Imagine standing at a crossroads in your life—a career change, a relationship ending, a moral dilemma with no clean answer. The anxiety is unbearable. So you reach for something solid: a rulebook, a tradition, a leader who seems to know. You think, If I just follow the right authority, I won't have to carry this weight alone.

It's one of the most common moves in human existence. We appeal to moral codes, institutional guidelines, religious commandments, or cultural expectations not merely because we believe in them—but because we desperately want someone else to bear the burden of our choices. If the rule says so, then it's not really my decision. The responsibility shifts. Or so we tell ourselves.

But existentialist philosophy cuts through this comfort with an unsettling precision. No matter how faithfully you follow a rule, you remain the one who chose to follow it. The authority you obey is the authority you selected. And that selection—quiet, often unexamined—is an act of radical freedom you cannot delegate. Let's look at why this matters.

There is a particular relief that comes with deferring to an authority. When a soldier follows orders, when a believer obeys scripture, when an employee adheres to company policy, a subtle transaction takes place. The individual trades the anguish of decision for the comfort of compliance. The responsibility, they believe, now belongs to someone or something else.

Sartre called this move bad faith—a flight from the recognition that we are, at every moment, choosing. The person who says "I had no choice; the rules demanded it" is performing a kind of existential sleight of hand. They present themselves as an object acted upon rather than a subject who acts. The rule becomes a shield, and behind it, the choosing self hides.

But consider: a rule never applies itself. A commandment does not reach into your life and move your limbs. Between the written code and the lived action, there is always a person who interprets, who decides this rule applies here, now, in this way. Even in the most rigid systems—military hierarchies, orthodox religious communities—individuals constantly make micro-decisions about how literally to follow, when to make exceptions, and what spirit animates the letter of the law.

The authority gambit fails not because authorities are worthless, but because authority requires a human being to grant it authority. The rule doesn't eliminate your freedom. It simply gives you a story to tell yourself about why you didn't use it. And that story, however comforting, is a fiction.

Takeaway

No rule can act on your behalf. Between every commandment and every action stands a person who chose to obey—and that person is always you.

Here is the deeper knot that most people never untangle. Suppose you genuinely believe a certain moral framework is correct—say, a religious tradition or a philosophical system. You follow its precepts faithfully. Haven't you successfully transferred responsibility to that framework? Not quite. Because you still had to choose that framework in the first place.

Sartre illustrates this with a famous example. A young man during World War II comes to him for advice: should he stay with his ailing mother or join the resistance? Sartre points out that the very act of choosing which advisor to consult already reveals what answer the young man wants. If he goes to a priest, he's choosing a certain kind of guidance. If he goes to Sartre, he's choosing another. The selection of the authority is the first and most fundamental free act.

This applies universally. The person who follows Catholic doctrine chose Catholicism over Protestantism, Islam, atheism, and a thousand other possibilities. The person who lives by Kantian ethics chose Kant over Aristotle, over utilitarianism, over nihilism. Even those raised within a tradition eventually reach an age where they could question it—and their continued adherence becomes a choice, not merely an inheritance.

This is not an argument against having commitments or following traditions. It is a recognition that your commitments are yours. You cannot hide behind them as though they fell on you from the sky. You picked them up. You carry them. And at any moment, with all the anguish that implies, you could set them down.

Takeaway

Choosing which authority to follow is itself the deepest exercise of your freedom. The framework you obey is the framework you elected—and you remain responsible for that election.

If all rule-following is secretly a choice, does that mean every tradition is bad faith? Not necessarily. Existentialism is not a philosophy of permanent rebellion or solitary self-invention from nothing. The distinction lies in how you relate to the structures you inhabit.

Bad faith means pretending you had no choice. It means saying "I'm just following orders" as though your agency vanished the moment you put on the uniform. It means clinging to a moral code precisely because it spares you the vertigo of deciding for yourself. The bad faith believer does not engage with their tradition—they hide inside it.

Authentic engagement looks different. It means choosing a tradition while acknowledging that it is a choice. It means following rules while remaining awake to the fact that you are the one granting those rules their power over your life. The authentic person can say: "I follow this path because I have examined it, I find it meaningful, and I accept responsibility for living according to its demands." There is no hiding, no pretense of compulsion.

The difference is subtle but immense. Both the person in bad faith and the authentic person may follow the same rules, attend the same services, obey the same codes. But one is asleep to their freedom, and the other is fully awake—carrying the weight of their choice without flinching. Authenticity does not require abandoning all structure. It requires owning the structures you choose to live within.

Takeaway

The opposite of bad faith isn't rejecting all rules—it's following them with full awareness that you chose them, that you could choose otherwise, and that the responsibility remains entirely yours.

The desire to escape responsibility through rules is deeply human. We want the relief of being told what to do, the comfort of a world where right and wrong are handed down from above and all we must do is comply.

But existence doesn't grant us that comfort. Every rule you follow, you chose to follow. Every authority you obey, you chose to obey. The anguish of freedom persists beneath every code, every commandment, every tradition—not as a flaw, but as the fundamental condition of being a conscious, choosing creature.

This isn't a reason for despair. It's a reason for honesty. You are already responsible. You always were. The question is whether you'll face that truth or spend a lifetime constructing elaborate ways to avoid it.