As the American gangster and multiple murderer Charlie Birger stood on the scaffold in 1927, he looked wistfully at the sky and said: "It is a beautiful world, isn't it?" But he had noticed it too late. ...
Once a man has deliberately closed his mind to all kinds of data - like the blueness of the sky - he has left himself connected to external reality by a dangerously thin thread - the thread of his immediate purposes. And, odd as it sounds, he is now living in a kind of cave inside his own head. That cave contains an enormous number of filing cabinets, full of photographs of the outside world, and the walls are covered with 'maps of reality' - ideas of how to deal with the problems of living. Religious people have religious maps; politicians have political maps; psychologists have psychological maps. Ordinary people have maps derived from their parents, from people they admire, and from their own experience - the latter usually being the least important. And when confronted by a new situation, each of them skims quickly through a drawerful of old photographs, glances hastily at his maps, and then responds 'appropriately.'
- from A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson, 1984, pg 99.
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