entailed by possible errors, and/or by passing to others the responsibility he dreads, living off their thoughts, their
judgments, their values.
It is a fact of reality that success is not automatically guaranteed to a man, not only in the pursuit of knowledge, but
in the pursuit of any value. A young person comes to realize, implicitly or explicitly, that life involves a process of
struggle, and struggle entails the possibility of failure and defeat. He may respond assertively and eagerly to the
challenges of existence. Or he may tend to withdraw from them, regarding the necessity of struggle and the
uncertainty of success as, in effect, a metaphysical tragedy.
It is a fact of reality that man must live long-range, that he must project his goals into the future and work to
achieve them, and that this demands of him the ability and willingness, when and if necessary, to defer immediate
pleasures and to endure unavoidable frustrations. A person may accept this fact realistically and unself-pityingly,
preserving his ambition for values. Or he may rebel against this fact, stamping his foot at reality, in effect, and
seeking only the sort of values that can be attained easily and swiftly, in resentment against a universe that does not
grant omnipotence to his desires.
It is a fact of reality that, in the course of his life, a human being will inevitably experience some degree of
suffering; the degree may be great or small, depending on many factors; what is not inevitable, however, is the
status that he will ascribe to his suffering, i.e., the significance he will give it in his life and in his view of existence.
A person may preserve an unclouded sense of the value of existence, no matter what adversity or suffering he
encounters; he may preserve the conviction that happiness and success are the normal and natural, and that pain,
defeat, disappointment are the abnormal and accidental, the metaphysically unimportant—just as we rationally
view health, not disease, as man's normal state. Or he may decide that suffering and defeat are the essence of
existence—that happiness and success are the temporary, abnormal, and accidental.
It is a fact of man's nature that he is a being of volitional consciousness, that he has the capacity to be rational or
irrational; every human being encounters some degree of irrationality in some of the people around him, which
causes him suffering. A