The writings of Existentialists and certain religionists, who suggest the contrary, necessitate this emphasis. A state
of chronic dread is not man's natural condition. The fact that man is neither omniscient nor omnipotent nor
infallible nor immortal, does not constitute grounds for his ego to feel overwhelmed by a sense of inefficacy. A
rational man does not set his standard of efficacy in opposition to his own nature and to the nature of reality.
Neither is man born with any sort of Original Sin; if a man feels guilty, it is not because he is guilty by nature; sin
is not "original," it is originated. The problem of anxiety is psychological, not metaphysical.
The Nature of Anxiety Conflicts
To the extent that a person indulges in irrational mind-subverting psycho-epistemological policies, he sentences
himself to a chronic anticipation of disaster.
If he fails to do the thinking his life and concerns require, he cannot escape the awareness that the range of his
action exceeds the range of his thought, that challenges and demands will confront him to which he is inadequate;
he feels afraid because of the thinking he failed to do, and guilty because of the knowledge that he should have
done it.
If he acts contrary to his convictions, if he takes actions which he regards as wrong and/or fails to take actions
which he regards as right, he comes to experience the feeling, not merely that his actions are wrong, but that he is
wrong, wrong as a person—since a person's deepest sense of himself has its base and origin in his method of
psycho-epistemological functioning, in the processes by which his mind deals with reality.
Even if the moral precepts he accepts are mistaken or irrational, so long as they represent his actual beliefs, he
cannot act against them with psychological impunity; he will be left with the feeling that he has betrayed his own
consciousness, and thereby rendered himself unfit for reality. (This is one of the reasons why the psychological and
existential results for his life are so devastating, if he accepts a code of values that, in fact, is inimical to his nature
and needs—as we shall discuss in Chapter Twelve.)
There is another, related reason why a man who acts against his own moral convictions will suffer a sense of
impending disas-