A Place Called Freedom

Extract

I is a prideful word. It's full of boldness over against the internal slumbering of the rest of our planet's creatures. That's because they carry their world with them, like a snail and its shell, while man emerges out of an information gap. Other animals are directed by an instinctual encoding, while we must tell ourselves what we need to know in order to survive. Indeed, we must persuade ourselves to listen. We lack an internal conviction of reality, automatic animal persuasion. As anthropologist Ernest Becker says, “man became man in a total celebration of himself.”