How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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The image contains the following text:
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