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

this man’s world ! ” and her sister who believes she “ would marry if the right man came along,” are all repeating Cain’s words in a different form. Modern problems are more complicated, perhaps, than the problems of the Biblical ancients, but the forms of escaping the responsibilities and obligations of mature life in a grown-up world are much the same to-day as they were in Eden six thousand years ago. The interesting thing about this modern plague, the neurosis, is that it is not, strictly speaking, a disease at all. The neurosis is an attitude towards life, and a technique of living, characterized by the fact that it is directed, always, at an escape from life and an evasion of life’s problems. The neurosis is always a bad technique of living, as we shall show, because its effectiveness is limited by the harsh reality of the cosmic logic that governs men and matter. The neurosis is based, like other false techniques of life, upon ignorance of the common-sense laws of human behaviour, and upon the fear born of this ignorance. But for the general ignorance of the meaning of the neurosis, it would long ago have ceased to exist. The neurosis is one of the tragic fallacies of human life ; eventually it will disappear from the earth together with the belief in magic and Santa Claus, alchemy, the geocentric universe, witchcraft, and wizardry, perpetual motion, and human infallibility, the attempt to get something for nothing, the search for the fountain of youth and the philosopher’s stone. As it is, the neurosis is the profession of uncounted thousands who seek to substitute their private logic for the inexorable logic of immemorial aeons of life and living. Its tragedy and its problem lie largely in the fact that it is a contagious disease and affects young children before they realize their danger. It is passed on from mother to children, from rulers to people, from one age to another by the written word of neurotics who wish to justify themselves not only in the present but for all time. One neurotic will infect an entire family or group with the insidious virus. One neurotic teacher can contaminate