That day I suddenly grew conscious of something that I had never really realized. I discovered that I was not honest even to myself; of course I had been pretending to be honest to the world around me for ages, but now this realization that I wasn’t even honest to myself began to devour me. How fake my life had been! All a pretense; all just empty words, idle beliefs. And I had been thinking all along that I was the noblest of us all. I had, in addition been sitting in judgment over others, as though I had some actual superiority over them. The world had been so good to me; it had allowed me to believe that, never ever contradicting my assumptions. But now I had seen with the eye of my own soul how shallow I had been in presuming things. Then it all fell on me like a pattern, the realization of what things actually were:

We are all the same. No one is better or worse than anyone else. We are all shaped by Circumstance that either elevates or dumps us down. The fabric of society relies on pretense; on role-playing that is not natural to us but is enforced by civilization. When I play my role well I begin to believe that I am good, I am pure, I am as I ought to be. But in this role playing lies the adulterating process, the straggling away from a corruption-free soul. Society ties me down, like a prisoner was tied, in olden times, to a pole from which there was to be no escape. The society that makes us different to animals, and to which we always try to live up to is the one that forces us to be what we are not. Society is that imperialistic colonizer that colonizes the soul and makes the individual alien to himself. It gives to him the desire to work against himself without quite knowing it. It makes him pursue the route to power and possession and takes away the urge in him to be his natural self. Every social unit and institution is one more step in the total subjugation of man.