How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy by Lorenzo von Matterhorn Page A

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:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    A laser tag enthusiast
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    A magician
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    A loyal friend who would fly all the way to California just to help get Lily and Marshall back together
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    Someone who desperately wants a true friend, to the point that he despairs when Ted says he has outgrown Barney
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    In love with Robin, to the point where he cannot convince himself otherwise, no matter how hard he tries
    At times, Barney is so compelled that he throws caution to the winds and makes a choice in spite of himself. In this way, he exercises his freedom and chooses an action among all of his possible actions. He’s not doing it because he feels he needs to. He’s doing it because he wants to.
    When he realizes that he loves Robin, it shakes him to his core. It doesn’t fit with his image of himself. He’s not the kind of guy who falls in love and commits to one woman. He’s the kind of guy who sleeps around. Loving Robin is not a choice that’s usually available to him in his magically constructed world.
    When he actually chooses to pursue that love, he is acting freely. He is doing what he wants to do, despite the damage it does to the consistency of his persona.
    The same goes for when he tries to reunite Marshall and Lily. In his normal view of himself, he would never support a lasting, monogamous relationship—especially one that is about to be bound by marriage. However, when his friends were in trouble, he acted outside of his magical world of limited choices. He helped bring them back together and didn’t even take credit for his actions. Barney may be the most predictable character in the group, but when he chose these actions, I admit that I assumed wrong.
    Wait for It . . .
    It’s true that Barney is, more often than not, living in bad faith. He defines himself in a very specific way and he play-acts in ways that reinforce that definition. This makes him very predictablebecause we expect him to act in the same way that he expects himself to act. He could always act differently, but that would be difficult. He has emotional connections to the world that make it easy for him to be the way he is.
    He’s happy to wear suits, womanize, and uphold the Bro Code. That’s the way he wants to be. The way that his