see, across the river or just a few blocks away, people who lead a totally different kind of life, and boys of his own
age who, somehow, did not become criminals; he has many means of access to a wider view of the possibilities of
life; but this does not raise in his mind the question whether a better kind of life is possible for him, it does not
prompt him to inquire or investigate—because he feels terror of the unknown. If he asks himself what it is that
terrifies him about breaking with his background, he will answer, in effect: "Aw, I don't know nobody out there and
nobody knows me. "In reason, this is not an explanation: there is nothing objectively terrifying in that statement;
but it satisfies him—because he feels an overwhelming dread of loneliness, and feelings are his only absolute, the
absolute not to be questioned.
And if, at the age of twenty, he is dragged to jail to await execution for some monstrously bloody and senselessly
wanton crime—he will scream that he could not help it and that he never had a chance. He will not scream it
because it is true. He will scream it because he feels it.
In a sense opposite to that which he intends, there is one element of truth in his scream: given his basic policy of
anti-thought, he could not help it and he never had a chance. Neither has any other human being who moves
through life on that sort of policy. But it is not true that he or any other human being could not help running from
the necessity to think, could not help riding blindly on his feelings.
On every day of this boy's life and at every crucial turning point, the possibility of thinking about his actions was
open to him. The evidence on which to base a change in his policy was available to him. He evaded it. He chose not
to think. If, at every turning point, he had thought carefully and conscientiously, and had simply reached the wrong
conclusions, he would be more justified in crying that he could not help it. But it is not helplessly bewildered,
conscientious thinkers who fill reform schools and who murder one another on street corners—through an error in
logic.
If one wishes to understand what destroyed this boy, the key lies, not in his environment, but in the fact that he let
himself be moved, guided, and motivated by his feelings, that he tried to substitute his feelings for his mind. There
was nothing to prevent him from thinking, except that he did not feel like it.