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

not according to your individual caprice, but in terms of the social demands of the group in which you live. We have indicated again that there is but one solution of the individual's problems of existence, and that is the solution which conforms to the technique of living which the human race, through millions of years of trial and error, has found good. Isolation : The Basis of the Inferiority Complex It now follows conversely that any individual who does not solve the problems of existence in a socially acceptable manner is liable to the same feelings of inferiority and inadequacy that threatened the primitive caveman who, being separated from his clan fire, was exposed to the ruthless dangers of an unfriendly world. We can well imagine this isolated caveman ancestor shivering with fear in the face of the lurking dangers about him, when by accident he became detached from his fellows. We can imagine him straining every fibre of his body to return to the magic circle of flame which stood between him and death. Proof of our contention that the race has solved its problems of inadequacy by social union, and evidence that the origin of society lay in primitive man’s fear of isolation is found in the fact that every modern individual, isolated from his fellows, for one reason or another, shows the identical fear and trembling which is the inevitable accompaniment of the inferiority complex. This brings us to one of the most important axioms in our book : The inferiority complex, as it exists to-day in the individual, is an expression of his isolation from the body of mankind, either physical, mental, or emotional. The chief emotional accompaniments of the inferiority complex, fear, anxiety, hesitation, indecision, are linked together by a sense of personal inadequacy. We know that the individual in his development from a single cell to the complex billion- celled organization of the adult, recapitulates the evolutionary stages which the race has experienced as a whole. This is one of the first laws of biology. It is D