More Travels in Hyperreality: Chapter Thirty-Nine
Tags: Writing, Hyperreality, Self Deception, Mauvaise Foi, Existentialism

Self-deception.

Jean-Paul Sartre called it bad faith, or more precisely, in the French language in which he wrote it, mauvaise foi.

Yes, I can’t avoid writing about self-deception any more.

But have I been avoiding writing about it?

In previous chapters I’ve written how sometimes I procrastinate or find excuses not to write a new chapter.

Why do I do that? Am I afraid of something?

Now that I look the problem squarely in the face, I am afraid of something. I am afraid that I am deceiving myself.

I am afraid of self-deception. I am afraid of mauvaise foi.

I am afraid of writing something which nobody will read. But I am equally afraid of writing something only to attract readers, something that I really don’t want to write about.

I am afraid that what I am writing is a fool’s errand, with the fool being me; that it is a total waste of time; that I should be doing something else, something better, or that I should face that fact that taking this story seriously, this story which I call More Travels in Hyperreality, is absurd, and whether I write it or not is of no consequence.

So, how did I arrive at this question that I am asking myself, about self-deception, about mauvaise foi?

I’ve been paying more attention to that whole “Existentialism” business. I put the word in quotes because existentialism is not as easy to pin down as some other things.

Take for example, my keyboard. It’s a real thing. (There’s that word, real again, as in hyperreality and also as in unreal.)

But my keyboard is real. I’m typing this on the keys of my keyboard. The words and sentences I type go onto the screen of my iPad, and pretty soon I will be uploading them to Medium, as clickbait for some potential readers, real or imaginary readers.

So it’s not hard to grasp the meaning of keyboard and the meaning of my keyboard. But what is the meaning of Existentialism?

I have my own magic formula to explain it: A declaration followed by a question.

I exist. So what?

But that’s a magic formula. It’s my own private (formerly private, because I’ve been sharing it online) magic formula to convince myself that I understand what Existentialism is.

The declaration, I exist, is a simple statement of fact. A reader of my story might quibble wondering if the real me is the same person I declare to be the real me. Fair enough. But a reader of this story has to know that story has an author, because without one, the story would not exist. Therefore, the reader has to know that an author exists. The reader has to know that both the story and the author are real. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the story is true, but to be read, it has to exist.

Then we get to the So what? question part of my magic formula. That two-word question raises the issue of the meaning of my existence. Is my existence meaningless or absurd? Or, as I would like to believe, does my existence have real meaning? Real meaning.

Yes, a keyboard can be real, but can meaning be real? That’s the next thing that the So what? question implies.

Can meaning be real, or can my belief (hope?) that the meaning of my existence is real be a form of self-deception?

So, there we are, in the belly of the beast.

What beast is that?

Existentialism.

So now I am faced with a choice: keep writing or stop right here.

Dear Reader, my fictional muse, wants me to keep writing. That’s her job. She’s a muse, after all.

I, for my part, have already made a decision. I never stop writing before I finish a chapter of this story, which I always publish to Medium.

But I am free to stop writing. I could stop writing at the end of this sentence if I wanted to.

I could.

But I won’t. Because I have freely chosen to write this story, and I have freely chosen the way I am writing it.

I like to think that both of those choices are not mauvaise foi, or self-deception.

So yes, if there are any real readers of this chapter right now, if you guess that I have dipped my toe into the icy waters of Existentialism, you are right. I have.

When I started writing this story, I had no intention of even taking a look at Existentialism, or at Jean-Paul Sartre, or at Sartre’s main squeeze Simone de Beauvoir. But that’s how the story wrote itself.

Yes, the story wrote itself. I am just the guy tapping away on my keyboard, the guy navigating the Medium software, which is not particularly hard to navigate, although I still don’t understand how their stats tell me I have one or more readers with zero reading time.

I made myself a note after writing my last chapter: “The more I learn about Existentialism, the less I know about it.” But that’s not true. It might as well be a lie. The more I learn about Existentialism the more I know about the fact that it’s a hard butterfly to pin to the board. Be that as it may, I still learn something about Existentialism, and there’s a lot to learn.

I did it. I ordered Sartre’s magnum opus (that’s “big book” in Latin), and I started reading it. More precisely, I tried to start reading it. I actually got through a few pages, or at least paragraphs. The name of his magnum opus, by the way, is Being and Nothingness.

The pipe-smoking French dude with the lazy eye was not deliberately making his book too hard to read for the rest of us peasants, I decided. He was writing what had to be written. He was presenting evidence that his Existentialist ideas were valid.

Okay, I’ve joined the cheerleader squad. I raise my imaginary Pom Pom and cheer for Jean-Paul Sartre. (By the way, he wrote a book about imagination too. Before he wrote his magnum opus. Also a hard book to read, of course.)

So back to the bad faith thing, the self-deception, the mauvaise foi. Back to the question: am I deceiving myself writing this story?

I put my Pom Pom down so both hands are free to type on my keyboard: