We seldom
realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are
not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images
which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We
copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is
supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also
learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to
funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just
because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended
mind and body.
Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using
its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed
separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with
self-contradictory rules.
