An irrational morality, a morality set in opposition to man's nature, to the facts of reality and to the requirements of
man's survival, necessarily forces men to accept the belief that there is an inevitable clash between the moral and
the practical—that they must choose either to be virtuous or to be happy, to be idealistic or to be successful, but
they cannot be both. This view establishes a disastrous conflict on the deepest level of man's being, a lethal
dichotomy that tears man apart; it forces him to choose between making himself able to live and making himself
worthy of living. Yet self-esteem and mental health require that he achieve both.
If man holds life as the good, if he judges his values by the standard of that which is proper to the existence of a
rational being, then there is no clash between the requirements of survival and of morality—no clash between
making himself able to live and making himself worthy of living; he achieves the second by achieving the first. But
there is a clash, if man holds the renunciation of this earth as the good, the renunciation of life, of mind, of
happiness, of self. Under an anti-life morality, man makes himself worthy of living to the extent that he makes
himself unable to live—and to the extent that he makes himself able to live, he makes himself unworthy of living.
The answer given by many defenders of traditional morality is: "Oh, but people don't have to go to extremes!"—
meaning: "We don't expect people to be fully moral. We expect them to smuggle some self-interest into their lives.
We recognize that people have to live, after all."
The defense, then, of this code of morality is that few people will be suicidal enough to attempt to practice it
consistently. Hypocrisy is to be man's protector against his professed moral convictions. What does that do to his
self-esteem?
And what of the victims who are insufficiently hypocritical?
What of the child who withdraws in terror into a private universe because he cannot cope with the ravings of
parents who tell him that he is guilty by nature, that his body is evil, that thinking is sinful, that question -asking is
blasphemous, that doubting is depravity, and that he must obey the orders of a supernatural ghost because if he
doesn't, he will burn forever in hell?