sacrifice his reason to his desires. In this issue, man is inviolately a self-regulator. The social environment can
provide him with incentives for good or for evil, but—to repeat—an incentive is not a necessitating cause.
The environment consists only of facts; the meaning of those facts—the conclusions and convictions to be drawn
from them—can be identified only by a man's mind. A man's character, the degree of his rationality, independence,
honesty, is determined, not by the things he perceives, but by the thinking he does or fails to do about them.
At any step of the way, a man can make honest mistakes of knowledge or judgment; he is not infallible; he may
identify incorrectly the meaning or the significance of the events he observes. His power of volition does not
guarantee him protection against errors; but it does guarantee that he need not be left helplessly at the mercy of his
errors for the rest of his life: he is able to leave his mind open to new evidence that can inform him that his
conclusions are wrong and must be revised.
If, for instance, a child is brought up by irrational parents who give him a bewildering, frightening, and
contradictory impression of reality, he may decide that all human beings by their nature are incomprehensible and
dangerous to him; and, if he arrests his thinking at this point, if, in later years, he never attempts to question or
overcome his chronic feeling of terror and helplessness, he can spend the rest of his life in a state of embittered
paralysis. But such does not have to be his fate: if he continues to struggle with the problem, or, as he grows older,
if he decides to consider the new, wider evidence available to him, he can discover that he has made an
unwarranted generalization and he can reject it in favor of a fully reasoned and conscious conviction.
Another child, in the same circumstances, may draw a different conclusion: he may decide that all human beings
are unreliable and evil, and that he will beat them at their own game: he will act as ruthlessly and dishonestly as
possible, to hurt them before they hurt him. Again, he can revise this conclusion later in the light of wider evidence,
if he chooses to think about it. The facts of reality available to him will give him many opportunities to perceive
that he is wrong. If he doesn't choose to think, he will become a scoundrel—not because his parents were irrational,
but because he defaulted