on the responsibility of forming his convictions consciously and of constantly checking them against the facts of
reality.
A third child, in the same circumstances, may decide that his parents are wrong, that they are unjust and unfair, or
at least that they do not act intelligibly, and that he must not act as they do; he may suffer at home, but keep looking
for evidence of better human behavior, among neighbors or in books and movies, refusing to resign himself to the
irrational and the incomprehensible as inevitable. Such a child will draw an enormous advantage out of his
misfortune, which he will not realize until many years later: he will have laid the foundation of a profound self-
confidence.
If an adolescent grows up in a neighborhood where crime flourishes and is cynically accepted as the normal, he
can, abdicating the independence of his judgment, allow his character to be shaped in the image of the prevailing
values, and become a criminal himself; or, choosing to think, he can perceive the irrationality and humiliating self-
degradation of those who accept a criminal's mode of existence, and fight to achieve a better way of life for himself.
If a man is pounded from childhood with the doctrine of Original Sin, if he is taught that he is corrupt by nature and
must spend his life in penance, if he is taught that this earth is a place of misery, frustration, and calamity, if he is
taught that the pursuit of enjoyment is evil—he does not have to believe it: he is free to think, to question, and to
judge the nature of a moral code that damns man and damns existence and places its standard of the good outside of
both.
Of any value offered to him as the right, and any assertion offered to him as the true, a man is free to ask: Why?
That "Why?" is the threshold that the beliefs of others cannot cross without his consent.
It is conceivable, of course, that a young child could be subjected, from the first months and years of his life, to
such extraordinarily vicious irrationality—such bewildering, contradictory, and terrifying behavior on the part of
his parents—that it would be impossible for him to develop normally, because of the limited evidence available to
him; it might be impossible for him to establish any firm base of knowledge on which to build. It is conceivable
that a child could be paralyzed psychologically—or severely retarded