to an issue of perspective: I use the term "ego" to designate man's power of awareness as he experiences it.
Any threat to a man's ego—anything which he experiences as a danger to his mind's efficacy and control—is a
potential source of pathological anxiety. The pain of this anxiety is the most terrible that man can know—because
the value at stake is, necessarily, the most crucial of all his values.
As a being of volitional consciousness, man is capable of undercutting and betraying his basic means of survival,
his mind. He can subvert the clarity and integrity of his own mental processes by evasion, repression,
rationalization, etc.—thus alienating himself from reality, and condemning himself to a state where to be is to be in
mortal danger.
Now let us consider the means by which a man can sabotage the perceiving-integrating function of his
consciousness, and bring himself to a state of pathological anxiety.
In order to deal with existence successfully, to achieve the values and goals his life and well-being require, man
needs to strive for an unobstructed cognitive contact with reality. This means that he must maintain a full mental
focus, must seek the clearest possible awareness with regard to his actions and concerns and everything which
bears upon them.
If a man defaults on the responsibility of this task, the consequences are not merely the failures and defeats he
suffers existentially: the deadlier penalty is the consequence for his ego, for his sense of himself. He is sentenced to
the feeling that his mind is not a reliable instrument. Whatever a man may have the power to fake, he has no way to
fake an efficacy his ego does not possess; if his mind is out of control, it is out of control; no rationalizations, no
denials, can wipe this fact out of existence—or extinguish its psychological consequence: self-distrust.
If, motivated by lethargy or fear, a man refuses to give thought to issues which he knows (clearly or dimly) require
his attention, he may evade the fact of his evasion, but the contradiction between his knowledge and his
performance is a fact that cannot be escaped; the fact does not vanish; it is registered in his subconscious—along
with the knowledge that the evaded issues have not vanished, either. The result is self-distrust.
If a man adopts a policy of throwing his mind out of focus, and retreating into the comfort of autistic dreams when
confronted by