How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy (11 page)

This goes for everyone. We are all free to choose any action that is physically possible for us in any situation. For example, when Ted met Barney in the bar, Ted could have taken any number of actions in response to Barney:

       
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Ted could have left the bar in order to avoid Barney

       
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He could have told Barney to leave

       
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He could have ignored Barney until Barney left himself, or

       
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He could have even poured a drink on Barney's suit!

The possibilities are endless. However, Ted chose to put up with Barney (despite Barney being “kind of a jackass”) and that was Ted's free choice.

There was a time when Barney was also presented with a life-changing choice. When his girlfriend left him for a suited-up businessman, he had a number of choices before him:

       
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He could have continued as he was, gone to Nicaragua, and hoped to find love again

       
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He could have broken down, depressed by the situation, and moved back in with his mom

       
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He could have fought the guy, whether he thought he could win or not

Again, the possibilities are endless. Barney was free to make a choice, and he chose to become a stereotypical, suit-wearing businessman. By becoming his enemy, he could get everything that he thought would make him happy.

The problem of self-deception arises when we start to choose actions as if they're our only options. When we deceive ourselves into thinking that there is only one possible action that we can choose, we have denied our freedom. Sartre calls this denial of our freedom “living in bad faith,” but this is essentially just a special kind of self-deception (p. 44). We're deceiving ourselves and thereby denying our true freedom.

Barney made the choice to wear a suit, work for a corporation, and try to pick up women, but none of these actions is the problem. The problem is that Barney is acting as if these are the only choices that will bring him happiness. In performing these actions continually and consistently, he is deceiving himself that he can't do otherwise.

Of Course You're Living in Bad Faith, Take a Look at Yourself, You Dumb Bro

In choosing the specific persona of a stereotypical businessman, Barney is illustrating one of Sartre's most famous examples of bad faith. In his
Essays in Existentialism
(Citadel Press, 1993), Sartre uses the example of a waiter, rather than a businessman, so consider Wendy the Waitress (p. 167).

Imagine that Wendy was not being her normal, friendly, hates-Marshall-for-making-her-carry-out-the-recycling self. Instead, imagine that Wendy is trying to walk around with perfect posture, excellent manners, and catering to her customers' every demand. This would not be Wendy acting freely; this would be Wendy play-acting and pretending to be a waitress. In other words, this would be Wendy being a waitress, not a waitress who happens to be Wendy.

The difference is subtle, but important, like the difference between encyclo-PEE-dia and encyclo-PAY-dia. On the one hand, we have the Wendy who we're familiar with from the show. Here, Wendy is being herself, but also being a waitress. She is being a waitress in a way that does not conflict with her freedom to be herself.

On the other hand, we have the Wendy from the waitress example. Here, she's play-acting and trying to be a stereotypical waitress in spite of herself. The “trying to be a waitress” is a form or self-deception because Wendy is denying herself the other options available to her. In deciding that her only options are those that make her a stereotypical waitress, she is ignoring all of the other possible actions.

It's the same with Barney trying to be a stereotypical businessman. When he decided to become like the man who stole his girlfriend, he started play-acting as a businessman. He went out, got cleaned up, and bought himself a suit. He got a job at a corporation and he detached himself from committed relationships. Barney began acting as we would expect a businessman to act, curving all of his possible actions to support his new persona.

However, not all of Barney's decisions are actions. Often, he will simply deny the reality of a situation. Take for example that time Barney simply tuned-out when the group was suffering from a breakdown of their relationship-blinders. Lily chews
food like a blender full of rocks; Robin is too liberal with the term “literal;” and Marshall sings nonsensical (yet, let's face it, really awesome and catchy) songs. When it's Barney's turn to have his flaws listed, everyone has something to contribute:

       
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He sometimes talks in a weird, high-pitched voice;

       
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He uses lame catchphrases, and

       
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He often spaces-out, ignoring what others are saying

Barney tunes back in just in time to retort, “See, you can't think of anything because I'm awesome!” If something is going to contradict part of his persona (in this case, his perfect awesomeness), then he ignores the situation entirely. To acknowledge the situation would require him to choose an action, which is the kind of freedom he is trying to deny.

Sartre's own example of this is one that Barney would love. It's an example that Barney can take to heart, or at least to bed. To explain how the denial of a situation can be a form of self-deception, Sartre uses the example of a woman who is being hit on by a man (p. 160). In this case, the woman is the one who is in bad faith, while the man is someone like Barney.

Imagine Barney trying to pick up a girl and he's following all of his rules of seduction. He's saying the girl's name a lot, subtly putting her down, and making physical contact. Now, when Barney is touching her knee, the girl notices that he is touching her knee and ignores it, while at the same time not stopping it. Here, the girl is deceiving herself because the girl is denying the true nature of the situation. In doing so, she doesn't need to make a decision about either rejecting him or accepting his advance. She is deceiving herself about her possible actions and remaining in a neutral state where she has no free choices.

Choosing not to act may seem uncommon for Barney. We've all seen his video resume. He is a man of action. We may not know what he does, but he is always doing something. However, like the girl from the example, there are times when he ignores the situation. At one time, he was at risk of being fired, but continued to act as if everything was perfectly normal. He simply chose not to acknowledge the situation. That way, he would not need to make a choice that could contradict
his persona. This denial effectively deceived him as to his possible actions.

One final example concerns a man who is trying to decide who he is, such as when Barney is grappling with his feelings of love for Robin. If he thinks that he can't be in love because he is the kind of man that has one-night stands and doesn't settle down, then he is deceiving himself based on his past. That is, he is limiting his present options based on his past decisions. He's trying to be consistent to his persona, in spite of his freedom to act however he wants.

On the other hand, if he says that he's the kind of person who does fall in love, then he is also deceiving himself. In this case, the deception is from the future, rather than the past. Barney is essentially saying, “I am now going to be the kind of guy that falls in love and will base my actions on what that kind of person would do.” This is no different from the other option. Either way he chooses, Barney is not doing what would come naturally. He is denying his own freedom to act as he pleases.

Barney desires consistency in his life, so he defines himself in a specific way and follows those guidelines. That is why he is living in bad faith, and that's why he is so predictable.

The Magician's Best Friend

It's tough to blame Barney for wanting a little consistency, especially since his real life is lacking in it. His father left him when he was a child. His first love broke his heart. Not to mention that, when he does admit that he loves someone, it always fails. Barney has not had an easy life, and yet he continues to be perfectly happy in his day-to-day life. This happiness with his current persona is the problem. Along with other emotions, it's the reason he falls so easily into self-deception.

As Barney's dad says, “a magician's best friend is a drunk audience.” Drunken people are less attentive to the trick, and therefore much easier to fool and entertain. It's the same thing with emotions and self-deception. When in an emotional state, people see the world in a way that makes it easier to act in a certain way. Barney may not be physically drunk like Beercules, but he is definitely drunk on his emotions and ready to be tricked.

In his book
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
(Routledge, 1962), Sartre defines emotions as magical transformations of the world (p. 39). He says that we use emotions to perceive the world in ways that we want it to be—ways that make the world easier for us to deal with. Emotions are not just how we react to the world; they are ways of structuring our world.

Remember the way that Marshall becomes obsessed with the “best burger”? The thought of that burger makes him so happy, while the thought of other burgers being equal to it makes him sad or angry. In feeling this way, Marshall is constructing a magical world where there is only one burger like the “best burger” and all other burgers are just poor imitations. This limits freedom because it limits options. By only allowing for the one “best burger” he eliminates the options of all other burgers.

Barney's whole world is magical like this. As a child, his mom told him that Bob Barker was his father and he was more than happy to believe it. It explained a lot. If Bob Barker was his father, then his father would always be busy with
The Price Is Right
, which would explain why he was never around. It would also give Barney an excuse to not contact him, as well as someone to look up to.

At its core, Barney's happiness was an escape from the truth, because the truth would mean that his real father was still out in the world. If Barney were to accept this, then he would need to make a choice about whether or not to find his real father.

This would be too hard to do, so Barney settled into his happiness. Using his emotions, he constructed a magical world where Bob Barker was his father and there was no confusion. Barney never needed to go searching for his real father. His happiness restricted his freedom to do so.

When he met Bob Barker, Barney had the perfect opportunity to tell him that Barney was his son. However, he chose not to. His fear that he may be wrong, and his happiness with the answer that he already had, led Barney to keep the information to himself. He preferred the magical world where he was happy, rather than the real world where he would need to make a difficult decision about finding his real father.

It's not just this decision that Barney wants to avoid. He wants to avoid almost all of them. He doesn't want to make
complicated decisions about how to dress, so he always chooses suits. Suits make him happy, everything else disgusts him, and it supports his view of himself as a businessman. The decision is easy.

He doesn't want to choose someone to be with for the rest of his life, so he just picks up women for one-night stands. The idea of having his heart broken again makes him sad and scared, so he eliminates all the possible actions that could lead to heartbreak.

Barney's world is constructed to support who he thinks he is and who others expect him to be. However, he could be otherwise. Sometimes he is.

Not the Purple Dinosaur

Barney's world doesn't need to be a magical escape from reality. He allows it to be that way. Like any other action, Sartre says that emotions can be freely chosen or denied (
Sketch
p. 40). When Barney gets mad at Ted for breaking up a catfight between Robin and Lily, it's because he thinks he should get mad about such things. He could easily choose to be happy when people break up catfights, but he doesn't. By thinking he needs to get mad at the end of a catfight, Barney has chosen this specific way to limit his own freedom.

Barney says, “When I feel sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead.” He can freely choose his emotional states, and he does, but only in ways that support his persona. If he is feeling one emotion, there's no reason that he couldn't change to feel another emotion. He just chooses not to.

Sadly, the truth is that Barney's deceiving himself more often than not. He's happy when he womanizes and sad when he breaks the Bro Code because that's the type of person he thinks he's supposed to be. He allows himself to adopt emotional states to support that version of himself—emotional states that deceive him about his true freedom.

However, the real proof of Barney's self-deception is that he's not always deceiving himself. Sometimes he acts in ways that are not consistent with his self-image. On occasion, he is a few other things that I did not mention earlier. Barney is: