How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

women to choose the professions of tramping, prostitu¬ tion, racketeering, drug peddling, the employment of child labour and similar forms of human enslavement. The pimp, the profiteer, the gambler), and others of this sort need a philosophy of irresponsible misanthropy to maintain them in their chosen path. Only an individual who doubts the value of human life would exploit his fellow beings. It requires considerable self-justification to continue in the profession of a pimp or a profiteer. Naturally the training formulas of the aberrant forms of human conduct are stricter and less elastic than other philosophic guiding principles, because the irresponsible misanthrope is constantly in conflict with social tendencies in human life, and must fortify himself by rigorous unconscious training. An increase in the factor of irresponsibility together with an increase in pessimism brings us close to the negation of life itself. In this sector, the goals are self- destruction, either by physical means, as in suicide, or by psychological means, as in insanity. At the criminal end of this quadrant we have paranoia, in which the individual is haunted by delusions of persecution. In paranoia the responsibility is not only renounced but is actually projected on to the persons of imaginary persecutors. The paranoiac is nearly always a potential criminal, and frequently is guilty of homicidal attacks on those he considers responsible for his own shortcomings. By gradual steps we enter the terrain of the manic-depressive psychoses, in which there are vacillating moods of exuberance and depression, with parallel vacillation in pessimism and irresponsibility, to end in the melancholias and in dementia praecox. In dementia praecox social responsibility is at its lowest ebb, pessimism at its most intense pitch, subjectivity elevated to a primum mobile of life. Suicide is frequent in the manic-depressive states, in melancholia, and in dementia praecox. The under¬ lying philosophy is one of irresponsible and subjective pessimism, accompanied by complete and active renun¬ ciation and negation of life.