Take stock of those around you and you
will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings,
which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to
analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the
reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover
that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite
the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any
personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a
chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened
at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover
it with a certain fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him
that his ideas are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his
existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.
