s, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and
watch his fists clench like an orang-outang's. Maybe he will even beat
his chest. Touch his silly vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding
pride--call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a
hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger's claw, or an
eagle's talon, incarnate with desire to rip and tear.

It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity. Tell a
plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring
tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to
pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer's, and the results are the same.
Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different
veneer, that is all. It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it
off. The raw animals beneath are identical.

But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism,
and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has
climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly
about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own
blessed immortality.

True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and
sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away. And there's
the rub. He has to effect adjustments with the real world and at the
same time maintain the sublimity of his dream. The result of this
admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded. The
man that walks the real world in his sleep becomes such a tangled mass of
contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that he has to lie to himself in
order to stay asleep.

In passing, it may be noted that some men are remarkably constituted in
this matter of self-deception. They excel at deceiving themselves. They
believe, and they help others to believe. It becomes their function in
society, and some of them are paid large salaries for helping their
fellow-men to believe, for instance, that they are not as other animals;
for helping the king to believe, and his parasites and drudges as well,
that he is God's own manager over so many square miles of earth-crust;
for helping the merchant and banking classes to believe that society
rests on their shoulders, and that civilization would go to smash if they
got out from under and ceased from their exploitations and petty
pilferings.

Prize-fighting is terrible. T