any painful aspect of existence, he may gain a momentary relief, but the betrayal of his cognitive development
remains real—as sternly, as unforgivingly real as the unchanging reality beyond his closed eyelids. The result is
self-distrust.
If, under the guidance of his emotions, a man takes actions that are contrary to his convictions, contrary to that
which he believes to be right, he may disintegrate his conscious mind in order to escape the implications of his
actions and of the psycho-epistemological policy behind them—but the implications do not cease to exist and a
merciless computer within his brain sums them up. He is left with the implicit knowledge that, in the event of a
clash between his reason and his emotions, it is his reason that he will sacrifice; under pressure, it is his mind, his
conscious judgment, that becomes expendable. The result is self-distrust.
If, in order to escape emotions and desires which he experiences as threatening to his self-esteem or equilibrium, a
man resorts to repression, if he institutes mental blocks that forbid him to know the nature of his own feelings, he
does not solve his problem; he merely creates a worse one. He subverts his power of introspection and his ability to
think about his problems. And he is left with the sense that somewhere within him he harbors a dangerous enemy
whom he can neither face nor escape—an enemy whom he has sought to defeat by blinding himself.
If, by the implications of his psycho-epistemological policies, a man establishes within his consciousness the
principle that it is permissible to act with his mind unfocused, that he need not know what he is doing or why, that
the difficult need not be thought about, the painful need not be faced, the undesirable need not be acknowledged—
if the ruling principle of his mental activity is not "know the truth," but "avoid effort" and/or ''escape pain"—then
this is the secret knowledge about its method of functioning that a man's ego cannot escape; this is the root of self-
distrust, self-doubt, and guilt.
When one considers the amount of reckless irrationality that most men permit themselves and regard as normal,
one does not have to be astonished at their psychological state, or at the plague-like prevalence of "causeless" fear.
If men feel anxiously uncertain of their ability to deal with the facts of existence, they have given themselves ample
grounds for their feeling.
But pathological anxiety, it must be remembered, is pathological, i.e., is symptomatic of an abnormal and unhealthy
condition.