Emotional Plague Structure

The person afflicted with the emotional plague… always develops as a part of his structure an envy coupled with a deadly hatred of everything healthy… [and] will attempt… to change his environment so that his way of life and his way of seeing things are not jeopardized. He senses everything that is at variance with his way of life as a provocation and, therefore, persecutes it with bitter hatred. The ascetic is a good illustration. Under one guise or another, the ascetic’s basic attitude is: “Why should others have it any better than I had it? Let them suffer as I suffer.” In every case, this basic attitude is so well concealed in a logical, well-thought-out ideology or theory of life that only someone having wide practical experience and capable of incisive thinking can unmask it.