Comparing Ulrich Beck’s “Organized Irresponsibility” to Sartre’s “Bad Faith” Anonymous College

To Jean Paul Sartre, if you haven’t ended your life, you have “chosen yourself”. While being physically born was not a choice, once existing in the world, one is actively choosing to be the continual “author” (Sartre, 323). Sartre is adamant that one can avoid the reality of continuous personal responsibility by injecting meaning into human life. While attempting to include meaning in the human experience, one often chooses to perceive the world as happening to the individual rather than because of them. This can result in comfortably remaining in preexisting systems rather than realizing individual autonomy. Sartre calls this aversion of autonomy ‘bad faith’. This philosophy lends itself well to the work of Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist. Beck’s “Risk Society” theory is cited as a diagnosis for the post-modern world. Risk, defined as the anticipation of catastrophe (Beck, 1-6), is ever-increasing in our current age.

Beck makes the distinction between “pre-industrial hazards, not based on technological-economic decisions, and thus externalizable (onto nature, the gods),” and “Industrial risks, products of social choice, which must be weighed against opportunities and acknowledged, dealt with or simply foisted on individuals”...