achieving efficacy, he surrenders the possibility of achieving full self-esteem.
Every child realizes that there are things he cannot expect to know until he grows older; that is not his problem. The
problem lies in the things he feels he will never know, yet needs to know if he is to function successfully. This
makes him regard himself, in effect, as an outcast in that foreign land: reality.
A child who clings tenaciously to the will to understand may suffer enormously in his early years, if he is caught in
an irrational environment—but he will survive psychologically; he will continue struggling to find his way to the
rational view of life that should have been exemplified by his elders, but wasn't; he will doubtless feel alienated
from many of the people around him—and legitimately so; but he will not feel alienated from reality. He will not
feel that it is he who is incompetent to live.
There are other ways in which a young person can resign himself to the unknowable, and thus do harm to his self-
esteem. For instance, in his school years, a student may encounter certain subjects with which he has great
difficulty. The cause may be that he is not really interested in the subjects, sees no reason to learn them, is poorly
taught, or experiences some form of mental block in those areas; perhaps the cause is simply that he has not applied
himself. But a young person is in danger psychologically if he concludes, in effect, that the trouble is ''just me—I
can't understand certain things—that's my nature."
He is not in danger if he identifies the causes of his difficulty; he may or may not choose to overcome them,
depending on other factors in his personal context. But he subverts his cognitive self-confidence if he merely
resigns himself to the notion that some aspects of reality are incomprehensibly closed to him. Once this premise is
established, it spreads very easily, extending to more and more issues and problems.
Man controls his mind's activity and growth by the goals he sets—in effect, by the assignments he gives to his
consciousness. If he holds to the will to understand, if he regards cognitive efficacy as an absolute, not to be
surrendered or relinquished, he thereby activates a process of growth and development which continually raises his
mind's power. If he abandons the will to understand, his mind reacts accordingly: it does not continue to rise to
higher levels of cognitive efficiency.