only to serve them, he must restrain them by assuring them that theirs is the right superseding all other rights. This,
he tells himself, is "hard-headed realism."
But he cannot entirely escape the disquieting awareness somewhere within him that his appeasement is not
prompted by the motives he names, that his "practicality" and "cynicism" are protective affectations masking
something worse. So he retaliates by cursing human irrationality and the malevolence of a world which demands
that he be concerned with moral issues.
To the extent that men irrationally surrender to fear, they increase the power of fear over their lives. More and more
things acquire the power to invoke fear in them. Their self-confidence diminishes and their sense of danger grows.
Social metaphysical fear is a cancer that either spreads or (if rationally resisted) contracts; but it does not stand still.
With every surrender to the consciousness of others, with every successive betrayal, the social metaphysician's
sense of alienation from reality worsens and his sense of impotence finds confirmation. The shrinking remnants of
his self-esteem are drained to appease an endless stream of blackmailers whose demands are inexhaustible—
blackmailers who are any human consciousness but his own—blackmailers who, more often than not, are as afraid
of his judgment as he is afraid of theirs, who are desperately seeking his approval, who are committing the same
form of treason and enduring the same humiliation. The grim irony is that all sides involved assure themselves that
the grotesque farce of their selfless existence is motivated by considerations of "practicality."
Social Metaphysical Types
"Social metaphysics" is a very broad classification; there are many different types of social metaphysicians. Certain
traits or symptoms, however, are common to all social metaphysicians: (a) the absence of a firm, unyielding
concept of existence, facts, reality, as apart from the judgments, beliefs, opinions, feelings of others; (b) a sense of
fundamental helplessness or impotence, a feeling of metaphysical inefficacy; (c) a profound fear of other people,
and an implicit belief that other people control that unknowable realm: reality; (d) a self-esteem—or, more
precisely, a pseudo-self-esteem—