What a man most controls is most himself. Those actions that are most controlled by forces _outside_ of himself are least his own. In his thinking he has to learn inseparably to link individuality and self-control. He has been taught from infancy to give up doing what he wanted to do himself and do what other people want. All other people want him to do almost the opposite of what he wants to do himself until, with punishments, retaliations, and all sorts of rebuffs, their wants have snowed under his instinctive desires with such an avalanche of prohibitions that his actions are about ninety-nine per cent controlled by the kind of selfishness that consists of selfishly trying to please other people for a release from this snow pressure, which release is called approbation or praise. The impulses which come from the avalanche are the egoistic-social motives, social because they come down upon him from everyone with whom he comes in contact, egoistic because he is really protecting and pleasing himself by following these motives. But one can see for himself how much of the control of his ordinary every-day actions is his, how much is the control of the avalanche. Really then the only thing left to the individual is his love impulse. Society is not interested in it, or does not see that it is. Society would be a very different thing if it had eyes. It might have some sympathy. The individual’s love impulse is the one bit of leaven in the human mass today. It is the one thing he can call his own, the one thing whose expression he can control. But society has taught by implication that that is the one thing he cannot control except by annihilation. So it appears society has shown quite Machiavellian abilities in checkmating the erotic impulse which is the individual impulse par excellence. Society is confronted with an apparently antisocial influence and reacts to it on the low intellectual plane of trying to destroy it. § 132 But control is not annihilation nor is annihilation control in any sense whatever. If you cannot train a horse by shooting him dead, you cannot drive him by poisoning him. If you do you haven’t got him. If you kill your love impulse you haven’t got it. You cannot kill it, but you can knock it in the head so that it is unconscious. Ascetics have done it. Society would as lief you did it yourself. Your love impulse, not the Sunday school variety but the full red-blooded variety of woman-loving (or man-loving) impulse is not only the most individual thing about you because it is capable of the most complex development in your case but it is the most valuable dynamo you have generating endless power whose source is the sun itself. Control of the love impulse therefore, and not annihilation of it, is the individual’s most personal advantage. § 133