***
He feels liberated when he realizes that his horrible problems are not his to worry about any longer: they’ve been shifted to the square shoulders of the dice. He becomes ecstatic. He experiences the transfer of control from an illusory self to the dice as a conversion or as salvation. It’s something like newly born Christians giving up their souls to Christ or God, or the Zen student or Taoist surrendering to the Tao. In all these cases the ego-control game is abandoned and the student surrenders to a force which is experienced as being outside himself.

***
No, sir, I regret to say I’m serious. Every society is based upon lies. Our society is based on conflicting lies. The man who lived in a simple, stable, sinle-lie society absorbed a single-lie system into a unified self and spouted it for the rest of his life, uncontradicted by his friends and neighbors, and unaware that ninety-eight percent of his beliefs were illusions, his values artificial and arbitrary and most of his desires comically ill-aimed.

The man in our multi-lie society absorbs a chaos of conflicting lies and is reminded daily by his friends and neighbors and TV set that his beliefs are not universally held, that his values are personal and arbitrary and his desires often ill-aimed. We must realize that to ask this man to be honest and true to himself, when his contradictory selves have multiple contradictory answers to most questions, is a safe and economical method to drive him insane.