There is a temper of mind which borrows a degree of virtue even from self-love. All freedom can do is to illuminate the possibilities that can be opened to us and toward which we can steer ourselves by making our choices real. To regard God as merely a spirit is tantamount to atheism. The grand design of the cosmos points to the existence of some vaster Person who looms out behind our God, and who stands in the same relation to him as he to us. And yet another, and another, and another. This pyramiding of deities is one of many items with enlivening the Victorian scene. All things on Earth have their price; and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honor is paved with thorns; but the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your own heart. It is the first policy in a time of difficulty or danger always to know the worst—never to hide the truth from yourself—never to persuade yourself that the evil is unreal, and that things are better than they are. There is nothing so dangerous as a question which comes by surprise on a person whose business it is to conceal truth or to defend falsehood. It is impossible to study the human frame without a little studying the human mind. As we have seen, those aspects of the mind that were programmed by the evolution for purposes of survival are especially ripe for exploitation by the various forms and mechanisms of unreality that we have identified. For instance, the TV takes advantage of the brain’s special attentiveness to recent events and particularly those which filter the visual span of the viewer with speed or heightened color. We are programmed by evolution to unreality’s special fondness for hyper activeness. However, the brain’s receptiveness to fast moving stimuli is not sufficient in itself to account for America’s special preoccupation with unreality. More than the workings of the brain alone are needed to account for the intensity with which Americans pursue unreality with a fever that approaches a national crusade. And indeed, to inveigh the phrase national crusade already implies that another part of the answer is to be found in American culture. 

Hyperactivity is not only a deeply ingrained feature of American culture by virtue of the special fortitude of those who journeyed to the new land in order to settle it—it was a dire necessity for survival—but, as a result, it has become linked with other fundamental American values and beliefs. Americans have always believed deeply in material progress. The two words material and progress are virtually inseparable. Each implies the other in the context of the American experience. The major foundation of the belief in progress: the idea that nations (like individuals) can never stand still. They must always be growing, changing, improving their material lot: life is a race to be won by the swiftest. Like the progressive faith, itself, this notion is often left implicit. Yet its impact has been incalculable. It accounts for the relentless dynamism at the heart of capitalist development, spreading an obsessive need for change throughout modern culture. And for most educated and affluent Americans, change means progress. The old nations of the Earth creep on at a snail’s pace, and many want it to thunder past with the rush express. There is a belief that those who are rich and successful are the highest types thus far produced in the evolutionary process. Poor people are considered biological misfits; hence, the sooner they disappear and leave room for those better able to take care of themselves, the better. This Erewhon philosophy holds true that is a person has made a fortune of over $2 million, they are exempt from all taxation, and are considered a work of art and too precious to be meddled with. Society is no so much a guide for making something—it is a design or pattern that can be followed to create a place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect. Thus, in Erewhon bodily illness is considered a punishable crime, whereas moral failings deserve sympathy and are given therapeutic treatment. Such progress we have learned was bought at a considerable price. To the uprooting and mass migration from farms and small country hamlets into the cities with their slums and social problems on the scales not experienced before, Americans reacted against what they experienced as the unreality of the new social order. 

Removed from nature with its natural sounds, sights, and rhythms, Americans felt a sense of uneasiness. They found the new factories with their vast management hierarchies and impersonal rules the very epitome of everything that was unnatural, unreal, stultifying, and suffocating. People felt that they were in danger of becoming the very machines with which they worked and were charged with controlling. Instead of fostering machinery, the Erewhonians, after a long struggle, destroyed it when they realized the machines, like organisms, were evolving and would soon acquire a mastery over humans.  The recoil from the artificial, overcivilized qualities of modern existence has sparked a wide variety of quests for more intense experience, ranging from the fascist fascination with violence and death, to the cults of emotional spontaneity of avant-grade artists to popular therapies stressing instinctual liberation. Antimodern impulses, too, were rooted in longings to recapture an elusive real life in culture evaporating into unreality. The darkest and most contemptible ignorance is that of not knowing oneself. The history of race relations in the United States of America has so sensitized us all that the initial phase of any interracial relationship between strangers is likely to be characterized by cautious attempts by each party to discern dominant or subtle indications of the racial attitudes of the other. Some violence is created by mental and emotional disorders, for which successful treatment is sometimes available. However, society needs to create an improved climate of acceptance for these programs of help and therapy that are available. In reaction to the growing sense of unreality brought on by the difficult adjustments to the new realities of modern life, Americans of all social classes will eventually retreat and engage in a frenzy-like search for authentic experiences. Elaborate home workshops where handicraft projects will be pursed with a vengeance. They will begin to look at family, friends, and true love as something desirably and that they need throughout an individual’s lifetime. They will never forget how each day can be described by the possibilities it contains and how tomorrow shall be well. One day, after a long life, we will find each other again.