chaos, the sense of being out of control and unable to assimilate the data entering his consciousness. To experience
a state of efficacy is to experience it as a value; to experience a state of inefficacy is to experience it as a disvalue.
The biological basis of this fact is the relationship of efficacy to survival.
The value of a sense of efficacy as such, like the value of pleasure as such, is introspectively experienced by man
as a primary. One does not ask a man: "Why do you prefer pleasure to pain?" Nor does one ask him: "Why do you
prefer a state of control to a state of helplessness?" It is through these two sets of experiences that man first
acquires preferences, i.e., values.
A man may choose, as a consequence of his errors and/or evasions, to pursue pleasure by means of values that in
fact can result only in pain; and he can pursue a sense of efficacy by means of values that can only render him
impotent. But the value of pleasure and the disvalue of pain, as well as the value of efficacy and the disvalue of
helplessness, remain the psychological base of the phenomenon of valuation.
A man's values are the product of the thinking he has done or has failed to do. Values can be a manifestation of
rationality and mental health or of irrationality and neurosis. They can be an expression of psychological maturity
or of arrested development. They can grow out of self-confidence and benevolence or out of self-doubt and fear.
They can be motivated by the desire to achieve happiness or by the desire to minimize pain. They can be born out
of the desire to use one's mind or the desire to escape it. They can be acquired independently and by deliberation or
they can be uncritically absorbed from other men by, in effect, a process of osmosis. They can be held consciously
and explicitly or subconsciously and implicitly. They can be consistent or they can be contradictory. They can
further a man's life or they can endanger it. These are the alternatives possible to a being of volitional
consciousness.
There is no way for man to regress to the state of an animal, no stereotyped, biologically prescribed pattern of
behavior he can follow blindly, no "instincts" to whose control he can surrender his existence. If he defaults on the
responsibility of reason, if he rebels against the necessity of thought—the distortions, the perversions, the
corruption that become his values are still a twisted expression