How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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79 (canvas 99)
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knives, steam shovels, locomotives, or electric cranes.
The keen-eared forest denizens live without a need for
telephones, musical instruments, or wireless. Tigers and
lions and other pure carnivora have good digestions and
need not cook their prey. Fur-bearing animals exist
comfortably without clothes. Man, generally, is the
weakest and poorest equipped animal in the scale of
living things. The period of his relative dependence on
his parents is greater than that of any other animal. His
need of self-protection by means of some communal
living is therefore greater, and with the exception of
ants and other social insects (whose problem is materially
simplified by their limited sphere of adjustment), man’s
social civilization is the most complicated and effective
compensation that is to be found in nature.
What man has accomplished as a race every individual
man and woman can do, and must do to survive. Mankind
has always lived in groups—and no individual can
isolate himself, either physically or mentally, and be
happy. There is but one limit to the compensation of the
individual, and that is that any individual compensation
for defects and inferiorities must fit into the general
pattern of human compensation. In other words
happiness is to be achieved solely in terms of socially
useful activities. Alexander the Great conquered the
world and lost his reason because his boundless ambition
led him outside the pale of socially useful striving. All
human striving, as we have seen, originates in a sense of
inferiority. The goal of all human striving is life, security,
and that sense of adequacy which we call self-esteem.
Much of the unhappiness of the human race is due to the
fact that individuals tortured with an exceptionally severe
inferiority complex attempt to break this important law
of human living, and seek for individual, anti-social,
useless compensations for their sense of inadequacy.
Let us examine the mechanism of useful compensations
and overcompensations, and then investigate the false
compensations we call neurosis, crime, and insanity.