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Life, said Sartre, begins on the other side of despair.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (d. 1980) called it ’bad faith’ [French, mauvaise foi], the habit people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice.

By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to recognize the multitude of other options that are available to her, a person places herself at the mercy of the circumstances in which she happens to find herself. Thus, the person is more akin to an object than to a conscious human being, or, in Sartrean terms, more akin to a ‘being-in-itself’ than a ‘being-for-itself’.

People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are alien to their nature as conscious human beings, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, and thereby to acknowledge, even if only implicitly, their freedom as conscious human beings.

The Waiter Example

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter.

Sartre points out that, in order to play-act at being a waiter, the waiter must on some level be aware that he is not in fact a waiter, but a conscious human being who is deceiving himself that he is a waiter.

The lesson here is that, whenever we take up a social function, we need to be careful not to confuse this borrowed identity with our own. Our social function is often a convenient hiding place, but, if the boundaries are blurred, it can lead us to act against our own beliefs, principles, and interests—as often happens with politicians when they confuse means and ends, losing sight of the ends or ideals that, early on, drove them into politics.

To kill a man is still to kill a man, even if we happen to be wearing a uniform.

The Young Woman Example

Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date. The woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest limply and indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances.

Whereas the young woman chooses to treat her date’s compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, implicitly acknowledging, or betraying, her freedom to make choices.

Conclusion

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, professional and social roles, and value systems.

In pursuing such and such pragmatic concerns or adopting such and such social roles and value systems, a person may pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, namely, the choice of pretending to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices. Man, Sartre concludes, is condemned to be free.

We cannot evade responsibility; if we try, we will become the walking shadow of the person we ought to have been.

Neel Burton is author of The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide.

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And why our approach to depression may be misguided.

As many as one in four Americans will at some time in their lives suffer from a mental illness called “Major Depressive Disorder”. Despite the growing concerns about their effectiveness, sales of antidepressant drugs continue to grow, and, in England, have more than doubled since 2008. Clearly, the approach to depression that we as a society are taking is not working. But why?

The concept of depression as a mental illness may be helpful for the more severe cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, by and large, are mild and short-lived, and readily interpreted in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition. Indeed, for many people, the concept of depression as a mental illness is likely to be positively harmful. How?

By pushing us towards doctors and drugs, the belief that we are suffering from a mental illness or chemical imbalance in the brain can prevent us from identifying and addressing the important real-life problems or psychological issues that are at the root of our distress, and that are, quite literally, crying out for our attention. To treat this cry out of the depths as a simple biological problem is effectively to ignore and suppress it, while ever more people join the legions of the depressed.

Depression as a signal

Crushing though it may be, depression, or the depressive position, can present a precious opportunity to come to terms with deep-seated life problems.

Just as physical pain evolved to signal injury and prevent further injury, so depression may have evolved to remove us from distressing, damaging, or futile situations, situations that do not serve us well as human beings. The time and space and solitude afforded by depression can enable us to reassess our needs, reframe our perspectives, and round up the resolve to break with established patterns. In other words, the depressive position may stand as a signal from our unconscious to our conscious that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing, or, at the very least, processing and understanding.

In the normal run of things, we may become so immersed in our daily life that we no longer have the opportunity or perspective to think and feel about our self. The adoption of the depressive position invites or compels us to shed our defences, stand back at a distance, re-assess our needs and priorities, and formulate a modest but realistic plan for fulfilling them.

At a deeper level, the adoption of the depressive position can enable us to develop a clearer understanding and appreciation of our self, our life, and life in general. From an existential standpoint, the adoption of the depressive position obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former. By meeting this ultimate challenge, we are able to break out of the mould that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

Light at the end of the tunnel

Looking at it like this, it can be no surprise that many of the most creative and insightful people in history suffered from depression, or a state that might today be diagnosed as depression.

The roll of names includes the politicians Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln; the poets Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and RM Rilke; the thinkers Michel Foucault, William James, JS Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer; and the writers JK Rowling, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Leo Tolstoy, and Evelyn Waugh, among many, many others.

To quote Marcel Proust, who himself suffered from depression, “Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.”

Neel Burton is author of The Meaning of Madness and Growing from Depression.

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Why the tyrant is the unhappiest of people, and three things to guard against tyranny.

Nero and Seneca, by Eduardo Barrón (1904).

Tyranny is back on the table, but the ancients thought hard about how to avoid it. One of their most interesting arguments is that the one who suffers most in a tyranny is… the tyrant himself.

When Lydia was conquered by Persia in around 540 BCE, the Greek cities of Ionia were ruled by tyrants nominated by the Persian satrap in Sardis, the former Lydian capital. These tyrants, backed by the Persian power, had no need to moderate their rule, and began to give tyranny, and Persia, a bad name to the Greeks.

The definition of “tyrant” is malleable, and has shifted many times over the centuries. All in all, a tyrant is an absolute ruler who is illegitimate and/or unrestrained by law. To maintain himself in such a precarious position, he (for it is invariably a “he”) usually resorts to oppression and cruelty. Even then, “the strangest thing to see is an aged tyrant”—as the philosopher Thales of Miletus noted more than 2,500 years ago.

In On Clemency, written for the emperor Nero, the Roman philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) says that clemency is the quality that most distinguishes a king from a tyrant: “A tyrant differs from a king in his behaviour, not his title … It’s because of clemency that there’s a big difference between a king and a tyrant.” For Seneca, a ruler’s glory depends not on his power, but on its proper exercise. Moreover, if people can see that their ruler is “for them as much as he is above them,” they will be loyal to him and act as his eyes and ears. Clemency, then, not only ennobles rulers but keeps them safe: “It is at one and the same time an adornment of supreme power and its surest security.”

The calm and deliberate exercise of power, says Seneca, is like a clear and brilliant sky, but when the ruler is unrestrained all becomes murk and shadows: “People on every side tremble and start at sudden sounds, and not even the one who causes all the alarm is left unshaken.” The tyrant is then caught in a vicious circle: he is hated because he is feared, and must make himself feared because he is hated. For everyone he kills, there are fathers and sons, brothers and friends, who will rise up in their stead. 

In 68 CE, Nero preferred to commit suicide than let himself be killed.

Socrates on tyranny

One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often thought, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are really all one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But in the longer term, their actions undermine both their and our happiness—and never more so than if they happen to be a tyrant.

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates makes the case that the tyrant is the most miserable of men because he is in a stronger position to harm himself and others—which is why those whom Homer has in Hades suffering eternal torment are not ordinary people but potentates such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Tityus.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates ranks people according to how much of the ideal Forms their souls are supposed to have seen, with philosophers, artists, and true lovers in the first class, followed by kings and generals in the second class … and tyrants in the ninth and final class.

Elsewhere, Socrates calculates that the king is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrant.

Plato and Aristotle on tyranny

The best rulers are those who are most reluctant to govern, and the most eager the worst—said Plato.

Plato did not care for Athenian democracy, but the tyranny of his own aristocratic relatives had proven much worse. In the Republic, he claims that the degeneration of the ideal state ends in democracy, followed by tyranny.

In Book 9 of the Republic, Plato gives a detailed account of the origins, mindset, and modus operandi of the tyrant, thereby demonstrating that this most unjust of men is also the most slavish and unhappy. The soul of the tyrant is so disordered that he is unable to do, or even know, what it truly desires—which is, of course, to be happy, and therefore good.

The life of the political tyrant is even more wretched than that of the private tyrant, first, because the political tyrant is in a better position to feed his disordered desires, and, second, because he is everywhere surrounded and watched by his enemies, of whom he is, in effect, the prisoner.

The Republic ends with the Myth of Er, according to which the souls of tyrants and murderers are barred from reincarnation and condemned to an eternity in the underworld.

Aristotle too suggested that there is no worse criminal than the tyrant: “Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence honour is bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant…”

In Book 2 of the Politics, Aristotle says that the Carthaginian constitution is so superior to any Greek one that the Carthaginians have never suffered a rebellion or been ruled by a tyrant.

How to protect against tyrants

So, what might the ancient philosophers have to say about today’s democracies?

First, we need to ensure that a life spent in politics remains an attractive prospect, or at the very least a tolerable one, or else sensible people will be put off from going into politics, hollowing out the center and leaving us to be governed, or misgoverned, by disturbed and power-hungry fanatics.

Second, we need to think more carefully about education, and what it means to be educated. Unless we transform ourselves by carrying out the work of the mind, we could be rich, powerful, and famous, like Nero, or Putin, and still be utterly miserable. Playing the tyrant, and taking everyone down with us, is not, as Seneca reminds us, what human beings are for.

Third, a country’s constitution or political settlement must contain sufficient safeguards to prevent or arrest the rise of a potential tyrant, or simply of a less than decent or competent leader. This is not the case in the U.S. and no longer the case in the U.K. where recent changes to how the main political parties select their leaders have enabled the rise of such improbable figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, who, as prime minister, purged his party of competent moderates and attempted to prorogue Parliament.

Since the time of Plato, humanity has made great strides in science and technology, but far less progress in politics. The world, now armed with nuclear weapons, is still crying out for fail-safe systems of government.

That, surely, is not beyond us.

Neel Burton is author of The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.