How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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61 (canvas 81)
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neurotic trick beloved by those hesitant males and over-
zealous women who really doubt their own sexual validity.
In this fashion the patriarchal code of conduct stultifies
and distorts normal human relations between the sexes,
and causes sex to become a source of profound inferiority
feelings, whose various ramifications we shall have
occasion to examine in more detail in a special section.
4. Social, Economic, and Racial Determinants
In any community which is divided into castes and
classes, whether openly, as in India, or tacitly, as in the
English-speaking countries, you are likely to become a
prey to inferiority feelings if you are unlucky enough to
be born into one of the submerged classes. It is an axiom
of democracy that all men are born free and equal, but
our prevailing social and economic prejudices very
quickly change the equality of birth into a decided
“ plus ” or “ minus ” in childhood. As in the case of
sex, class prejudices have an evil effect both on the “ ins
and the “ outs ”. If your father was a farm labourer
your chances of attaining great social significance are
very slight, and your opportunities for fulfilling your
complete humanity are likely to be very constricted. If
your ancestors came to England with the Conqueror,
and your father is a cabinet minister, you are just as^
likely to be constricted by the artificial confines of
snobbery and tradition to a very narrow sphere of activity.
History is full of the stories of poor men who have risen
to fame and of aristocrats who have become splendid
leaders of mankind, but the probability is that an
unfavourable or unusual social position will exaggerate
a normal feeling of inferiority into some form of the
inferiority complex.
In America the economic situation is even worse than
the social. In a plutocracy, the child of the slums grows
up under tremendous disadvantages. Deprivation, lack
of proper recreation, early exposure to the evils of
economic exploitation, the greater incidence of sickness