The Dehumanization of the Self

Politics, Individualism, Group-Think, and Why The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre is More Relevant
Today Than Ever Before
by Joe Duncan

Internet groups, news feeds, the neverending stream of dogmatic and often-frenzied minutiae,
Republicans here, Democrats there, Christians protesting, Anti-Vaxxers and Flat-Earthers “fighting for
their rights,” radically violent movements promising a way out, and more, the contemporary world is
largely one massive circus of various groups, all vying for a piece of the attention-pie, staking their claims
as being right, refusing to listen to anyone else, all while dehumanizing themselves and others in the
process — everyone is screaming, no one is listening, and no one wants to listen. The individual is
drowned out by the chorus of voices which are the various groups protesting indignation that they see as
true injustice.

Many people simply feel out-of-place, they feel like they don’t belong in a world of passionate rabble-
rousers banding together in the collective herds to spew slogans and nasty sentiments at others, purely
laced with an inflammatory intent, an intent to degrade and hurt.
Because of this, the existentialist work of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre couldn’t be more relevant than it is
today, and his description — not preaching — of radical individualism is a breath of fresh air amidst an
increasingly group-think climate. Sigmund Freud, a contemporary of Sartre’s early years, also had a lot to
say about group-think and the role of the individual in groups, and how individuals differ in isolation and
as a part of a group.

The trade-off is simple, and vaguely goes like this, as so says the group to the individual “Give us your
thoughts, your individuality, your whole self, and we’ll give you security in numbers, soothing those
emotions of isolation and fear.”

Do you feel like the pressures of group-think are getting us nowhere and leaving reasonable, sensible
people behind? You’re not alone, though it may feel like it, because that is the nature of the individual,
and exactly why people trade their individuality for subscription to a group — but is it worth it?

Group-Think and the Individual

“The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the following,” says Le Bon as
quoted directly by Sigmund Freud in his Group-Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:

“Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their
occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group
puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner
quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of
isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being or do not transform
themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a
provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the
cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very
different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.
Much of the psychological work by Sigmund Freud has stood the test of time in describing “group-think”
and “herd mentality” as it happens, as Freud worked to uncover the deeper motives behind our
willingness to completely remove any and all individual thinking in exchange for the security of the
group, no matter how tragic.
Group-Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego is a highly recommended read if you find yourself trying
to figure out the plight of the individual in an increasingly technological age, one which has been shown
to increase human tribalism and dehumanization.

Deindividualization is submitting ourselves to the group. Dehumanization is refusing to acknowledge

another individual’s humanity, reducing them to whichever convenient group we assign them. These are
serious problems in today’s world and are being expanded by our social technologies, not even trying to
be alarmist, here, but that seems to be the reality, that our technologies encourage group-think and
diminish both our individuality and humanity.

Continuing, the work goes on to tell us…

“To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries.
We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that,
having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has
deprived him of it and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful
investigations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length of time in a group in action
soon finds himself — either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the group, or from
some other cause of which we are ignorant — in a special state, which much resembles the state of
‘fascination’ in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.… The
conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are
bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.”
This realization of the fact that this process has been documented a century ago and still nothing has been
done about it is rather unsettling, and can understandably lead us to a sense of unease — are humans
destined to strip others of their humanity in such a way that causes perpetual strife and pain?

But, this isn’t all, the work of the 20th-century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre focuses on still more curious
cases where the individual doesn’t just dehumanize people who subscribe to different groups from their
own, but that they actually dehumanize themselves and render themselves an object for the use of others.
The Burden of Responsibility

Sartre discussed at length the Burden of Responsibility, painting a picture of our existence as an
individual being one fraught with crippling self-doubt, the painful, torturous slow agony of realizing that
we’re constantly responsible for the freedom we’ve been endowed with as a part of our human condition.
Sartre was both the philosopher of anxiety and the philosopher of freedom and considering that freedom
and responsibility are two sides of the same coin which is choice, it’s no secret that with great freedom
also comes great fear and pressure.

The pressure of making our own choices, the courage required to constantly think for ourselves is
overwhelming, at times, and the tendency is for us people to cling to a group, a dogma, an ideology, so
that we may, even if temporarily, absolve ourselves of the responsibility of actually having to think and
take responsibility. While this philosophy may sound somewhat dismal, it’s quite accurate in its
description of the human existence.

There is a built-in incentive to join a group and stop thinking, and that built-in incentive is that it, at least
perceptively, absolves us of our perceived responsibilities that come along with our individual thoughts
and actions.

Psychologists later termed this process deindividualization, scarily proclaiming, as an example, that a riot
has the potential to make otherwise non-violent people get swept away in the flood of violence and
become violent.
Bad Faith

Sartre proposed an existentialist approach to psychology, something that merely lost in the vast
competition for popularity, but that doesn’t mean that the work of Sartre’s actual psychology doesn’t have
value — it just means it emerged at a time when various different approaches to human psychology were
vying for attention on the world stage.

We must be authentic, first and foremost, and all of our personal problems, no matter what we achieve, no
matter what we attain, no matter where we go or who we go with, will inevitably remain — it’s better to
be hated for who we are than loved for who we are not, a notion we all deeply resonate with because an
inauthentic love, just like an inauthentic happiness, is so disingenuous, that it’s hardly desirable. Safe to
say, the trade-off of our individualism for the security of the group is one facet of this concept, we deeply
know it’s inauthentic, which may possibly serve to effectively describe the reason for the aggression of
most groups.

When our very identity is a lie that identity will never bring us an authentic happiness or purpose, but
merely a sense of smug pride which is inflated and empty.
Bad faith is a concept that’s wider than things like hypocrisy or double-standards, bad faith is the process
of lying to one’s self about the nature of things, of life, of responsibility, and so on. While bad faith has
been around since the dawn of philosophy itself, Jean-Paul Sartre modernized it to mean self-deception in
front of the pressures of life, when we actually dehumanize ourselves and become merely an object
incapable of decision making. This is precisely dishonest because, whether we thrust our decision-making
responsibilities onto a group or ideology, we nonetheless are making a decision to do so, so the only thing
we’re absolving ourselves of is the perception of the need to make a choice, not the actual need to make a
choice.

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s contemporary and life-partner said that bad faith takes place in women
often as their narcissistic objectification of themselves, by turning themselves into an object to be desired
rather than allowing themselves to be the complete thinking, feeling human beings that is the real nature
of their human condition. Together, Sartre and Beauvoir spelled out a roadmap for us to follow in
becoming true, thinking individuals.

Flawed, naked in the face of a hostile world, beautifully dirty and corrupted, but very wonderfully human
— this is our condition and we need to embrace it, stamping out any notions of purity in front of others,
preferring the purity of ourselves rather than purity of our use as objects for others.

The Case For Freedom

The year was 1946 when Jean-Paul Sartre would give a speech that would be later published into a work
called Existentialism is Humanism, in which he made the case for radical freedom, declaring, once and
for all, that freedom, as manifested by free actions, had no other aim than being an end-in-itself.

Quietism is the attitude of people who say, ‘let others do what I cannot do.’ The doctrine I am presenting
before you is precisely the opposite of this since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes
further, indeed, and adds, ‘Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes
himself, he is, therefore, nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’
We absolutely must, according to Sartre, subscribe to our intuition and the inner notion of what we are,
refusing to be swayed along the way by ideologies and movements which disagree with our authentic
selves.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be a constituent of a concerted effort, like an anti-Nazi movement or
pro-feminist movement, as Sartre himself, along with Simone de Beauvoir, worked tirelessly as
individuals to contribute to concerted lines of thinking.

It’s that we must not trade our authenticity by becoming engulfed in such movements, by becoming an
object of the movements, by reducing ourselves to nothing more than a role in the movement — we must
not deindividualize.

“What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute the character of the free
commitment, by which every man realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity — a commitment
always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch — and it's bearing upon the relativity
of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment”
Thus continues Sartre in that famous speech where he declared the individual the fundamental unit of
every group — it is not that the group should serve every and only individual ends, it is that the individual
should serve their own ends, and by committing themselves to concrete actions in the world, subscribe to
various lines of thinking as individuals, rather than mere objects.

Social media and the internet provides a strange platform for people to be all talk without ever stopping to
listen, and worse, taking action. What good are our opinions if they never manifest in reality through
concrete actions? They are nothing at all, says Sartre. And this is the consolation, the consolation is that
even when we are drowned out by the loud, unceasing voices of the unreasonable crowd, there is power in
our choice not to subscribe, which is an action in itself — the act of refusal and rebellion against the tide
of populism.

In the end, we haven’t traded our authenticity to become the objects that are moveable instruments of the
will of others, we’ve refused to allow ourselves the objectification of the group, and not only is this our
freedom to do so, but our obligation to ourselves and, ironically, to the groups we subscribe to and
challenge themselves.
The Power of One

The power of one will always be greater than the power of zero. Our authentic selves are more valuable
than our selves which are reduced to a mere shell, both to ourselves and others, as well as the world at
large. When we deprive ourselves of the ability of individual-level critical thinking, as thinking-things,
we’re no use to anyone, including ourselves.

The play-on-words Nietzschean maxim encapsulates this idea beautifully:

“What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers?
Seek zeros!”
No matter how many follow a group, if they follow inauthentically, they’re value is individual
contributors are effectively reduced to zero, and Nietzsche was saying here that it’s better to keep yourself
and have no useless instruments than to have one hundred unthinking followers. Because there’s value in
authenticity that’s irreplaceable, and that value is the ability to act in congruence with our principles,
something we have none of when we allow others to do our thinking for us.

© 2019; Joe Duncan. All Rights Reserved

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