drawing final conclusions until his mind has cleared. In this manner, he can remain in control even under acute
stress. (It is worth mentioning, in passing, that the more a man surrenders to his emotions in nonacute situations,
when he could have easily done otherwise, the more susceptible he is to becoming psychologically incapacitated
and helplessly blinded under pressure; he has no firmly established "habit" of rational self-discipline to support
him.)
An incentive is not a necessitating cause. The fact that a man has a good reason to want to think about some issue,
does not guarantee that he will do so; it does not compel him to think. And the fact that a man is afraid to think
about some issue, does not make it impossible for him to do so; it does not compel him to evade.
A man's behavior, i.e., his actions, proceed from his values and premises, which in turn proceed, in the context of
the knowledge available to him, from his thinking or non-thinking. His actions may be said to be free in that they
are under the control of a faculty which is free, i.e., which functions volitionally. This is the reason why a man is
held responsible for his actions.
As to a man's desires and emotions, a man cannot will them in or out of existence directly; but he is not compelled
to act on them if and when he considers them inappropriate. A desire or an emotion is a value-response, the
automatic product of an estimate (conscious or subconscious)—and an estimate is the product of an individual's
values and premises (conscious or subconscious), as the individual applies them to a given situation (Chapter Five).
Man can alter his desires and emotions only by revising the thinking or non-thinking that produced his values and
premises.
Volition and the Social Environment
A man's social environment can provide incentives to think or it can make the task harder—according to the degree
of human rationality or irrationality that a man encounters. But the social environment cannot determine a man's
thinking or non-thinking. It cannot force him to exert the effort and accept the responsibility of cognition and it
cannot force him to evade; it cannot force him to subordinate his desires to his reason and it cannot force him to