B1210 <=> B1212 (BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1211)

Thanks to correctly conducted self-observation, a man will from the first days clearly grasp and indubitably establish his complete powerlessness and helplessness in the face of literally everything around him.

With the whole of his being he will be convinced that everything governs him, everything directs him. He neither governs nor directs anything at all.

He is attracted and repelled not only by everything animate which has in itself the capacity to influence the arising of some or other association in him, but even by entirely inert and inanimate things.

Without any self-imagination or self-calming – impulses which have become inseparable from contemporary men – he will cognize that his whole life is nothing but a blind reacting to the said attractions and repulsions.

He will clearly see how his what are called world-outlooks, views, character, taste, and so on are molded – in short, how his individuality was formed and under what influences its details are liable to change.

And as regards the second indispensable condition, that is, the establishment of a correct language; this is necessary because our still recently established language which has procured, so to say, “rights-of-citizenship,” and in which we speak, convey our knowledge and notions to others, and write books, has, in our opinion already become such as to be now quite worthless for any more or less exact exchange of opinions.

The words of which our contemporary language consists, convey, owing to the arbitrary thought people put into them, indefinite and relative notions, and are therefore perceived by average people “elastically.”

In obtaining just this abnormality in the life of man, a part was played in our opinion, by always that same established abnormal system of education of the rising generation.