human being's conceptual maturation. The problem is far, far commoner in this realm and far less recognized.
Without ever confronting the issue in fully identified terms, the overwhelming majority of men begin retreating,
very early in life, from the challenges of proper conceptual growth—and they die, never having actualized more
than a small fraction of their potential intelligence. The self-esteem deficiency expressed in the feeling of "Who am
I to know? Who am I to judge? Who am I to decide?" is the consequence of too many retreats from the
responsibility of thought and judgment in situations where the person did not have to retreat, where an effort could
and should have been made but was not, where the disvalue of fear and uncertainty took precedence over the value
of efficacy and knowledge.
Often, this policy of self-abdication is wittingly or unwittingly encouraged by parents and other elders who act in
such a way as to penalize intellectual independence and initiative on the part of the child and/or to create an
impression of such bewildering irrationality that the child gives up the effort to understand, his incentives undercut
by the feeling that human beings are hopelessly unintelligible. By the same token, parents make a positive
contribution to the child's proper development to the extent that they encourage and reward independence and self-
responsibility, and act in a consistent, predictable, intelligible manner which supports and/or implants in the child
the conviction that he is living in a knowable world.
A person's retreat from the responsibility of intellectual growth and his default on the process of proper conceptual
maturation, affects adversely both the cognitive and the evaluative sphere of his mental activity. The worst
devastation, however, is wrought in the evaluative sphere. Many persons—who are not basically anti-effort and
may actively enjoy the process of thinking—exhibit a far greater degree of independence in regard to cognitive
issues than in regard to value issues.
Normative abstractions (such as "justice," for instance) stand on a higher, more advanced level of the hierarchy of
man's concepts than do many (though obviously not all) of his cognitive abstractions; the conceptual chain that
connects normative abstractions to their base in perceptual reality is long and complex. This