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Week 4 - Bad Faith Detection - Dan Travis - Training to Be Dangerous
The Doctrine
The Manufactured Constraint
Bad faith, in the Sartrean sense, is not lying. It is something more insidious and more common. It is the active project of convincing yourself that you have no choice — in order to avoid confronting the freedom and moral responsibility that choice entails.
The person operating in bad faith is not deceiving you. They are deceiving themselves. They genuinely experience their constraint as real. The bureaucrat who says the rules do not permit it. The colleague who says their hands are tied. The institution that says this is simply how things work. Each of them has constructed a version of reality in which their agency has been removed — and they live inside that construction as though it were fact.
Bad faith is unstable when confronted by someone who is genuinely operating as a sovereign being. You cannot maintain the fiction of having no choice in front of someone who clearly does.
This is why bad faith detection is so powerful as a practical tool. You do not need to argue with the person. You do not need to expose them or call them out. You simply need to see it for what it is — a language game, a performance of constraint — and respond to the actual situation rather than the fiction being presented.
Bad faith operates in two domains that require slightly different detection strategies:
Institutional bad faith is when organisations use procedural language to avoid accountability. The rules say. Policy requires. This is not something we can change. These formulations are almost always bad faith. Institutions have more discretion than they claim. The question is always whether the claimed constraint is genuine or manufactured.
Interpersonal bad faith is when individuals use circumstance, other people, or external forces to avoid owning their choices. I had no option. You left me no choice. Anyone would have done the same. These formulations deny the freedom that was actually present and exercised. The person chose. They are simply refusing to acknowledge the choice.
The six signals of bad faith are worth learning precisely, because each one sounds reasonable on the surface:
1
The Passive Construction
Mistakes were made. It has been decided. This is how things are done. The removal of the subject from the sentence is the removal of the agent from the action. Someone decided. Someone made the mistake. Bad faith hides in the passive voice.
2
The Appeal to Rules
The rules do not permit. Policy requires. I am just following procedure. Rules are interpreted and applied by people with discretion. The appeal to rules as though they were natural forces rather than human decisions is almost always bad faith.
3
The Absent Authority
I would help but my manager. The committee has decided. Head office requires. The authority that cannot be questioned or accessed is often fictional or exaggerated. Real authority can be identified, contacted, and engaged.
4
The Symmetry Claim
Anyone in my position would have done the same. This is what everyone does. There was no alternative. The symmetry claim erases individual choice by appealing to an imaginary universal actor. It is never true. Choices were made.
5
The Emotional Override
I was upset. You made me angry. I could not help it. Emotion presented as causation rather than context. Feelings inform choices. They do not make them. The person who was upset still chose their response.
6
The Process Defence
We followed the correct procedure. Everything was done properly. The process was adhered to. Process compliance as a substitute for outcome accountability. The process produced a bad result. The process defence says this is irrelevant.
Once you can see these six signals clearly they become impossible to unsee. Every conversation, every institutional interaction, every piece of correspondence begins to reveal its structure. This is not cynicism. It is accuracy. Most of what passes for constraint in human affairs is manufactured. The dangerous person sees this and responds accordingly.
The Exercise
The Bad Faith Audit
Allow 45-60 minutes - look at real situations, not hypothetical ones
This week you are looking at your actual life — the institutions, relationships, and situations currently in play — and identifying where bad faith is operating. Start with the institutional. Move to the interpersonal. Then look inward.
Exercise 01
Identify one institution currently in your life that is claiming a constraint it may not actually have. What is the claimed constraint? Which of the six signals is it using? What would you ask if you assumed the constraint was manufactured?
Think about employers, councils, landlords, banks, professional bodies, healthcare systems. Any institution that has told you something is not possible, not permitted, or not how things work.
Exercise 02
Identify one person in your life who regularly presents their choices as constraints. What is the specific language they use? Which signal does it most closely match? What is the choice they are refusing to acknowledge?
This is not about judging them. It is about seeing the structure clearly so you can respond to the actual situation rather than the presented one.
Exercise 03
Now look at yourself. Where in your own life are you currently operating in bad faith — presenting a choice as a constraint, a decision as an inevitability, a preference as a requirement?
This is the hardest exercise in the programme so far. Bad faith is invisible from the inside. You will need to use the discomfort tolerance from Week 3 to stay with this question long enough for an honest answer to emerge.
Exercise 04
Think of a recent situation where you accepted someone's bad faith claim at face value — where you believed the constraint was real and adjusted your behaviour accordingly. What would you have done differently if you had seen it as manufactured?
This is not about regret. It is about calibrating. The gap between what you did and what you would have done differently is the measure of what bad faith detection is worth to you.
Exercise 05
Write one precise question you could ask the institution or person from Exercise 01 or 02 that would require them to either validate or abandon the bad faith claim. The question should be specific, unemotional, and impossible to deflect with another bad faith formulation.
The best bad faith detection questions ask for specificity: Who exactly decided this? What is the specific rule and where is it written? What would need to be true for an exception to be made? Vague claims cannot survive precise questions.