#112 You Did Not Follow Him; You Fled From Yourself

A person tolerates being deceived far longer than he tolerates being returned to his own doubt. This is not weakness. It is the ordinary economy of the mind: he had exchanged a heavy uncertainty for a visible hope, and every day of belief was a day he did not have to examine himself.

To follow another is not to admire him. It is to outsource the exhausting work of hope. You watch his progress and accept it as your own; his certainty stands in for yours; his path becomes the proof you were unable to supply from your own life.

When the fraud appears, the lost money is the smallest part. What is torn away is the borrowed future. The man must then face again the question he had hired another to silence. No refund covers that.