something Noam Chomsky regularly points out. Sartre adheres to an ethics of belief, that not valuing the truth is a very serious moral shortcoming. Sadly, most people prefer comfort to the truth, another strong increasingly noticeable characteristic of capitalism’s intrinsic decadence capitalism that for today’s “anything goes” world is not only oppressive, but fascistic in an age of moronic moral degenerates, con men and serial liars such as Donald Trump. Introducing critical thinking and ethics in our schools would perhaps be an antidote, but Christian Churches and Chambers of Commerce invariably block these programs. I know this from personal experiences. What is the point of embracing moral ideals in a world where people can endlessly express contempt for violence, while having empathy, compassion and concern for others while in practice do little or nothing about their countries wars, imperialism and exploitation of people living in zones of everyday poverty or territories of terror and genocide such as in Israel’s decimation of Gaza. We are increasingly living in a rapacious world dominated by corrupt corporate assholes and psychopathic billionaires whose interests are served and protected by government pimps, cops and the military. Sartre was an insightful and progressive yet complex thinker whose theoretical treatises, plays, novels and short stories graphically displayed his philosophy which includes No Exit from which the well-known passage “Hell is Other People” is found. I would proclaim this as one of his best plays and interpreted as an allegory regarding Sartre’s obvious axiomatic unapologetic atheism. The characters in No Exit all seek salvation through the redeeming judgment not only of other humans, but from the fictional God, Jesus and other supernatural characters in the Bible; but such puerile imaginary inferences are not forthcoming. Similarly, Sartre seemed to be informing us that the hope for a Christ to pay for our sins and a God to forgive us for them will also be illusory. Surely enough, Sartre’s atheistic existentialism is an extremely demanding ethical and intellectual worldview. It instructs the importance of getting things right the first time, since no phantom deity is going to set your wrong decisions and deeds right. The best you can hope for is that, if you mistreat, betray and manipulate others, they might be inclined to forgive you. But since God does not exist, he/she/it is not a participant in the transaction. There is, and can be, “no exit” from our freedom and responsibility for everything we do. Another of Sartre’s insightful plays is the lengthy The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) which deals with several large scale social and political issues from which can be found truisms that need to be continually repeated such as “When the rich fight the rich, it is the poor who die.” But of course wars, like religion and capitalism, are rackets and it is the credulous poor and working class men, who fight, are mutilated and die in all wars as has been the case throughout history. This concern for the poor, and righteous indignation at the injustice of their treatment by the rich, was notably and repeatedly in Sartre’s work for the entirety of his intellectual life. Perhaps the most important message of the The Devil and the Good Lord is that ethical purity in the world as it currently exists under an intrinsically and systemic immoral capitalism is unattainable. The good, at least in most cases, will be mixed to some degree with not only widespread unacceptable bad behavior, but outright malice and evil. This can happen in several ways, three of which are: (1) ignorance and stupidity. Since our knowledge is limited, often by design and deliberate, we are likely to engage in unacceptable behavior and evil, either in spite of or in addition to good deeds, even if we are trying our best to do be a moral person; (2) Power is limited by the political apparatus and unethical socio-economic system that is in place. There are times when we do not have the resources to do the right thing except by using means that also cause some very bad outcomes; (3) Starting points. The capitalist world so plagued by greed, exploitation, plunder and other countless evils such as children working in sweatshops, economic hardship and homelessness, imperialism and perpetual war, destruction of the environment, the ruthless exploitation of animals, and so on and forth) that it is impossible to deal with all of them at once – or any of them, given the neo-fascist authoritarianism that has taken hold of gullible people throughout the world To participate in any of these horrors and nefarious activities is pure evil. But to refuse to participate in any of them would require one to withdraw from the 40 or more hours per week to earn a meager living and literally starve - or live a stark monkish existence would continue to leave the world’s capitalist evils undisturbed. Let’s be honest: if everyone on our beleaguered planet could be persuaded to abide by the minimalist ethical adage of the golden rule, capitalism would not last a day. These observations point to another issue that is featured in this play, the issue of whether, or to what extent, or in what circumstances, violence is morally justified as a means for fighting evil and promoting the common good. On the one hand, almost everyone understands and agrees that violence is an evil, best avoided if at all possible. But on the other hand, a principled objection to violence, even when it offers the only expectation, hope or faith for overcoming some great evil such as, for example, slavery, would seem to make sense only if violence were the only evil, or, at any rate, always the greatest evil. Incidentally, I personally have no use for either hope of faith as a solution to anything. As the example of violent resistance to slavery suggests, frequently the alternative to violence is not peace, but rather simply another level of violence. Thus, Sartre seemed to be arguing in this play that an ethics of absolute nonviolence is an ethics of docility, passivity and contemplation, rather than action. It is essentially a top down religious morality grounded in arbitrary bogus authoritarianism appropriate only for a tyrannical supernatural god and heaven, not for a peaceful natural earth populated by humans and other life forms. Sartre further admitted in countless interviews that he is an anarchist and commentators have consistently described him as such. An important component of Sartre’s anarchism is his antipathy toward moralistic dogmatisms as I hope to show that Sartre’s conception of ontological freedom is one of the important bases regarding his anarchist conclusion about ethics and moral behaviour. Sartre was surely in sympathy with the inspiring anarchist views of freedom especially as an antidote to a tyrannical bureaucratic capitalist states and churches. I’m reminded of the graphic scene on a train from the great David Lean movie Doctor Zhivago with refugees cramped in a boxcar during the Russian Civil War (1918-21). When a communist apparatchik comes on board and agitates an anarchist played by Klaus Kinsky, he declares “I’m the only free man on this train.” Sartre was a socialist of course and argued that democracy, freedom and in particular morality in general was not possible in a capitalist system that was plagued by the depravities of bureaucratization, greed, gluttony, plunder and exploitation of both people and the natural environment. Sartre was a proponent of both freedom and the golden rule which are not possible without preliminary notions of the common good, solidarity, economic equality and ethical responsibility for the other. For him, capitalism was a huge problem for any pretence to bottom up democracy, common decency and ethical norms. Interactions with other people and the confusions and misunderstandings that often ensue is graphically illustrated in Sartre’s brilliant play No Exit, which is often described by some critics as cynical and pessimistic. But sadly most people are insecure, have limited knowledge and critical acumen, low self esteem and are easily led and deceived by institutions and people who wield power over them. This is the dark side of human beings, many who are sociopathic lacking in compassion or moral principle that gravitate to positions of power which of course is corruptive. One of the characters in the play proclaimed that “Hell is other people”, like the selfish incredibly obtuse manipulative psychopathic neighbor who lives across the street from my wife and I. Far too many people, I hesitate to say a growing number of our overpopulated 8 billion, are uncaring selfish ignorant jerks, bitches and assholes. Fortunately this negative depiction does not describe all people but certainly the numbers have been increasing in the past four or five decades with the growth of systemic corporate corruption, neo-fascism, nihilistic gangster kamikaze capitalism, financial predation and rollback of responsibility by our phony “democracies” to citizens who are in need, many living on the streets and finally widespread mounting existential threats from ecosystem collapse and species extinction - with the exception of homo saps who continue to reproduce like an out of control virus. Another common elusive behavior of complicity and docility is for people to make the bogus claim that they were “only following orders”’, an excuse advanced in order to exonerate all manner of abominable immoral and irrational behavior, ranging from every war in history, police brutality, the Holocaust to the humiliation of people who have been incarcerated and abused in the hell holes called prisons. These are well-documented crimes, whose perpetrators defend their actions on the grounds that they were “only following orders”. Sartre insists that orders can never cause us to act against our will: they only have the force or authority with which the agent himself invests them. The agent always chooses to assent or disobey, to resist or to acquiesce. Several of Sartre’s protagonists in his novels and plays struggle with the dilemma that they chose to obey orders which they felt they ought to disobey, and yet to which they freely and culpably assented. To lie to oneself about the exercise of one’s own freedom and moral discretion is Sartre’s definition of bad faith. By contrast the authentic person agrees that all his actions flow from his inherent freedom, accepting that every action is an implicit assertion of moral value and realizes that our actions are the only basis on which others are entitled to judge us. Action is our dimension-for-the-other in the world, and we have a right of mutual moral scrutiny as if all our actions are committed freely. Another entailment of this ethical analysis is that “all human life is human”. This tautological maxim adapted from Nietzsche and Heidegger is deployed by Sartre to undercut inauthentic or hypocritical interpretations of actions as being bestial, diabolical or inhuman. The more apt we become to attribute or offload inhuman or supernatural entities and epithets to our behavior, the more likely we are to be talking about conduct that is, in fact, exclusively or even typically human: no other species could conceive, much less re-enact Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz, Gulags or the various torture prisons run by the murderous US military on their over 800 monstrous military bases that contaminate the world. But the gluttony of the capitalist classes and their equally bought and paid for corrupt lickspittle political sycophants will keep the minds of the unthinking masses occupied by trivialities and amusements (read Amusing Ourselves to Death by the late educational philosopher Neil Postman) such with binge eating of fat laden fast food, lotteries, online gambling on sports and other incredible stupidities and irrelevancies - as the intellect, moral responsibility and self-discipline promoted as superfluous as OCD and its partner ADHD are considered normal. Every ad on TV and online embrace these dumb ass Beavis and Butthead, Trailer Park Boys, Larry, Moe and Curley Joe character traits as normalcy. Some psychological researchers in Germany have hypothesized not without evidence that the global IQ average is now 85. This IQ is very close to the moron status and seems to be accelerating to the point at which we are arriving at the dismal dumb and dumber conditions not unlike the 2006 movie Idiocracy: Idiocracy (2006) Full Movie | Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews - YouTube The intrinsically authoritarian business classes, corporate oligarchs and obnoxious arrogant billionaires in cahoots with other calcified conservative talking heads such the churches and schools will maintain total global control over the masses by what Chomsky and Herman called Manufacturing Consent who will relentlessly prevaricate and bullshit - remember the old adage “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks”. Slavery has not left us; with rare exception we are basically now wage slaves working for vipers and vultures such as Skip the Dishes and Door Dash as even in their spare time (which is precious little) they get sucked into mindless entertainments which are also corporatized. Bet 365 anyone? Sartre’s Existentialism In the early 1950s when Sartre had his notorious squabbles with Albert Camus, one of Camus’ main arguments against Marxism in his book The Rebel was that it meant sacrificing the present to the future, committing evil now in the hope that some benefit would come later. Sartre’s argument about ends and means was based on his view of history and unlike many of the rigid, dogmatic and often sycophant Stalinist/Marxists whom he encountered in the French Communist Party, he did not believe in a historical determinism that developed through predetermined stages to a necessary conclusion. Although a socialist this determinism he quite rightly believed was one of the flaws of Marxist theory. For Sartre history was no more than the total accumulation of human choices. As he said in a famous lecture in 1945: “Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be”. How ironic and prophetic is this given that fascism is back with us throughout the world despite the fact that fascism was the issue over which millions were slaughtered and maimed in World War II? [2] Sartre challenged long standing prohibitions, many from religious texts including the Bible; such as “one ought not to lie”. Sartre has no use for most absolutist dictums void of context such as one must never lie. Surely no one could criticise many communist party members who fought against the Nazi occupations with the French underground partisans during World War II who when taken prisoner would lie to the Gestapo to protect their comrades. But as he points out, lying often does fail to achieve its purpose and lying is most commonly immoral especially when invoked for self-serving reasons. Thus if I lie about my achievements in order to be praised, the praise I win will be false and unsatisfying since only freely conceded genuine admiration and praise can really satisfy its recipient. Moreover, surely a moral and character issue are at stake when most people do very little during their walking dead existence of petty mind numbing amusements combined with obedience to the endless consumerism, indoctrination, bullshit and propaganda from the capitalist state, the huge corporations and financial mafia they underwrite, school systems and finally medieval draconian church power, facilitated by docility and self-inflicted ignorance. Reading Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, the many works of Nietzsche’s and the disturbing Franz Kafka’s novels, short stories and his other writings will help the reader to the grim realities and understanding of the ongoing bureaucratic and authoritarian predicaments one is mired within. But we must as individuals rise up and fight these insults to our humanity, intellect, injustice and the cruelty and the profits of the racket called war. The person of integrity must give up on faith and hope since they accomplish NOTHING. The existentialist must rise up, take risks and challenge his masters, including the fictitious ones such as Gods. As the great anarchist Mikhail Bakunin wrote, “If God actually existed, it would be necessary to abolish him”. Sartre argued that for a moral world of principles and good will, God is irrelevant; it makes no difference whether this invisible uncommunicative asleep at the wheel ghost in the sky and his cosmic police state exist or not. The entire Christian edifice looks much like George Orwell’s Big Brother and his dystopian novel 1984.Human responsibility cannot be avoided and as Sartre argues, God is a lame excuse for shirking on one’s accountability for his acts. There’s a brilliant quote on Sartre from the late existentialist scholar Walter Kauffman’s when he wrote, “All man’s alibis are unacceptable: no gods are responsible for his condition; no original sin; no heredity and no environment; no race, no caste, no father, and no mother; no wrong-headed education, no governess, no teacher”, a passage from his excellent Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 1956. The Gods of religion including the few existentialists who are Christian, no matter how elusive, mysterious and paradoxical, is still a lame hypocritical immature alibi and cop out. What Sartre would think of the world today is difficult to imagine; what would he think of an immoral monstrous beast and neo-fascist such as Donald Trump leading the most evil, militaristic and powerful country on the planet? Wasn’t it fascism that my fighter pilot father and his older brother in World War II fought to prevent from happening again? His older brother Arthur was killed in North Africa in the fall of 1942; my father returned but not without PTSD, serious emotional scars and lifelong alcoholism. Existentialism is the philosophical moniker associated most closely with Jean Paul Sartre although it is not a term he invented but he accepted it despite his mild dislike of the name. He nevertheless invoked it and gave it wide currency through a lecture in the immediate post-war World War II period delivered at the Club Maintenant, Paris, in October 1945 with the title Existentialism is a Humanism which was eventually published as a slim volume in 1946 that is still popular and in print. It’s a good place to start for anyone wanting to understand Sartre and Existentialism which entails a useful conception that underpins the whole of his philosophy; that being Existence precedes essence. This is a key principle because it runs counter to the main thrust of Western thought from Plato to Hegel, Judaism, Christianity and Rene Descartes. What it claims is that there is no a priori conception of humankind, whether as species or individual. It therefore disposes with the Platonic realm of the ideal, with the fictitious Judeo-Christian creator God and with the Hegelian notion of the Absolute Idea. It is axiomatic for Sartre, as it was for Nietzsche, that we inhabit a godless universe which they rightly deemed a common-sense view, given the scarcity and poor quality of any evidence or argument for god’s existence. Consequently one can only conclude there is no god-given spirit that is distinct from our corporeal selves and that can exist before or after or outside of our earthly material lives. Existentialism is therefore also a counter to the Cartesian notion of the duality of mind and extension, or matter, summarized in the famous aphorism: Cogito ergo sum. In effect, Sartre inverts this premise to say: Sum ergo cogito, “I am therefore I think” which is at least for Sartre the natural and realist order of things. On close examination of the species called human or homo saps, the ability to think is highly dubious and diminishing rapidly in our uncurious, anti-intellectual discombobulated unthinking uncritical planet. Perhaps most important of all, since there is no god and we are alone without cosmic support from a sky daddy asleep at the wheel, faced with the consequences of all this; moreover every living thing that exists is born alone without parental planning. Even humans in almost every respect have children that are not planned or surely the earth would not have an unsustainable 8 billion humans - 2 million in 1925; contraception anyone? Can anyone explain why this supposedly omnipotent loving god allows a child to die of cancer or the result of the racket called war after one week of life? [3] My introduction to existentialism was from an introductory undergraduate college course in philosophy and from discussions with fellow students. The three most popular and important for me were Jean Paul Sartre, his lifelong feminist partner Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary fellow existentialist colleague and friend Albert Camus and time permitting throughout my hopeful and optimistic university days during the brief uplifting counterculture of the 1960s and resistance of primarily young people to the slaughter and barbarism of the Vietnam War. But the anti-war movements and hopeful atmosphere for a better world began to wane by the end of the 70s and far right wing capitalist zealots and their massive propaganda big money began to have a negative impact on dismantling hard won social programs and progressive groups such as the peace and anti-war movements. By early 1980s with the election of reactionary hard ass conservative creeps such as Ron Ray Gun, Maggie (There is no society) Thatcher, Brian “On the Take” Mulroney, book burning bible thumpers, wealthy elite corporate oligarchs, banking mafia and other neo-fascist financial predators were in full control. During those depressing times I continued to embrace existentialism, especially the brilliant writings of anti-capitalists such as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and various left wing politicians such as Tommy Douglas and political critics such as Noam Chomsky. Despite World War II that was ostensibly a war against fascism (Russia who arguably won that war isolated on the Eastern Front until late 1942 had itself 27 million casualties) and the fact that my father and his older brother were fighter pilots in the war (his brother never made it back but most of those who did like my dad were PTSD and lifelong alcoholics that took its toll on families) we have returned to the bleak1930s politically in many ways. That the overpopulated contaminated discombobulated world of 8 billion homo saps has taken an 180 degree turn back to full blown fascism today. But this ought to be unsurprising, given the depressing dismal conditions of our so-called democracies and local communities as Mother Nature screams “help, rape”. Then there is the specter of Donald Trump, elected twice like the semi-literate moronic George W Bush. Trump, by the way, is arranging a barbaric UFC fight on the White House Lawn, likely complete with rampant online betting which has also been legalized like anything else that can be turned into obscene profit for some deranged ravenous capitalist asshole (aka entrepreneur).
Two Lifetime Partners and Geniuses : Jean Paul and Simone Like all Wars Democracy is and always has been a Lie Democracy with liberty, freedom and justice for all was never meant to exist, despite the nauseating mythologies promoted by the schools, churches and corporate controlled media. Although these fragmentary depressing conditions have always existed in varying degrees our social relationships and solidarity against power structures and their corruptions have dramatically deteriorated in the past four to five decades. But as mentioned political and intellectual freedom especially and real bottom-up democracy has always been a farce with hierarchy and authoritarianism combined with injustice and economic inequality having been the standards throughout human history. Capitalism is no exception and it could be argued it is the most unjust and economically unequal of all hierarchical world orders that include theocracies and monarchies. In recent years the world has descended into an intellectual and moral abyss from with there is likely no escape as vulture and gangster capitalism has embraced barbarities of every conceivable form of financial predation, endless iterations of boom-bubble-bust-bailout, ethical cesspools such as lotteries, online betting, reverse mortgages and other forms of debt penury and blood splattering barbarities such as the aforementioned UFC. The list is long and the likelihood of the masses waking up from their self imposed stupidity, OCD intellectual stupor and mind destroying zombie induced cell phone addictions, petty mindless amusements and misinformation wastelands is basically ZERO. Anyone who has lived through these grim years since the mid 1970s and been observant and engaged cannot help but notice declining intellects, rude behavior, authoritarianism and decadence not only of the imperialist police state militarist capitalist system of greed and exploitation, mafia banks and predatory financial behemoths but the sycophantic complacency of the predominantly far right wing political apparatus. It would be difficult to ignore the fact that fascism is back, as in the past during the period between the two World Wars our capitalist masters having again created a far right wing neo-fascist moral abyss for which there seems to be no respite or remedy, the war mongering Israel and their leader Nutter Yahoo and lunatic US aspiring dictator Donald Trump merely two glaring manifestations of this depressing state of affairs. Moreover, as mentioned we are faced with apocalyptic signs not only of appalling fragmentary uncaring obtuse behavior and breakdown of corporate criminals, predatory mafia banks and their political lackeys, but local communities. Moreover and perhaps even more dire is an ongoing ecosystem collapse combined with soil, water and air contamination and universal species extinction with the exception of an unsustainable 8 billion humans, most of who live in grinding poverty, combined with an infinite growth model. With the possible exception of fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell who was also a brilliant mathematician, Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is perhaps the most known philosopher of the twentieth century. [4] Incidentally Sartre’s tireless pursuit of studying and understanding the human animal without a defined essence or human nature and subsequent philosophical reflection, literary creativity and in the second half of his life, active moral and political commitment gained him worldwide recognition and for many like myself, reverence and admiration. Despite the groundwork of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he is commonly considered the forerunner and most important proponent of existentialist philosophy whose writings set the tone for intellectual life in the decades immediately following the horrors and senseless butchery of the Second World War. Given the slaughter of the two World Wars followed by the doctrinaire rigidity and arrogance of the Cold War with its police state anti-communist hysteria and finally the end result of the screwed up undemocratic unjust world we currently inhabit, how can anyone avoid a stance of deep despair and pessimism? If Sartre were alive today, surely it would be difficult to maintain his position of hope and optimism for a peaceful civilized just world. Sartre, although not a dedicated pessimist like Schopenhauer yet given the grim anguish of his own time - not unlike the dismal immorality of 21st century capitalism and multiple existential challenges we face - had an ironic view on what he considered to be an unavoidable pessimism. In one of his essays featured in the volume of essays from 2013 We Have only this Life to Live he wrote: “Just as anguish is indistinguishable from a sense of responsibility, despair is inseparable from will. With despair, true optimism begins; the optimism of a man who expects nothing, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and acting for the good of all”. We are the outcome of every choice we make, even if that choice is to do nothing by submitting to the dismal status quo of capitalist exploitation and plunder; one can either resign oneself to the tyrannical dictatorship of capitalist gluttony, the myriad of injustices that put profit before people - or rebel against it. One may have hope for a more humane and democratic world order, but hope without action, effort and solidarity is vacuous. Sartre, Camus and other like-minded existentialists describe and explain our multiple depressing predicaments despite their dispositional optimism regarding freedom combined with total personal accountability. As Jean Paul Sartre puts it, “We are condemned to be free”. The challenges we face are not new and for those looking for a place to begin with existentialism, I recommend the book by Sartre Existentialism and Humanism, a brief 108 transcript based on a popular lecture delivered in late 1945. I then recommend moving on to The Words (Les Mots) Sartre’s brilliant autobiography followed by one the best biographies of Sartre among many is the one I read several years ago by Annie Cohen-Solol. Then you will be hooked on this brilliant man. Two quite recent volumes on Sartre are Simply Sartre by David Detmer and Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. An article on the online web site Jacobin by Sartre scholar Ian Birchall titled The Outrageous Optimism of Jean Paul Sartre is a worthwhile read as are many other writing by Birchall. Conclusions In an age of the monstrous buffoon Donald Trump, authoritarianism and fascism’s return, corporatism, systemically corrupt neo-liberal kamikaze capitalism, hideous endless boom-bubble-bust-bailout iterations there have surely been revivals of existentialist thought, socialism, anarchism and other alternatives to the immoral anti-democratic unjust global capitalism that pollutes the social and political landscape. It has taken the form not so much of working-class movements and parties but of revitalized ways of thinking critically about capitalism which has always been antithetical to basic ethical norms, decency and genuine direct democracy with its ongoing inequalities and environmental crises. It’s little wonder that such critiques have brought on multiple challenges to a rotting system that creates gross economic inequalities and grinding poverty for most people. Consciousness has been growing, especially among younger people who face austerity, costly post secondary education and life as a wage slave. For the first time in decades, avowed socialists in the UK and USA have become a real political force, both locally and nationally. Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK have put the word socialism back into the discourse of national politics and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have seen its memberships rise from 7,000 to more than 50,000 since Donald Trump was elected first in 2016 and (gulp) again in 2024,. Less important than Karl Marx’s specific analyses of the system’s failures for all but big corporations, mega mafia banks and a tiny minority of wealthy oligarchs is the fact that capitalism’s failures of people and the natural environment calamities are more and more being viewed from perspectives that are critical, holistic and structural. In this revival, whether or not a Marxist movement of the working class is on the horizon is less important than the fact that the working class, such as it is, and everyone else - as well as the world’s ecosystems - are in trouble under the dictatorship of kamikaze capitalism. Along with these factors has come a growing appreciation of the basic insight of historical materialism and ethical considerations that Sartre took as given: economic structures and priorities decisively influence both politics and culture, constraining - if not determining - what is possible on a planet of 8 billion mostly stupid docile and complacent people. Even if Marxism and existentialism are no longer the philosophies of our time, they are destined to remain a potent source of inspiration for anti-capitalist thought, dissent and organization. If this revival of socialism, whether Marxist or not, is to succeed, though, I feel it will once we again consider the views of Sartre - partly because his emphasis on freedom resonates with a distinctively American political culture sceptical of collectivism, and partly because it helps us to realize why Marxism has , with rare instances, has yet to be implemented. Sartre explored that issue explicitly in the second, unfinished volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason on how the Russian Revolution become the grave of revolutionary aspirations following the brutal civil war and death of Lenin, hope, rise of Stalin, banishment of Trotsky that inevitably created one of the twentieth-century’s most brutal authoritarian police state regimes. But is the United States of today any better? As many black intellectuals in the US and especially the leaders of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s have understood, Sartre was surely the existentialist Marxist who was a vital source of self-understanding and inspiration. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth(1961) Sartre introduced the notion of counter-violence, exploring how the subjects of colonialism could overcome submission, reject complicity, find a voice, and engage in resistance. Stokely Carmichael, for example, appealed to Sartre’s philosophy and moral dictums in his famous “Black Power” address in 1966. Moreover, it was Sartre’s theory of freedom and accountability that underpinned his vitriolic partisanship on the side of the oppressed, from Jews in the Holocaust to black Africans under colonialism and French workers so marginalized and exploited that they joined the Communist Party. The other aspect of this defence of the oppressed was Sartre’s contempt for oppressors: the bourgeoisie in Nausea, white Southern aristocrats and racists in the United States, French practitioners of torture in Algeria, Americans engaging in genocide of five million in the Vietnam, War and apparatchiks of the totalitarian Soviet Stalinist machine. In the essay Colonialism and Neo-colonialism Sartre expressed his disgust and horror for one of capitalism’s ugliest projects during the centuries of barbarism, slavery, indigenous genocides land and land and resource theft. This continued well into the 20th century and exists today in more clandestine and nefarious ways. For France which post World War II insisted on holding on to its colonies, his disgust was directed at French Indochina (Vietnam) and Algeria and their struggles to gain independence from France. He argued that the colonial system exposes the hideous spectre of capitalism for what it is in its full horror when dealing with the colonized abroad as the capitalists see no need to curb their greed and pillage or to disguise it under the veneer of civility that continues to characterize bourgeois society today. Further, he denounced the hypocrisy of the French who immediately upon achieving their own liberation from the Germans and their sclerotic conservative collaborators in France who thought nothing of intensifying their own colonial oppression that included torture of the Algerians. One can understand why the French government did not like Sartre’s views on the Nazi occupation and its lickspittle traitorous Nazi collaborators in Vichy or the harsh criticism of neo-colonialism that reappeared in the aftermath of World War II. He points out how the French attitude toward torture had changed significantly in the short period of time separating the present Algerian conflict to the time during World War II when the Gestapo had used torture in an attempt to suppress the mostly communists and other partisan resistance fighters against the occupying Nazis. In 1958 Sartre wrote: “We watched the German soldiers walking inoffensively down the street, and would say to ourselves: ‘They look like us. How can they act as they do?’ And we were proud of ourselves for not understanding. Today we know that there was nothing to understand…. Now when we raise our heads and look into the mirror we see an unfamiliar and hideous reflection: ourselves. Appalled, the French are discovering this terrible truth: that if nothing can protect a nation against itself, neither its traditions nor its loyalties nor its laws, and if fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then its behavior is no more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” Happy are those who died without ever having to ask themselves: “If they tear out my fingernails, will I talk?’ But even happier are others, barely out of their childhood and who have not had to ask themselves that other question: ‘If my friends, fellow soldiers, and leaders tear out an enemy’s fingernails in my presence what will I do?” Sadly, as the ongoing ugly American militarism war on terror and the second act of the fascist monstrosity Donald Trump makes clear, Sartre’s essay is as relevant today as it was over 65 years ago when he wrote it. In Sartre’s last play The Condemned of Altona, situated in post WW II Germany Sartre can be read on one level as a dramatic reflection on German collective guilt over the Holocaust and the mindless slaughter for which the Russians lost 27 million people. While the major characters had not been enthusiastic dedicated Nazis, they had like millions of other Germans been complicit with and assisted the Nazis when it was in their self-interest to do so. And when confronted with the facts of history they offer both to others and to themselves, lame feeble rationalizations for their behavior. For example, in the play when Gerlach, a wealthy shipping tycoon, is challenged by his son, Franz, to explain why he had sold land to the Nazis, even though he had known that it would be used for a concentration camp, he replies as follows; “What is there to explain? Himmler wanted somewhere to house his prisoners. If I had refused my land, he would have bought some elsewhere…. A little farther to the west, a little farther to the east, the same prisoners would suffer the same guards, and I would have made enemies inside the Government.” The Condemned of Altona attempts to make sense of something seemingly inexplicable: how could the unimaginable horrors and atrocities of the twentieth century have happened following centuries of the humanist Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution for which Germany had a strong impact? The play suggests that attributing them to some of the century’s great monsters such as Hitler and Himmler is a shallow explanation; after all these villains could not have accomplished what they did without the cooperation of millions. While Hitler and his cohorts may have been evil, it was their millions of faceless accomplices who facilitated the crimes and in so doing justified their actions to themselves with Sartre’s notion of bad-faith rationalizations. For example, some Germans may have said to themselves, “you can’t blame me for Hitler’s crimes. I didn’t approve of his mad schemes. I hated Hitler!” But Franz, another character in the play who had been a soldier in Hitler’s Army, rebuts such reasoning, as he says to his father, “We hated Hitler, others loved him. What’s the difference? You supplied him with warships, and I with corpses. Tell me, could we have done more if we worshipped him?” I would describe the moral message is that the cause of the greatest evils is typically not sheer naked malevolence which although is visibly emerging today, has been for most ordinary people relatively rare, but rather greed, self-imposed ignorance, stupidity, cowardice, conformity, passivity, bad behavior (to cite just one of countless examples): examine the bad driving behaviors and lack of cooperation of those in a roundabout which only works if people have a sense of fair play like a lineup to get on public transit, opportunism, docility and mindless obedience are all too common – and are increasing. But what we most stand to gain from existential Marxism today is a revitalized conception of freedom against corporatism, financial parasitism and widespread global authoritarianism combined with the ugly re-emergence of fascism over which World War was allegedly fought. Sartre’s voluminous writings and speeches can help us to appreciate how people can induce solidarity and perhaps even aspire to hope where there was none. Sartre insists that we can always choose, in any and all situations - and that even not to choose is a choice. It is in this sense that Sartre asserts that we are always responsible for ourselves even as we are oppressed and living within an unjust undemocratic capitalist nightmare. As he learned from Marxism, we need to appreciate the heavy burdens of history and class as Sartre never abandoned the principles of his remarkable critical thought. Though he tempers it from abstract and total freedom to concrete and situated freedom after World War II, he insists that what distinguishes humans from inanimate objects is that we must invariably make something of what we from birth onward. It is understandable that radicals will be divided over this notion of freedom. After all, it asks that we take responsibility for situations we did not create and then makes us responsible for what we do about them. This may be a tough lesson to internalize but it serves as a forceful reminder of the undying possibility of active struggle. Dissent and resistance spring from the same power of self-determination as do submission and apathy, complicity and resignation. If the individual sometimes yields, complies, accepts much less than is fair, at other times she joins with others and breaks out into the open which may redefine identities, recast situations and create revolutions that allow for real democracy and justice. If atheist existentialism takes tragedy, anxiety, powerlessness, and absurdity seriously and to their logical conclusions, then it is easy to see how this can give us a radical and life-affirming philosophy for the twenty-first century. If we accept the themes of the existentialist literature with seriousness, and if all responsibility is on us, then since the themes of existentialism cannot be answered, remedied or overcome, they should be embraced and used as a way of affirming one’s individuality and as an impetus towards living authentically. What follows from this is a philosophy of action. And if there was ever a time when an existential philosophy of human responsibility was needed, it would surely be now. Political unrest, globalization, social change, and the loss of modernist certainties, are only a few of the paradigm shifts occurring at the present time. Feeling powerless is an all-too-common phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Resignation and life have become almost synonymous, since political, social, and individual change often appear to be utterly beyond our control. The bombardment of information, much of it useless, also stirs a sense of distraction, confusion, skepticism and frustration. The thinking of the millennial generation mirrors atheistic existentialism in many ways with its focus on the individual, on doubt, regret and on disenchantment with political systems reflecting French intellectual life from the 1940s through to the 1960s. Although we are offered many solutions to our current predicament – mind numbing New Age spirituality, religious faith and other delusions, psychics, consumer commodities, ADHD and OCD, conspicuous consumption, lifestyle enhancers, pharmaceuticals, gluttony and overeating junk food, barbaric spectacles such as wrestling and UFC, apocalyptic movies, scams such as lotteries and online gambling on pro sports– none of these idiotic distractions offers satisfaction or enhance the intellect and are inauthentic and unrealistic. They are simply veils that hide the void between the haves (who present themselves as happy on TV ads) and the have-nots (who have limited venues to present themselves at all - especially the masses of homeless. Instead of examining and evaluating the ways in which people orient their lives, we are offered quick and easy answers. But we don’t need answers as much as we need corporate, financial and other business integrity and honesty from the political sycophants who do underwrite their thievery. Perhaps atheistic existentialism can help modern society by providing people with a philosophy that accepts the tragedy and absurdity of existence while promoting responsibility and authentic living. It can help people move past resignation into an orientation that affirms the uniqueness of the individual and her projects. Her subjectivity, when seen in relationship to others, can create a sense of sympathy and empathy. So against the idea of an ‘infinite distance between the self and the other, I contend that genuine and authentic communication can take place, even if made difficult by the distance between the individual’s authentic private self and one’s public expressions. Existentialism provides an ethic that honors individual projects and social responsibility, encouraging and promoting compassion, empathy, justice and generosity in a world dominated by an immoral capitalist world order that endlessly peddles exploitation, profit at all costs and untrammeled greed that pollutes our everyday experiences or existence even in the local neighborhood that were in the not too distant past, civilized and friendly. Today most people don’t even know who their neighbor is. World events have unwittingly conspired to attract renewed interest in Sartre’s political theorizing, which had been widely ridiculed and despised during his lifetime. In our world, unlike the one in which he lived and wrote, capitalism reigns supreme everywhere, un-threatened by any serious challenger. What is the result? The gap separating rich from poor widens every year; the use of torture as an interrogation technique is on the rise; governmental surveillance of ordinary citizens is becoming routine; an amorphous “war on terror” continues to rage with no apparent end in sight; and the accelerating increase in global temperatures threatens to put an end to human life on the planet. In light of these trends, millions are searching for an alternative both to the prevailing capitalist order and to the murderous tyrannies of the 20th century that called themselves anti-capitalist. Sartre’s various attempts to fuse selected Marxist insights about the contradictions of capitalism, the reality of economic and social structures as forces in the direction of history, and the importance of coordinated group activity in the production of progressive political change with his own analyses of individual consciousness, freedom, and responsibility, thus stand before us as a highly promising, and underutilized, resource. In the foreword to Franz Fanon’s book Sartre offered the opinion that as did more than any other intellectual in the world to denounce injustice and to support the wretched of the earth. Sartre’s continuing relevance is partly attributable to the fact that the injustices he denounced are still very much with us, only far worse than when he wrote about the decadence and depravity of capitalism. Indeed, his work has helped to inspire contemporary political activist movements such as Occupy Wall Street as several books by and about him were included in its People’s Library and Black Lives Matter. Post Mortem Note on Gangster Capitalism (Canada Day 2025) A couple of days ago I received my fourth class action suit notification from Mafia I Division of TD Waterhouse. With RBC it’s been only three class action suits. Of the seven it’s been outright theft from trusting clients like yours truly. This time with TD (which was charged with money laundering a few months ago which is common practice with all our chartered banks in Canada as not one has been charged with these serious criminal offences) and 40 years a client with TD. With RBC it’s been over 55 years as a client. This time TD stole over $1400 which the plaintiff lawyers called “trailing brokerage fees” which is one of the multiple ways, including countless hidden fees, Canadians are bilked by our criminal banks which make billions in profits every quarter. But Canada is a country of financial and corporate thievery. Read Bruce Livesey’s depressing expose: “The Thieves of Bay Street”. The first class action with TD was over 15 years ago and when I spoke with the plaintiff lawyer he said the bank would settle out of court and clients who had been robbed would merely receive the stolen money (this time it was illegal charges on currency conversions on market trades) in future brokerage fees. When I called the Vancouver Sun business editor regarding the scandal he informed me he’d be fired if he wrote a piece on TD’s crimes. “Oh Canada, our home ON Native Land” Yes, even the land on which our overpriced homes are situated is stolen. Notes: [1a] In contrast to many secular humanist philosophers and scientists, existentialist philosophy and psychology have emphasized freedom of the will and human autonomy as inescapable, asserting that choice is one of the defining characteristics of human existence, even if it isn’t necessarily a facility that is certain. Free will is a notion that seems impossible to refute despite the compelling arguments by popular scientists such as Robert M Saplosky and others. After all, if not free will, whence accountability for our acts? According to Søren Kierkegaard, the sheer extent of our freedom in having to make choices may induce a state of disorientation and dread, and we make our choices “in fear and trembling.” As mentioned in this essay Jean-Paul Sartre believed that the freedom to choose courses of action without fully controlling or even knowing their consequences have contributed to human “angst” or anxiety. As Sartre put it in his famous phrase, we are “condemned to be free” whether we like it or not. In the excellent book The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: The Tyranny of Truth, during the events leading to Hitler’s tyrannical rise to power in Germany, Albert Einstein posed the question to Arendt, “What is the meaning of life?” Her response was “throwness” an idiom of her professor of existentialism Martin Heidegger. This is not unlike Sartre’s necessity of freedom; we are thrown into the world and are forced to deal with its absurdity, injustices and chaos by making choices regardless of whether free will exists or not. With the advent of corporate platforms such as Facebook and Twitter - which since their inception I personally have avoided like a plague - are for profit internet business enterprises whereby attention deficit agitated people are now subjected to constant and dubious dialogues whereby choices are made promptly on mobile phones and internet devices such as a PC, laptop or tablet without much prior thought or serious deliberation or research. Much of this drivel is simply passed on to others without much thought or critical examination of the sources. In addition, much of this discourse carried out while engaged in some other activity so the results are usually seriously compromised since most people cannot multi-task and even have trouble focusing on one task in our distracted postmodern post truth world. This is called System 1 Thinking by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his insightful must read book Thinking Fast and Slow and the most common symptom is error. I’m frequently reminded of a famous n famous line from Jean Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos, characterized as hell (recall his equally famous line “Hell is other people” from No Exit) as the severe unrelenting discomfort of being watched and judged by other people and projecting onto yourself the judgmental characteristics you sense they have at best intuitively perceived. It would seem that multi-billionaire Zuckerberg and his cohorts have gleaned from Sartre’s (remember Sartre is an atheist) metaphorical version of hell on earth on to Facebook’s business model, making every declaration or gesture a form of public speaking. Whenever you compose a post or comment, you do so with the knowledge that someone else whom you are not directly addressing and perhaps don’t even know, might be looking on, including the enhancement of corporate profits. You and your views and desires are also sold to marketers – for a price of course. And even when no one is paying you any attention, this sense of being overlooked very likely never goes away where privacy is becoming non-existent. But perhaps for some they find enjoyment in the notion that it is they who are doing the spying. Long before social media mania and in reaction to behaviorist and Freudian psychology, humanistic psychologists such as Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers have argued that human behavior is not necessarily determined by our past and present experiences, since we always have the capacity to make choices based on our assessments of current situations. Whatever the expressions “greatness” and “excellence” entail, it has invariably happened to people who have in spite of debilitating external influences, exercised their autonomy and self-discipline, even if it means overcoming obstacles and delaying gratification for a greater path to a flourishing life, what Nietzsche perhaps meant by his expression “self-overcoming”. [1b] During the aftermath of the Second World War young French people especially were warming up to existentialism flocking to the cafes and nightclubs of Paris seeking intelligent conversation with like-minded Sartre followers. Expectedly the wild abusive attacks from the political right and Catholic Church mattered little to the anti-authoritarian atheist Sartre. He active described himself as a man of the libertarian left despite the French Communist Party (PCF) attacks on him for not fully endorsing their often Stalinist political program. The PCF was popular since it had formed the majority of the Resistance to the Nazi occupations during the war. Sartre had not voted in elections and had no intentions of joining the PCF since his socialist philosophy was bottom up and decentralized - against bureaucratized hierarchy. Sartre proclaimed that, “For my part, I have become a convinced socialist but an anti-hierarchical and libertarian one, in favor of direct democracy.” Nevertheless he felt that he and the PCF shared enough common ground for them to work together as they had during the Resistance to the Nazis who occupied France during most of World War II. But for the doctrinaire PCF, Sartre was never quite suited to the rigidity and doctrinaire character of the Communist Party and was the subjected to an onslaught of personal attacks on existentialism and much else. [1] The great German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that human beings should be treated as “ends” and not as “means”; this was a major concern for Jean Paul Sartre who died before finishing his book on ethics that had run up to 600 pages which was published after his death as Notebook for an Ethics. For the most part Sartre would agree with Kant who wrote, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Kant stated this in his theory of morality entailed in his famous moral dictum called the Categorical Imperative. This obligatory requirement is at the centre of Kantian moral theory that focuses on the independence and freedom of an individual with the additional requirements of intelligence, logic, critical thinking skills and other features of rationality. Sadly the vast majority of people have none of these intellectual attributes, thanks to the Christian churches and the business communities that only want docile obedient workers and credulous unthinking consumers. In a godless universe in which we are “condemned to be free” and totally responsible for our acts, it’s the same whether one becomes a leader of nations or a hopeless drug addict. Regardless of our challenges such as socio-economic background we are responsible for what we become but some may ask, does this open the door to moral chaos? Was Dostoevsky who was cited by Sartre correct when he claimed: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”? Since morality is not grounded in arbitrary authority, it is irrelevant whether the fictitious phantom deity of Christianity exists or not. Sartre argued correctly that all political stances and systems demand a moral basis but for Sartre this is not possible in a capitalist dictatorship grounded in raw power and violence that puts profit before people, thus creating the grotesque economic inequalities that it has created. Sartre rightly argued that in a capitalist system based on power, violence, greed and private property, ethics was not possible. If everyone on the planet held to the Golden Rule, for example, capitalism would malfunction almost immediately, grinding to a halt. Sartre used the notion of private property to illustrate the violence, laws, police and prisons that enable the violence and rule of those in power who control the money, wealth, property and global financial system – all underwritten by the state capitalist apparatus including its police and military. Sartre’s position is beautifully illustrated by the story of the Yorkshire miner walking across what was once land held in common before the enclosures. The local landlord rode up on his grandiose horse and informed him that he was trespassing on his private property. The miner quite naturally inquired as to how he came to own the land. “My great-great-great-grandfather won it in a battle,” replied the landlord. “Take your coat off,” said the miner, “and I’ll fight you for it now.” [2] In his discussion of ends and means Sartre refers frequently to Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet Their Morals and Ours. Incidentally Trotsky’s works were not easy to track down in France during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s complete with French right wing collaboration and complicity that included big business during the Nazi Occupation. By the way after the War was over no one of the right wing traitors of the Vichy regime was held responsible for this infamous collaboration. Trotsky wrote from first-hand experience of the early years of the Russian Revolution, and the harsh choices necessary when during the brutal civil war from 1918-21 foreign armies from capitalist countries such as the US, UK, France and even Canada attempted to strangle the Revolution and return the Romanoff monarchy. Trotsky a brilliant intellectual and charismatic personality with no military background led the Red Army to victory but at a huge cost. In his short book Their Morals and Ours he rejected the facile formulation that the end justifies the means. He argued that a simple balance sheet of profit and loss could not do justice to the ethical problem; that there was a dialectical interaction whereby the means used conditioned the end arrived at. Since socialism involved the self-emancipation of the working class, then the only means permissible were those which raised working class consciousness. After all, the working class could not be deceived and liberated behind its own back. [3] I quote at length from another Sartre scholar Benedict O’Donohoe’s excellent piece published in Philosophy Now over 20 years ago called “Why Sartre Matters”: Obviously, Sartre wasn’t the first western philosopher to dispose of phantom gods and then having to deal with the consequences. Nietzsche with little or no reservations notoriously declared the demise of the deity and then confronted the corollary that humans are the sole source of moral values, which had necessarily to be “re-valued, beyond good and evil”. For Sartre, however, it is not so much the absence of God (which he postulates a priori) as the nature of consciousness that makes humans the authors of all moral value. The discriminating power of self-consciousness, enabling us to stand outside ourselves as if we were things in the world much like other things, also enables us to discern that any present situation could be different, and that we could make it so: we can always (ought always, Sartre implies) have a project to amend the status quo. Moreover, in most situations, we can conceive of more than one way to change things: in short, we can – indeed, we have to – choose. What Kierkegaard identified as the inescapable “Either-Or”, the source of all anguish, is, for Sartre, the defining characteristic of being human which is unqualified freedom. Freedom is not itself a matter of choice, Sartre insists; it is the ineluctable, inherent and foundational quality of human being. We are, as he puts it in one of his pithy formulations, ‘condemned to be free’: every time we act, we are destined to discriminate anew between various possible courses of action in pursuit of our project to modify our situation in the world. Whether we like it or not, we are responsible for the actions we commit, and we are therefore, on the evidence of these, amenable to moral judgment: “You are nothing but the sum of your acts.” Another way of saying that existence precedes essence is to say that “acting is the antecedent to being”, or that “to exist is to act”. Because we are conscious of our moral responsibility, we feel anguish in the face of our freedom, and we are naturally inclined to flee from that anguish. *** It flows from Sartre’s first principles that we are embodied consciousnesses, alone in a godless universe, characterized by freedom, destined to act autonomously and by our own lights, and to be wholly responsible for our actions and therefore open to moral judgment on the basis of them. Sartre’s existentialism, then, is an ontology that entails an exigent, unrelenting and burdensome deontology, or ethics, whose premises are grounded in empirical good sense, and whose complements derive from it logically and persuasively. Yet there is a problem, which we might call ‘relativity’: the individual’s relation to his situation, or the interface of subjectivity and objectivity, the confrontation of person and history. How does Sartre account for the historical moment, which he calls facticity and which is axiomatically contingent? How does facticity impact upon the agent? To what extent is my freedom circumscribed by my conditioning? * In Being and Nothingness (1943) he wrote: ‘If war breaks out, it is in my image, it is my war and I deserve it…’ But Frantz, the anti-hero of his play The Condemned of Altona (1960), says: ‘It is not we who make war, but war that makes us.’ To which of these opposing perspectives did Sartre finally adhere? * My Note: Sartre’s interest in the relationship between human agency and historical determinism was featured in the title he gave to his multivolume collection of essays with the title, Situations, the first volume of which appeared in 1947. In his massive volume Being and Nothingness Sartre introduced the concept of “being-in-situation, having explored at length our unavoidable human freedom, rooted in the capacity of human consciousness to negate or transcend the “facticity” or conditions within which we find ourselves. To say that we are always “in situation” is to be attentive to the way our actions are constrained by historical and social reality, from our language, environment, class consciousness, race, gender, genetics and family upbringing. In other words, we are situated but we never wholly determined. Freedom, for Sartre, has no meaning outside of concrete situations, however limiting or oppressive they may be. In seeking to understand the circumstances (or situations) of injustice and oppression, Sartre enters into ever-deeper contact with Marxist approaches to historical and social structures. The theory of “situations” had an enormous influence on the intellectual culture of the day; among other upshots, it would find expression in the Situationist International, a group of social revolutionaries that had taken part in the formations of anti-capitalist student strikes and uprisings in Paris during the summer of 1968. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Sartre moved away from what he called the analytical and apolitical phase of his thought – enshrined in Being and Nothingness which is subjectivist, individualistic and asocial – towards a dialectical conceptualization, culminating in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), which is objectivist, collectivist, and socially focused. This is another distinctive element of Sartre’s legacy: the attempt to reconcile, without renouncing them, the main tenets of his phenomenological ontology and ethics with a more comprehensive and inclusive worldview that would take account of the historical moment in the narrative of the individual; that is, to incorporate the ideology of existentialism into what he called the “unsurpassable philosophy of our time”, Marxism. This evolution can be encapsulated as a shift from the uncompromising analytical dictum, ‘We are what we do’, to the more subtle dialectical statement: ‘We are what we make of what others have made of us’. This is a pragmatic acknowledgment that our freedom, albeit inherent and ineluctable, is necessarily conditioned by time and place. As Sartre once rebuked Camus, in their dispute over the latter’s book The Rebel, “the facts of life are not the same in Passy and in Billancourt” – respectively, affluent middle-class and poor working-class quarters of Paris. This progressive realization on Sartre’s part – stemming successively from his war-time experience of relative constraint and impotence, the random intoxication of post-war notoriety, and the relentless struggle to be a critical travelling companion of communism during the 1950s – led not only to a more realistic and humane analysis of the human agent, but also to a political insight articulated in his highly controversial preface to Frantz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This is a ground-breaking analysis of colonial oppression that prompted opponents to denounce Sartre as an apostle of violence, and sympathizers to hail him as “the first third-worldist”. Sartre was clearly ahead of his time in declaring that the first world (the erstwhile imperial powers) was rich at the expense of the third world (the erstwhile colonies), and he inaugurated a new discourse which legitimized the counter-violence of national liberation and decolonization as an authentic response to hegemonic, western European domination. Here again, it seems clear that Sartre’s analysis is spot-on and his moral intuitions are sound. The depredations perpetrated by the imperialist powers against the peoples they enslaved and the lands they expropriated, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries, were nothing less than institutionalized violence on a massive scale, justified broadly speaking on the same grounds as slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries, namely those of inherent racial and moral superiority. And although the colonies have in name been emancipated, they remain in thrall to their former imperialist masters through such control mechanisms as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the ever-present threat of American military might. This is the potent infrastructure of globalization, which ensures that the third world remains poor enough to underwrite the wealth of the first. Sartre’s unshakeable commitment to freedom meant that he was always on the side of the oppressed and dispossessed. With hindsight, Sartre’s deep suspicion of American intentions in the post-war period looks extraordinarily prescient, and well justified in light of the annexation of western Europe through the Marshall Plan, and the Manichean demonization of the USSR as the ‘Empire of Evil’ over a 40-year time frame, inaugurated by the manic McCarthyism witch-hunts of the early 1950s (which Sartre parodied brilliantly in his satirical farce, Nekrassov, 1955). It is true that his distrust of the USA led him on occasion to be over-optimistic about the Soviet experiment of socialism, and to be slow to acknowledge the delirious extent to which the Stalinist régime relied upon torture, deportation and murder. Nevertheless, Sartre denounced the Gulags in Les Temps modernes as early as 1950, and he remained aloof from the French Communist Party, by whose apparatchiks he was reviled as a ‘demagogue of the third way’ (which New Labor fondly imagines it has invented!), because he obstinately and admirably adhered to his self-styled status as a ‘critical traveling companion’. When Soviet tanks crushed Hungary in 1956, Sartre was cured of any lingering illusions about the Soviet model of socialism, and concentrated his verbal fire all the more fiercely against colonialism and imperialism, a tirade in whose sights was now the empire-building USSR itself. Certainly, some of Sartre’s later political forays were naïve and wrong-headed, and arguably informed by anachronistic (mis)conceptions of ‘the people, the masses, direct democracy, revolutionary action’, and so on. Yet, whenever he defended the right of the oppressed to meet violence with violence; or that of working people to refuse exploitation by big business; or that of refugees to be saved and given asylum – notably in the case of escapees from South Vietnam after the American debacle, known as the ‘boat people’, whom he championed as one of his last public acts – Sartre’s social or political interventions were underpinned by profoundly humane moral instincts that remained faithful to his radical analysis of the inalienability of human freedom. Why, then, did Sartre never complete the book of ethics that he promised in Being and Nothingness, his notebooks for which were published posthumously in 1983? In the immediate post-war period, Sartre was optimistic that free human beings (i.e. everyone) could be integrated into a socialist collectivity in which respect for individual freedom would be the overarching and inspirational value informing all real action in the world. In other words personal relations, inevitably grounded in competition and articulated in conflict – much as he had evoked them in Being and Nothingness – might be mediated instead by consensual norms of reciprocal respect and free commitment to a common good. In short, he was a believer in the French revolutionary mantra of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. His optimism was dealt severe blows, however, by the tyranny of the Soviet system, and by what he saw as De Gaulle’s subversion of cherished republican principles. His response to these disillusionments took the form of Critique of Dialectical Reason, in which his aspiration was to “rediscover the real individual reduced to an idea by the Marxian dialectic” and to “trace him through the praxis of his projects in the world” – an ambitious but ultimately doomed enterprise. Yet Sartre was right to try. It is not his fault that democratic socialism hides a crippling self-contradiction at its very core: people will not freely subscribe to a scale of values and governance that privileges the collective good above the individual advantage. Democratic governments famously cannot get elected on platforms to increase personal taxation in order to improve the common weal – still less on undertakings to cancel third-world debt! On the contrary, democratic political parties feel constrained to vie with each other in a reverse fiscal auction in order to sue for the support of the greedy, self-interested, egocentric voter. None of this is Sartre’s fault, and it is greatly to his credit not only that his analysis of human reality is so transparently honest and, I suggest, accurate; but also that he courageously drew out the consequences of that analysis, placing equal emphasis upon the twin foci of freedom and responsibility; and that he never ceased to wrestle with the profound paradox of the individual / social dichotomy, the oxymoron of the man / history dialectic, in every aspect of his vivid life and eclectic work. [4] During the 1960s Sartre and Bertrand Russell, the two most famous living philosophers at the time, albeit from very diverse traditions, came together to oppose the illegality and barbarity of the Vietnam War by setting up a manifesto and tribunal against the war crimes committed by the United States that was embraced by other famous anti-war activists. They inspired many thousands of young people, especially college students, who joined the anti-war movement. Russell cited the Nuremburg Tribunal prosecuting Nazi crimes during the Second World War that “If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” – Robert H. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. During the massive strikes and demonstrations in Paris that began in May 1968 Sartre backed the insurgent French university students from the very first day. In the aftermath of 1968, when he sold banned socialist newspapers on the streets to defy the state and addressed a meeting outside the Renault car factory, he seemed to embody the hope that Marxist theory and revolutionary practice were coming together for the first time since the 1920s. Sartre was also against the efforts of the French government to restore the rule over Indochina (aka Vietnam) and huge supporter of Ho Chi Minh in addition to his full support of the Algerian War of independence from French racist colonial rule that was plagued by incarceration, police brutality, torture and mass murder by the French military. When Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited and toured the United States following WW II they were shocked not only by the inequalities and widespread poverty but systemic oppressive racism that contaminated the entire country. Political freedom has always been a sham in so-called Western democracies and during 1952 as the Cold War intensified the French police had viciously attacked a Communist demonstration as its leader was arrested for being in possession of two pigeons, with which, it was alleged, he was planning to communicate with Moscow. Presumably the PCF leadership had slightly more sophisticated channels of communication; however there was even talk by the French conservative elite and other intolerant right wing political hacks of banning the French Communist Party altogether. Although not a member Sartre’s reasoning for the support of the PCF was the fact that it massive working-class support of over five million voters and the leadership of the biggest trade-union organization and he chose to stand by the organized working class. For him what was happening in France was more important than what was happening in the USSR; in the words of the German Communist Karl Liebknecht, “the main enemy is at home.”
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