We follow Freud in the belief that it is only illusions that we have to fear; and we follow Hardy—in our epigraph to this book[, below]—in holding that we have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism. As Duncan so passionately concluded his Nietzschean and Dostoevskian exposition of the terrifying dynamics of purity and love, "... we cannot become humane until we understand our need to visit suffering and death on others.... The sociology of our time must begin in [such an] anguished awareness...."
If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst.
—Thomas Hardy