How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
53/400

equally true that the mental and emotional development of the individual recapitulates the broad patterns of the adjustment which mankind has made. Every child suffers and experiences the same torturing sentiments of inadequacy that his defenceless ancestors of the stone age experienced. It follows, moreover, that the identical path of attaining security which has proved valuable in the case of the race, is also open to the individual. The individual, like the race, must cure his inferiority complex by social adjustment. The inferiority complex now unmasks itself as no more than the expression of a bad technique of life. This is a very hopeful and important consideration to any individual who feels himself perplexed and tormented by the feeling that his own life is inadequate. If the inferiority complex is no more than evidence of bad craftsmanship in the process of self-sculpture, and if, as we have said, the path towards security and happiness may be found by learning new methods and new ways of attaining social adjustment, we come to the inevitable conclusion that you need not retain your inferiority complex, no matter what its origin, if you learn a better technique of living. What the race has done to obviate its sense of in¬ adequacy, the individual can do also. In our modern life, the individual who suffers from an inferiority complex does so, not because it is difficult to effect a social adjust¬ ment, but because he has not learned the technique of adjusting himself. When you suffer from an inferiority complex, it indicates that you have based your life upon a fallacy. This fallacy, in brief, is that it is easier to win security and happiness by building walls around yourself than by building bridges to your fellow-men. It is the old problem of armaments versus allies. Any man who stops to consider the lessons of history must recognize that allies have always prevailed over the most powerful armaments. The cure of every inferiority complex there¬ fore consists simply and solely in the realization that social adjustment is not only the easiest but the best