beyond wishful thinking 25quence of the particularity of the course of life is to open a rift between
who we ultimately are and know ourselves to be and how we must live.
Th e individual knows himself darkly to be more, much more than his
outward existence reveals. Instructed by the world religions and, today,
by the demo cratic and romantic creeds, he may even feel that he is en-
titled to scale the heights of experience and vision because he has un-
plumbed depths. Th at, however, which he knows himself ultimately to
be he is unable to express in a course of action in the world. Th e result
is that existence becomes an ordeal of self- distortion and self- suppression.
It is not the tragedy of Hamlet alone; it is every man’s pain.
He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older,
and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been
forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent sur-
renders, of half- term solutions, and of diminished consciousness be-
gins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidifi ed
version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many
times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if
he were able fully to recognize the value of life. Th is third encounter
with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by
installments.It is crucial to a moral and po liti cal vision, and therefore as well as to
any religion, that it mark in the right place the division between the
inalterable circumstances of existence and the alterable arrangements
of society. To represent fl awed and revisable ways of or ga niz ing social
life as inescapable is the characteristic form of superstition about soci-
ety and history: the illusion of false necessity. Th e consequence of such
illusion is to help entrench a par tic u lar ordering of society against chal-
lenge and transformation. It is to leave our ideals and interests hostage
to the institutions and practices that represent them at a par tic u lar
moment, and thus as well to inhibit our eff orts to reconsider their mean-
ing. A contemporary example of such institutional fetishism is the un-
warranted identifi cation of the abstract ideas of a market economy or
of representative democracy with a par tic u lar, path- dependent way of
or ga niz ing markets and democracies.
To deny the inescapable features of existence— death, groundless-
ness, and insatiability— is to commit no less grievous an insult against