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Freedom, Reader, is an awful thing: so Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, Albert Camus, and dictators throughout the world continually tell us.

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If a man overcomes what he calls sinfulness by his own willpower, he increases his ego-pride, which, according to the Bible, is the very foundation of sin. Only when sin is overcome by some external force does the man realize his own insignificance, only then is pride eliminated. As long as you strive as an individual self for the good, you will either have failure – and an accompanying guilt – or pride, which is simply the basic form of evil. Guilt or pride: those are the gifts of self. The only salvation lies in having faith.

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A mental hospital is a total institution: it engulfs each patient with a consistency of rule, habit and attitude which effectively isolates him from the more unpredictable problems of life in the outside world. A patient can adjust successfully to hospital life because he can count on its limiting its horrors to certain predictable patterns. The outside world holds no such hope for him. He is thus often able to adjust to hospital life and yet be frightened footless by the thought of having to live. We have effectively prepared our patients to live adequately in the mental hospital and no place else.

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From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.