hatred. The hatred is aimed at those who invoke his fear. Resentment and hostility are his dominant emotional
traits. (These emotions, of course, usually are operative in the Conventional social metaphysician also, but they do
not play the same central role in his motivation, they are not the motor of his development and goals.)
To this type, the Conventional social metaphysician's path to pseudo-self-esteem is too frighteningly precarious; the
spectre of possible failure and defeat looms too large to be endurable. The Power-seeking social metaphysician
feels too unsure of his ability to gain the love and approval he desires; his sense of inferiority is overwhelming. And
the humiliation of his dependence—of his unrequited dependence, so to speak—infuriates him. He longs for an
escape from the uncertainty of "free market" social metaphysical competition, where he must win men's voluntary
esteem. He wants to deceive, to manipulate, to coerce the minds of others; to leave them no choice in the matter. He
wants to reach a position where he can command respect, obedience, love.
As an example, consider King Frederick William of Prussia, who would beat his subjects while shouting at them:
'You must not fear me, you must love me!"
This is the psychology of any dictator from Hitler to Stalin to Khrushchev to Castro to Mao. This is the man whose
formula is: "If you can't join them, lick them."
The hatred that such men feel toward other human beings extends ultimately to reality as such, to a universe which
does not allow them to have their irrationality and their self-esteem too, a universe which inexorably links
irrationality to pain and guilt. To defeat the reality they have never chosen to grasp, to defy reason and logic, to
succeed at the irrational, to get away with it—which means: to make their will omnipotent—becomes a burning
lust, a lust to experience the only sort of "efficacy" they can project. And since, for social metaphysicians, reality
means other people, the goal of their existence becomes to impose their will on others, to compel others to provide
them with a universe in which the irrational will work.
The extent of such men's alienation from reality, the extent to which objective facts have no status in their
consciousness, may be observed in the following spectacle: a brute standing on the bal-