home to join the anarchist movement, because his father suggested to him that perhaps it is time to start earning a
living, now that he, the son, is approaching forty.
Overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy in relation to the conventional standards of his culture, this type of person
retaliates with the formula "Whatever is, is wrong. "Overwhelmed by the belief that no one can possibly like or
accept him, he goes out of his way to insult people—lest they imagine that he desires their approval. Overwhelmed
with humiliation at feeling himself an outcast, he struggles to conquer his sense of nonidentity by maintaining that
to be an outcast is proof of one's superiority.
The fact that he evades is that there are two opposite reasons why a man may be "outside" of society: because his
standards are higher than those of society—or because they are lower; because he is above society—or below it;
because he is too good—or not good enough.
To the Independent social metaphysician, existence is a clash between his whims and the whims of others. Reason,
objectivity, reality as such have no meaning to him, no importance inside his mind.
While he may profess devotion to some particular idea or goal, or even posture as a dedicated crusader, his primary
motivation is negative rather than positive; he is against rather than for He does not originate or struggle for
positive values of his own, he merely rebels against the values and standards of others—as if the absence of passive
conformity, rather than the presence of independent, rational judgment, were the hallmark of self-reliance and
spiritual sovereignty. It is by means of this delusion that he seeks to escape the fact of his inner emptiness.
The Independent social metaphysician is the brother-in-spirit of the Power-seeker. Often, it is merely the accident
of historical circumstances that determines whether a social metaphysician becomes one type or the other. Naziism
and communism, for instance, attracted many Independent social metaphysicians who made an instantaneous and
effortless transition to the psychology of the Power-seeking type; they found a form of "togetherness" for which
they were eagerly willing to relinquish their "independence."
In a culture where rationality, productiveness, and simple sanity are dominant values, if only on a common sense
level, social metaphysicians of the Independent type tend to remain on the