How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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to the tasks and problems of life is parallel to and
coincident with the dynamic drift of the personality.
It stands to reason that we can understand something of
an individual’s goal in life if we can discover his psychic
plan of campaign, his vital training-formula, that is, his
underlying life-philosophy.
Let us examine the cardinal compass points of human
conduct as if we were navigators mapping a new world.
The lode-star is the good life ; the best course, the
course of constructive altruism. The cardinal points are
power, crime, social irresponsibility, insanity, neurosis,
pleasure, self-complacency, and the good life.
The goals of personal power and egoistic ambition are
served by a philosophy of individualistic opportunism.
Seize the day. Get what you can out of life while you
can. The end justifies the means. The ambitious egoist
does not openly war against society, but he exploits it to
his own end. Many of our most “ successful ” men and
women owe their “ success ” to their ruthless personal
ambitions and the indefatigable cult of their individual
ego. Money, prestige, possessions, are the chief symbols
of power in our civilization.
Crime, one of the major problems of modern times, is
not so much an end result of human conduct as it is the
expression of an underlying philosophic attitude toward
life. We can understand the criminal better when we
remember that he is an individual who has never been
adequately initiated into the fellowship of human beings.
His philosophy might be formulated as a belligerent
misanthropy. The criminal believes that every man
within the social scheme is his natural enemy, and he
trains himself to continue his depredations against society
because he believes that his initiation into human society
is impossible. He seeks to inflate his ego at the expense
of those who are “ in ”, and at the cost of those who
“ have ”,
Beyond crime, but still on the borderland between
unsocial optimism and unsocial pessimism, we find the
goals of passive resistance to life which lead men and