The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

importance imagines that others are personally
thinking about him, he is on the road towards
insanity. You make a speech, let us say, at some
public dinner. Photographs of some of the other
speakers appear in the picture papers, but there is
no picture of you. How is this to be accounted for?
Obviously not because the other speakers were
considered more important; it must be because the
editors of the papers had given orders that you
were to be ignored. And why should they have
given such orders? Obviously because they feared
you on account of your great importance. In this
way the omission of your picture is transformed
from a slight into a subtle compliment. But selfdeception
of this kind cannot lead to any solid
happiness. In the back of your mind you will know
that the facts are otherwise, and in order to conceal
this from yourself as far as possible, you will have
to invent more and more fantastic hypotheses. The
strain of tying to believe these will, in the end,
become very great. And since, moreover, they
involve the belief that you are the object of
widespread hostility, they will only safeguard your