The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Again using St. Augustine to introduce his subject, Watts states that the ultimate good is to love. The problem is determining how to love. He criticizes the moralists who act as technicians attempting to articulate the precise ways people ought to live from a pulpit. While there is a place for the precision of rulemaking, moralists, especially in the form of the preacher, scold people for their bad behavior, and this is worse than useless.

Watts uses the notions he’s developed (the divided mind, the problem of the separate self, etc.) to articulate a moral position. He distinguishes between true freedom and choice, which we mistakenly take for freedom. The illusions of choices are a way for the divided mind to differentiate pleasure and pain for the benefit of another illusion: the separate self, the “I.” Since “you cannot plan to be happy” (113), a moral philosophy built on the free choice for happiness is a façade.

Similarly, he criticizes ethical theories that are overly concerned with the production of a good, worthy self. Such a person does not love but rather aggrandizes the self, even in seemingly selfless behavior: “The urge is ever to make ‘I’ amount to something. I must be right, good, a real person, heroic, loving, self-effacing.